Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
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Los Angeles Review of Books
Martha Ronk on Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
Ferocious Friendship
THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY, the third volume in Elena Ferrante’s seductive Neapolitan series, continues the story of two women whose lives intersect, parallel, antagonize, and support one another as if they are mirrored halves of one creature. Taken together, the volumes follow the two from their lives as girls in Naples, Italy, through their teens and twenties, in which one marries young while the other pursues university studies, and on to their early adult lives. Each volume flames into life in those moments in which the narrator, Elena Greco, loses herself in her childhood companion, Lila Cerullo, using her as negative model, as brilliant muse, the one who defines and witnesses, “the one without whom….” Many women, perhaps especially as children, have such an attachment — intense, familiar, all-encompassing. Although the title suggests separation, in truth, the one left behind expresses herself in full force whether present or absent, and the one who leaves stays attached.
The two women meet on page one of this third volume in a future glimpse of them as old women, one skin and bones, one gaining weight: “Yet I loved her, and when I came to Naples I always tried to see her, even though, I have to say, I was a little afraid of her.” The opening pages here also contain the violence, both bodily and psychically, that runs through all the books. The women chance upon the ruined corpse of a childhood friend once married to the powerfully cruel head of the Solara family. A shoe lies beyond, “as if she had lost it kicking against some pain or fear.”
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Los Angeles Times
Review
Women’s paths diverge in Elena Ferrante’s epic ‘Those Who Leave’
I first encountered Elena Ferrante’s fierce, singular voice in her second novel, “The Days of Abandonment,” an unrelenting exploration of a woman whose husband has left her. In her newest novel, “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” the third of her quartet of “Neapolitan novels,” we come up for air.
Centered on the friendship between Elena Greco, the protagonist, and Lila Cerullo, her childhood friend, “Those Who Leave” seamlessly braids those same urgent domestic concerns with the volatile political landscape of Italy in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
San Francisco Chronicle
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,’ by Elena Ferrante
By Joan Frank
The eminent belle-lettrist Stephen Dobyns once observed that to write a novel, all one needs are “a handful of names and a street map.” In the case of Italian author Elena Ferrante’s “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” (the third in her “Neapolitan Novels”), those names are now well established for her growing fan base — and so is the map.
Ferrante, who conceals her own real name and personal particulars, has created an oeuvre that’s taken the literary world by the hair. Her grip has not relaxed; in fact, hair-on-fire intensity defines all her work. (See James Wood’s brilliant analysis, “Women on the Verge,” in the Jan. 21, 2013, New Yorker.)
The Slate Book Review
A Counter-Melody
Elena Ferrante’s brilliant, riveting novels about female friendship.
Vogue
Elena Ferrante on the Origins of her Neapolitan Novels
T-Magazine – The New York Times
Who Is Elena Ferrante?
The writer known by that name has never been photographed, interviewed in person or even made a public appearance, but a collection of fiercely candid novels has earned her (him?) recognition as one of the keenest observers of Italian society. On the eve of the publication of “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” the much-anticipated third volume in the author’s Neapolitan series, three admirers celebrate this elusive talent.
Kirkus Reviews
KIRKUS REVIEW
This third volume of the Neopolitan trilogy continues to chronicle the turbulent lives of longtime friends Lila and Elena, as begun in the enigmatic Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2012) and The Story of a New Name (2013).
With Naples and the looming specter of Vesuvius once again forming the ominous background to the girls’ lives, Elena travels from the city of her childhood, first to the university in Pisa, and then beyond upon her marriage to Pietro, the intellectual heir to an influential Milanese family. Lila’s existence in Naples follows a more brutal and mundane course, but both young women are confronted with the social and political upheavals that echoed across Italy (and the world) during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Always rivals as well as friends, Lila and Elena struggle to assert themselves in a landscape of shifting alliances and growing corruption in Naples as well as in a culture where women’s desires almost never direct the course of family life. The domestic balancing acts performed by both women—one leading a life of privilege, one burdened by poverty and limited choice—illuminate the personal and political costs of self-determination. The pseudonymous Ferrante—whose actual identity invites speculation in the literary world—approaches her characters’ divergent paths with an unblinking objectivity that prevents the saga from sinking into melodrama. Elena is an exceptional narrator; her voice is marked by clarity in recounting both external events and her own internal dialogues (though we are often left to imagine Lila’s thought process, the plight of the non-narrative protagonist). Goldstein’s elegant translation carries the novel forward toward an ending that will leave Ferrante’s growing cadre of followers wondering if this reported trilogy is destined to become a longer series.
Ferrante’s lucid rendering of Lila’s and Elena’s entwined yet discrete lives illustrates both that the personal is political and that novels of ideas can compel as much as their lighter-weight counterparts.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/elena-ferrante/those-who-leave-and-those-who-stay/
Entertainment Weekly
Who is Elena Ferrante? An interview with the mysterious Italian author
By
Do you know Elena Ferrante? The Italian author’s urgent, blistering fiction has made her something of a cult sensation here in America. I myself had never heard of her until this summer, when I dove deep into her Neapolitan series, an intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends Lila and Elena, bright and passionate girls from a raucous neighborhood in working class Naples. Ferrante writes with such aggression, and such unnerving psychological insight about the messy complexity of female friendship, the real world can drop away when you’re reading her. “My work is sometimes a struggle,” says Ann Goldstein, Ferrante’s long-standing Italian translator. “It’s very intense and very disturbing and sometimes I have to walk away from the words. But then when I’m done I sort of think ‘Wait, where are those people? My life is now empty.’”
The Telegraph
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante, review: ‘high stakes literature’
Elena Ferrante’s real identity is unknown, but her novels reveal her genius
Over the last 18 months, two writers whose autobiographical series of novels are gradually being translated into English have caught the literary world’s attention: the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard and the Italian Elena Ferrante.
Of the two, Ferrante remains the more enigmatic. The author is in her sixties, and from Naples. Her actual identity is unconfirmed and no verifiable photograph exists: an almost impossible achievement in our confessional age. Of her disturbing, excoriating novels, this is the sixth, and third in her series about the lifelong relationship between two girls, Lila Cerullo and Elena Greco, who grow up together in the slums of post-war Naples.
The New Yorker
Elena Ferrante and the Force of Female Friendships
BY MOLLY FISCHER
The Neapolitan novels by the Italian writer Elena Ferrante are a series of (so far) three books about the lifelong friendship between two women, and when I read them I find that I never want to stop. I feel vexed by the obstacles—my job, or acquaintances on the subway—that threaten to keep me apart from the books. I mourn separations (a year until the next one—how?). I am propelled by a ravenous will to keep going.
This is much the same feeling I associate with all of the major friendships I developed between the ages of six and eighteen: I always wanted to keep going. Why have a playdate when you could have a sleepover? Why have a sleepover that lasts one night when you could have a sleepover that lasts three, or a week? That might sound obsessive, or borderline erotic, and it is: childhood friendships of the kind I’m describing are like the primordial soup of human relationships, messy and unformed but with the raw parts to make anything that might come after. Such friends are like family (you need, or hate, or cannot forsake them) and a beloved (you are so jealous, so sensitive to their slights!) and an alternative (better?) self, squashed into one. And Ferrante’s subject is exactly this sort of friendship.
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New York Times
Between Women
Elena Ferrante’s ‘Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay’
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Elena Ferrante is one of the great novelists of our time. Her voice is passionate, her view sweeping and her gaze basilisk. Her subject is the domestic world, and part of her genius lies in her capacity to turn this sphere into an infernal region, full of rage and violence, unlimited in its intellectual and emotional reach. Ferrante’s view of family life is anything but sentimental, anything but comforting.
In fact, her writing is remarkable for its velocity and ruthlessness. Reading her is like getting into a fast car with Tony Soprano: At once you are caught up and silenced, rendered breathless, respectful.
Ferrante is the author of six novels. Her most recently translated, “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” is the third in a Neapolitan series that began with “My Brilliant Friend” and “The Story of a New Name.” The books (impeccably translated by Ann Goldstein) track the lives of two women, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, born in Naples near the end of World War II. Their neighborhood, bone-scrape poor, is deeply and permanently infested by the verminous, lethal presence of the Camorra. These novels reveal the intersection of poverty and crime, and their effects on the lives of women. Narrated by Elena, now in her 60s, the series begins with the disappearance of Lila and goes on to recapitulate a lost history — one that Lila has tried to erase through vanishing, but that Elena stubbornly records.
The New Yorker
WOMEN ON THE VERGE: The Fiction of Elena Ferrante
By James Wood
Elena Ferrante, or “Elena Ferrante,” is one of Italy’s best-known least-known contemporary writers. She is the author of several remarkable, lucid, austerely honest novels, the most celebrated of which is “The Days of Abandonment,” published in Italy in 2002. Compared with Ferrante, Thomas Pynchon is a publicity profligate. It’s assumed that Elena Ferrante is not the author’s real name. In the past twenty years or so, though, she has provided written answers to journalists’ questions, and a number of her letters have been collected and published. From them, we learn that she grew up in Naples, and has lived for periods outside Italy. She has a classics degree; she has referred to being a mother. One could also infer from her fiction and from her interviews that she is not now married. (“Over the years, I’ve moved often, in general unwillingly, out of necessity. . . . I’m no longer dependent on the movements of others, only on my own” is her encryption.) In addition to writing, “I study, I translate, I teach.”
Publishers Weekly
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
Surpassing the rapturous storytelling of the previous titles in the Neapolitan Novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name), Ferrante here reunites Elena and Lil, two childhood friends, who dissect subjects as complicated as their own relationship, including feminism and class, men and women, mothers and children, sex and violence, and origin and destiny. As the narrative unfolds in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the fiery Lila stays in Naples, having escaped an abusive marriage, and lives platonically with a man from the neighborhood, along with her young, possibly illegitimate son. The feisty Elena leaves town, graduates from a university in Pisa, publishes a successful book, marries an upper-class professor, and moves to Florence, where she gives birth to two daughters. Against the backdrop of student revolution and right-wing reaction, the two women’s tumultuous friendship seesaws up and down as each tries to outdo the other. “You wanted to write novels,” Lila tells Elena. “I created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality.” Are the two women less opposites than parts of a whole? The book concludes not with a duality but with a surprising new triangle involving Nino, another homegrown intellectual, who loves both women. (Sept.)
Kirkus Review
This third volume of the Neopolitan trilogy continues to chronicle the turbulent lives of longtime friends Lila and Elena, as begun in the enigmatic Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2012) and The Story of a New Name (2013.)