The Story of a New Name

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Brissioni Blog

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The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante – Book

Book 2 of The Neopolitan Novels has us still following the lives of Elena (Lenù) and Lila (Lina), two childhood friends, but these two are adults now and their lives diverge more and more. This segment of their story is concerned with love, and finding love, and losing love, but it is even more concerned with class, social class and upbringing. Elena graduated from high school, a true accomplishment in her neighborhood where almost no one stayed in school after the elementary level. Studying separates her more and more from most of the neighborhood children she grew up with. Elena sees that by continuing her schooling she will lose a connection with everything she has known in life and everyone, even her family. She will never fit in here again and it is hard to give up this sense of belonging to something.

Lila, now called Lina, has glued herself to the neighborhood by becoming a wife and a mother, but she is unhappy with her husband. He is too coarse for her; he beats her. Lina has been praised for her intelligence. She knows she is quick and creative. She thinks she can use her natural abilities to succeed even without an education. But poverty is a terrible weight and a trap. Without her husband she has no income and must give up any thought of moving up in the world, even give up the times when she tries to return to her studies on her own. She has a child that must be supported so she tries to pin her hopes to him and give him a start in life that will lift him out of the poorest class in the city.

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The Idle Woman

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The Story of a New Name: Elena Ferrante

The Neapolitan Novels: Book II
 
The first installment of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels moved me deeply and there was no doubt I’d continue with the series. For various reasons this week has been challenging and so yesterday afternoon, on a whim, I bought the second book and have spent a few hours here and there absorbed afresh in Ferrante’s compelling world, by turns painfully familiar and shockingly alien. As in the first novel, the characters have a presence and reality which means one can’t comfortably dismiss them as fictional. Once again, this book has the charge of thinly fictionalised autobiography: nostalgic, fearless and merciless, a forensic dissection of the anatomy of friendship.
More than the first book, perhaps, this slice of Elena and Lila’s history evokes powerful emotions that I find it difficult to put into words. Much of that, I think, stems from the fact that I can relate to certain aspects of Elena’s emotional experience, particularly her sense of isolation. Her studies render her unable to fit into the world of her childhood, but offer her no replacement sphere where she feels at ease. Anyone who’s gone away to university after growing up in a small town, where people all know each other and rarely move away, will be familiar with that bewildering sense of semi-exclusion on returning home. In this novel, she finds herself still studying at the high school, increasingly separated from her childhood friends who have dropped out of education to do as their mothers did before them: to work in the grocery or the shoe store, gradually re-calibrating their lives to focus on what is considered the natural environment for a woman: a useful job and then a husband, children, the weary grinding down of marriage. Elena has chosen to take another path, defiantly pursuing her studies while increasingly confused about what value they have in the greater scheme of things. In adolescence, doing well at school is an end in itself. But once life broadens out and becomes about more than grades, what is the merit in being educated for education’s sake? It becomes increasingly apparent that Elena’s determination to keep learning isn’t just founded on a desire to make the most of her intelligence. It isn’t even part of a coherent plan for ending up somewhere else, somewhere better, than the humble neighbourhood of her youth. It is more an effort to prove herself to Lila: to prove that she, finally, has something Lila doesn’t have. For Elena knows that, despite Lila’s choice to marry, and to take on the life of the elegant, prosperous young wife, her friend still burns at the thought of being outdone in anything.

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The Phraser

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Book Review: The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

The Story of a New Name is the second book of the Neapolitan Novels.  It’s raw and brilliant, with a light that shines unblinking on its characters

Naples has always hung its washing to catch the air – it’s a city that knows its secrets … and so does Elena Ferrante.  In her novels she packs the unhidden into private lives and passes it on to us.

The novel follows Lila, Elena and their peers through courtship, abuse, marriage, summers and work, and we see them now from two angles … from the thick of their lives in Naples, and from the refined distance of academia and college in Pisa.

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Cannonball Read 7

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A Soap Opera Worthy of Tolstoy Continues

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante (Buy on amazon.com)

Rating:

In the second novel of her trilogy, Ferrante continues the story of Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, two Neapolitan girls born in 1944 Italy into poor families in a working class neighborhood. When we left them in My Brilliant Friend, 16-year-old Lila had married the prosperous grocer Stefano, the son of the “ogre” Don Achille. Elena, no match for her friend in looks but a successful and hardworking student, feels that her world is falling apart. Her best friend, with whom she expected to work together  to leave the neighborhood for a better life, has left her for marriage, and it seems that Elena’s best efforts at school will not buy her a ticket out. She pines for the handsome intellectual Nino Sarratore, formerly of the neighborhood, son of a poet, unhappy and restless. At Lila and Stefano’s reception, Stefano has done two things that he swore to Lila he would not do, and the reader was left waiting for the angry and fearless Lila to react.
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Merle

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The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

It is hard to write individual reviews of these books, because they are all one big novel, and because they are remarkably consistent in terms of quality – if anything, the series improves as it goes, but perhaps I simply grew more invested in the characters. (Meanwhile, the covers are consistently godawful; somewhere out there is a marketer who needs a new calling.)

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New Humanist

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Taking off the mask: Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels

In these compelling books, the Italian writer – whose real identity is hidden – combines the novel with feminist polemic.

–   by Fatema Ahmed   –

This article is a preview from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series (known in Italian as the Brilliant Friend novels) could be at the intersection of a publisher’s fantasy Venn diagram; they occupy the spot where Anglophone readers notice novels in translation and male critics read women seriously. This is a remarkable amount of commercial success and critical acclaim for what, on the face of it, is a female bildungsroman that begins in 1950s Naples. Three instalments of what Ferrante has said is really one novel have been published so far, with a fourth and final volume due to appear later this year. My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay are set over 60 years and run to some 1,200 pages in Ann Goldstein’s English translation. It all seems a great departure from Ferrante’s three previous novels, each of which is a slim work narrated by a woman in crisis, spanning a short period in the near present.

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The Millions

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A Year in Reading: Charles Finch

By posted at 11:00 am on December 22, 2014 11

I read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy this year.  I read it twice, actually.  It made me want to quit writing.

coverThat sounds like the kind of cutesy thing you could say about any book you love, but in fact the reality of it was terrible, a sensation that lasted for days, a blend of nausea, fog, and loss.  How can I explain it?  Reading those books — My Brilliant Friend, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of a New Name — it was as if I had spent my whole life training to be a world-class swimmer, waking up at dawn to do laps, eating the right stuff — and then, all of the sudden, swimming in the ocean one day, I had been joined briefly by a dolphin and realized, oh, of course, that’s what swimming actually is.

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Shiny New Books

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THE NEAPOLITAN NOVELS BY ELENA FERRANTE

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Review by Lizzie Siddal

Every recent piece about Elena Ferrante seems to begin with the question, who is she?  I’m not about to do that.  The fact that the author, whoever (s)he is, wants to avoid the cult of celebrity and direct attention to the novels is absolutely fine by me.  It’s almost unheard of that I read 3 books by one author in six months, but that’s the truth of 2014. The hashtag is entirely apt.  I have caught #ferrantefever.
It would appear one fix is all it takes and My Brilliant Friend was that fix.  The story of the childhood and adolescence of Elena Greco (Lenu)  and Raffaella Cerullo (Lila), two clever girls, stuck in a poverty-stricken area of Naples during the 1950s, is rivetting. These girls are of my generation and their experience is in some ways similar, though, in most, so far removed from my own.  Reading brought back fond memories from the classroom, teachers who coached and encouraged to greater things, competitions (against those dratted boys) as to who was the cleverest.  The story is narrated by Lenu,  the fortunate one with parents willing to make the monetary sacrifices to keep her in education.  The opportunities of her brilliant friend, Lila, severely restricted by her parents refusal to do the same.  Education will help Lenu escape the claustrophobic small-minded mentality of her neighbourhood. Lila, however, has to rely on her own resourcefulness and sex appeal. Seeing little return for the help she gives to her father’s shoe-making business, she decides to marry the wealthy grocer, Stefano Caracci When local money lenders and bully boys, the Solara brothers, for whom she has nothing but contempt, turn up at her wedding, and are not turned away by her bridegroom, a very mucky dye is cast.
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Harper’s Magazine

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THE SECRET SHARER

Elena Ferrante’s existential fictions

By Jenny Turner

Jenny Turner is on the editorial board of the London Review of Books.

Little is known about the writer Elena Ferrante. It’s assumed the name is pseudonymous, but only her Italian publisher could say for sure. From Fragments, a short collection of letters and written answers to readers’ questions, published in 2012, we do gather a few facts: she comes from Naples but no longer lives there, has a classics degree, was once married, and is a mother. These details correspond with the outline of the story she gives to Elena Greco, the narrator of her remarkable novel sequence—My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), and now Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay—about the friendship between two women born into working-class Neapolitan families in the Forties. In Italy, rumors circulate that “Elena Ferrante” is the work of a male writer, or even writers, an Ern Malley–type hoax. This is not impossible, though if it’s true I feel sorry for the man, or men, behind it. They’ve worked so hard for so long that they must be either sanctified or deranged.

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Open Letters Monthly

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Peer Review: Elena Ferrante’s Hunger, Rebellion, and Rage

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Elena Ferrante is such a badass! — Elif Batuman

The critical response to Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has been so uncannily consistent it’s enough to make you suspect collusion. (To what end, though? Good question: I’ll come back to that.) The following statements, for example, have become axiomatic, a critical credo recited with every invocation of her fiction:

1. She is mysterious.
2. She is angry.
3. She is honest.

The first of these points is certainly true: little definite is known about Ferrante, including her real name or even whether she is in fact a woman. The second and third, however, are assumptions, inferences from the voice that speaks from her novels, which signals the fourth, sometimes implicit, pillar of Ferrante criticism: that the author and her creations are one.

Ferrante has published six novels. The first to appear in English translation was The Days of Abandonment in 2005; right out of the gate, Janet Maslin’s New York Times review established both the tone and the substance of what has become the standard Ferrante narrative:

Using the secret of her identity to elevate this book’s already high drama, the author (Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym) describes the violent rupture of a marriage with all the inner tranquility that you might associate with Medea.

In short, we don’t know who she is, but we know, and welcome, the literary quality of her anger: “the raging, torrential voice of the author is something rare.”

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The New Yorker

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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.”

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San Francisco Chronicle

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The Story of a New Name

Book Two of the Neapolitan Novels

By Elena Ferrante; translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

 

The elusive yet volcanic Italian author Elena Ferrante has become a kind of insiders’ icon on both sides of the Atlantic. Shunning publicity, concealing her real identity, Ferrante will only say (per the New Yorker writer James Wood, who discusses Ferrante brilliantly in its pages), “I study, I translate, I teach.”

Electrified by “My Brilliant Friend” – book one of “The Neapolitan Novels” – I devoured all Ferrante’s other titles immediately: “The Days of Abandonment,” “Troubling Love,” “The Lost Daughter” and now book two of the Neapolitan group, “The Story of a New Name.” (Each has been limpidly translated by Ann Goldstein, an editor at the New Yorker.

Ferrante’s effect, critics agree, is inarguable. “Intensely, violently personal” and “brutal directness, familial torment” is how Wood ventures to categorize her – descriptions that seem mild after you’ve encountered the work.

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