In a recent interview, Ferrante explained that, for her, “the passion to write never coincided with the desire to become a writer .” In Italy, where the cult of celebrity can be especially toxic, her anonymity is not a denial of the presence of herself in her works (“what lies silent in the dep­ths of me”) but, rather, of “the media emphasis, the predo­minance of the icon of the author over his work.” She repeats again and again in Fragments that although she brings her novels to life, they must then be allowed to stand alone, separate from her. Virginia Woolf once called George Eliot’s Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” The same thing could be said of Elena Ferrante’s rich, engrossing, gloriously uncompromising third book in the bestselling Neapolitan series, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Like Middlemarch, it is a bildungsroman written by a woman about a woman. Ferrante’s Elena Greco, an intelligent and unhappily married writer in 1960s Naples, bears some traces of Dorothea Brooke’s intelligence and unhappy wifehood. Like Middlemarch, Those Who Leave also has a kind implacability, like an Old Testament flood sweeping through the plains of human experience, drenching anyone who would dare to call it mere “women’s literature.”

The interdisciplinary conference ‘Those who leave and those who stay: the consequences of emigration for sending countries’ aims to bring together researchers from different fields – political science, education, anthropology, history, political economy, and sociology, among others – who explore the socio-political and economic consequences of emigration for sending countries, regions and communities. The field of international migration is predominantly focused on the topic of immigration, debating its causes, the legal challenges it poses, and the way it has been politicised in receiving countries, among other topics of scholarly and political importance. Yet, there has been much less focus on ‘those who stay’, that is on how emigration transforms the places and people who are left behind.From pettiness to rape threats, obviously the underlying concern of this essay has been how gendered experience shapes criticism. Despite the fact that scholarship has worked for decades to describe how gender enters into criticism, it remains an unresolved question, and we would posit that this may be because the form of criticism itself disallows admission of the emotional experience in which gender most forcefully resides. Claiming that gender is an emotional experience is not at all to deny that is also an embodied, interpretive, and economic one—instead it is to say that all these conditions combine to generate an emotional state, and that often the state of those who fall under the sign “woman,” and who seek to speak about that experience, is one primarily of irritation: not quite a wound, but a rawness. (Perhaps that’s why so many of us spend so much money on salves.) In this third Neapolitan novel, Elena and Lila, the two girls whom readers first met in My Brilliant Friend, have become women. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her abusive husband and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which have opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons. Both women have pushed against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance, and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up during the nineteen-seventies. Yet they are still very much bound to each other by a strong, unbreakable bond. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (The Neapolitan Novels, #3) by Elena Ferrante – eBook Details There’s nothing good here! Living alone in old age, narratives of loss, and transformations of belonging While each of her novels is uniquely beguiling, they interrogate a shared set of concerns and obsessions, with bracing narrative frankness. The cumulative effect of her oeuvre is that of reading the distillation of someone’s deepest, most furtive thoughts. A meeting with Pietro’s sister Mariarosa introduces Elena to the feminist cause, and there she finds her voice. As a model for her own life, Elena explores how women can only be defined in society by their men. In the midst of a creative frenzy that finally gives her life, Nino Sarratore shows up once more and plants small seeds of dissent in Elena’s heart. Next to Nino, Pietro looks even more drab and dull, while Nino is filled with vibrant ideas and political furor. Under Nino’s encouragement, Elena finishes her essay and it is brilliant. The two begin an affair that eventually ends with both of them leaving their families and traveling away together.

There seemed to us, thus, to be a mismatch between the novels’ dissatisfaction with public writing and the act of publicly writing about them. As critics tried—in essays, even in Facebook threads—to fit their encounters with the novels’ pettiness into critical forms, the pettiness lost its vitality, was in fact called out as petty, which was, in our experience, irritating. The book’s center is Elena’s friendship with Lila, yet this woman-to-woman relationship is always threatened. The men in Lila’s life—kind Enzo, irresponsible yet brilliant Nino—spend more time with her than Elena does. Elena herself is walled off by her husband, the distracted and unappreciative Pietro, and only realizes, years into her marriage, that the confinement of womanhood has separated her from Lila, forcing them to compete for male attention. “We would have written together, we would have been authors together, we would have drawn power from each other, we would have fought shoulder to shoulder. The solitude of women’s minds is regrettable,” Elena says, reflecting sadly on her lifelong rivalry with Lila.The Review of the Great Books The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child (The Neapolitan Novels #2-4) by Elena Ferrante By the time he reappears in the novel, Nino could pretty much come into Elena and her dull husband Pietro’s living room, fart loudly, and she’d run off with him. He’s Nino, the hot intellectual ladies’ man. (Everything’s exciting when he’s around and empty when he’s not and Nino Nino Nino, sigh.) But that’s not what he does! No, Nino seduces Elena (if one can call it that, given her preexisting decades-long infatuation, this despite his liaison with her best friend) by appealing to her professional ambition. He does some swooping in of his own and declares – and he’s not wrong – that Pietro has asked to much of Elena in the domestic sphere, putting his own work first and leaving her to squander her (superior, Nino notes, again accurately) intellect. Pericoli, Matteo (2017-04-17). "Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend". The Paris Review . Retrieved 2023-02-27. Our goal, we realize now, was to create in readers the irritation we were experiencing: the irritation of having an insight or objection that could not be spoken within criticism’s evaluative rules of play. We wanted to make polemic claims without making argumentative ones—that is, we wanted to make arguments while making it difficult or impossible for anyone to argue with or against us. We wanted to say something that asserted itself as the best without subjecting itself to the test of bestness.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is a 2013 novel written by Italian author Elena Ferrante. It is the third installment of her Neapolitan Novels, preceded by My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name, and succeeded by The Story of the Lost Child. It was translated to English by Ann Goldstein in 2014. As you can see the books were published in sequence annually, as they were supposed to be read one a year. I went for it & read the whole series, with a small break after Book 2, and completed the series at the end of February 2016. This sentence stages our most polemic claim—“taste is just another name for internalized misogyny”—as a truth claim at the foundation of an argument rather than the argument itself. More, the claim can’t hold, argumentatively: it is out of scale with itself. It contains a multitude of debatable assumptions about how taste, culture, gender, and even psychology work, yet we were uninterested in debating any of them. Because the very fact of having to debate them, carefully, with evidence and expertise, dissipates the deep feelings—of love, of irritation—that the covers cause us to feel and, importantly, what the discussion of the covers lead us to know but to know other than through agreed upon standards of argument. The knowledge, here, came from the accrued feeling of living for years in a world that finds a pastel aesthetic distasteful. Criticism’s carefulness would defuse the power of experience behind this claim. My Brilliant Friend is the first book in the series and it’s a modern masterpiece from one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors. My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship.

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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).

The narrator is Elena Greco, the brilliant writer who still struggles with her place in the world. Early in the novel she reconnects with Nino Sarratore, the young man from the neighborhood who has made himself a great name. He still holds a place in her heart. After her book is published to great success and receives a lot of attention, particularly its “racy” scenes, Elena marries Professor Pietro Airota and moves to Florence. Perhaps you all know how this ends. Perhaps it is hardly surprising for me to tell you that we are scattered now, that many of us no longer talk at all. I never told them this, but I didn’t want to live in California anyway. Virginia Fanny Faccenda (University Saint-Louis Bruxelles) and Mariam Camilla Rechchad (University of Turin)Raffaella Cerullo (known as Lila or Lina), Lila's best friend. She starts a relationship with Enzo, and starts working at IBM. In high school my friends and I daydreamed about the big house we’d all buy together when we grew up. It would be a big house in Southern California, and every day would be a continuation of our glorious days of summer: dinner parties, Frisbee, car washes, greasy sandwiches, bonfires at the beach. We each had a role: handyman, cook, that guy who does all the spreadsheets. Ferrante's writing seems to say something that hasn't been said before, in a way so compelling its readers forget where they are, abandon friends and disdain sleep."— London Review of Books In season three of the TV series that focus on the headiness of the times leads to multiple moments where Elena’s joy over the success of her first novel is undercut by all the critics and Naples neighbors who are preoccupied by the book’s frank sex scenes—confirming some of her old rivals’ impressions of her as “impure.” (One of the boorish boys she grew up with tries to hit on her, saying, “Let me get close to you; you’ll be able to write about it.”) And while Elena is coping with rude comments and not-so-subtle aspersions about her reputation, Lila is working at a literal sausage factory, where the men feel free to tell dirty jokes and to pressure her for sex when they get her alone.