Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: middle age (Neapolitan Quartet, 3)

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Neapolitan Quartet" is an immersive look at a female friendship". The Dartmouth . Retrieved 2023-02-27. At home in Naples, she is called “superior” and told she has ideas above her station. Every single scene between Lenù and her mother is a mesmerising battle between cruelty and love. In Milan, she must watch on as young academic men are lauded for their brilliance. Lenù is trying to prove that she is a new person, at the same time as trying to work out what it is she wants to say, now that she has a voice with which to say it.

The Neapolitan novels move far from contrivance, logic or respectability to ask uncomfortable questions about how we live, how we love, how we singe an existence in a deeply flawed world that expects pretty acquiescence from its women. In all their beauty, their ugliness, their devotion and deceit, these girls enchant and repulse, like life, like our very selves.” Franich, Darren (15 November 2019). "Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels are the best book series of the decade". EW.com . Retrieved 2023-02-27.Markets and movements. Freedom of movement in the common market and effects on sending countries: win-win or dependency?

Central themes in the novels include women's friendship and the shaping of women's lives by their social milieu, sexual and intellectual jealousy and competition within female friendships, and female ambivalence about filial and maternal roles and domestic violence. Isabelle Blank wrote about the complex, mirrored relation between the protagonists Lenu and Lila: "Lenù and Lila are foils for one another. Lenù is blonde, studious, eager to please, self-doubting and ambitious, whereas Lila is dark, naturally brilliant, mercurial, mean and irresistible to those around her. The story is told from Lenù’s point of view, but the two friends understand one another on such a deep and complex level that the reader is often privy to Lila's perceived inner thoughts." [6] Elissa Schappel, writing for Vanity Fair, reviewed the last book of the Quartet as "This is Ferrante at the height of her brilliance." [20] Roger Cohen wrote for the New York Review of Books: "The interacting qualities of the two women are central to the quartet, which is at once introspective and sweeping, personal and political, covering the more than six decades of the two women's lives and the way those lives intersect with Italy's upheavals, from the revolutionary violence of the leftist Red Brigades to radical feminism." [21] 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.”

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In 2019, The Guardian ranked My Brilliant Friend the 11th best book since 2000. [18] The overall series was also listed in Vulture as one of the 12 "New Classics" since 2000. [19] Those Who Leave and Those Who Staysurpasses the rapturous storytelling of the previous titles in the Neapolitan Novels.” — Publishers Weekly ( starred review ) The relationship between migration and kinship enjoys a long scholarly tradition and attention. How does the emigration of family members affect the personal and social biographies of those left behind? How do those who stay behind justify their choice: to emigrate or not to emigrate. To what extent is it useful to talk about emigration as a ‘personal choice’? The question was posed by reader Paolo Di Stefano to Elena Ferrante in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, "how autobiographical is the story of Elena [Greco]?". Ferrante replied, in "her characteristically direct yet elusive manner, 'If by autobiography you mean drawing on one's own experience to feed an invented story, almost entirely. If instead you're asking whether I'm telling my own personal story, not at all'." [15]