The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels)

by Elena Ferrante

Paperback, 2013

Status

Checked out

Publication

Europa Editions (2013), Paperback, 480 pages

Description

The second book, following last year's My Brilliant Friend, featuring the two friends Lila and Elena. The two protagonists are now in their twenties. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila. Meanwhile, Elena continues her journey of self-discovery. The two young women share a complex and evolving bond that brings them close at times, and drives them apart at others. Each vacillates between hurtful disregard and profound love for the other. With this complicated and meticulously portrayed friendship at the center of their emotional lives, the two girls mature into women, paying the cruel price that this passage exacts.

Media reviews

Every so often you encounter an author so unusual it takes a while to make sense of her voice. The challenge is greater still when this writer’s freshness has nothing to do with fashion, when it’s imbued with the most haunting music of all, the echoes of literary history. Elena Ferrante is this
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rare bird: so deliberate in building up her story that you almost give up on it, so gifted that by the end she has you in tears.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member lauralkeet
I enjoyed the first Neapolitan Novel, My Brilliant Friend, and after reading The Story of a New Name I am completely hooked. At the center of the Neapolitan Novels are Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, two women growing up in Naples in the 1960s. My Brilliant Friend begins with primary school and ends
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when they are about sixteen; The Story of a New Name follows them into their early twenties. While both Elena and Lila excelled in school, women did not typically attain the same level of education as men. Lila followed a traditional path in her middle-class neighborhood, marrying young and working in a family-owned business. Elena was able to continue her education, thanks to sponsorship from a teacher who recognized her talents. Lila and Elena's paths diverge, and initially it appears Lila has it all: she lives in a nicer house than most people, the business is successful and they are financially comfortable. Lila has good looks, a nice figure, and a fashionable wardrobe; she exudes sex appeal. Elena is shy and fairly clueless about beauty and fashion, but well-informed and eloquent. In fact, each is sure the other one is living a better life and is rather jealous about it.

However, as is the case with most people's lives, there is a lot more happening beneath the surface. One summer, Lila convinces Elena to spend several weeks with her at the beach instead of working in a local bookshop. They spend idyllic days in the sun, but this is also when Elena discovers some truths about Lila's marriage and experiences a profound betrayal. The consequences ripple through both of their lives, and they go their separate ways for a while. Elena eventually graduates from high school and leaves for university. Her world view expands, but at the same time, she feels like a stranger in a new country. She has to suppress her accent to blend in. She doesn't have the right clothes for social functions. And other students from more privileged backgrounds instinctively understand things Elena does not:
They knew, without apparent effort, the present and future use of the labor of studying. They knew because of the families they came from or through an instinctive orientation. ... They knew the names of the people who counted, the people to be admired and those to be despised. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, to me anyone whose name was printed in a newspaper or a book was a god. ... I didn't know the map of prestige.

While Elena works her way, step by step, through the educational system, Lila's path is far less linear. Elena Ferrante describes it beautifully:
How easy it is to tell the story of myself without Lila: time quiets down and the important facts slide along the thread of the years like suitcases on a conveyor belt at an airport; you pick them up, put them on the page, and it's done. It's more complicated to recount what happened to her in those years. The belt slows down, accelerates, swerves abruptly, goes off the tracks. The suitcases fall off, fly open, their contents scatter here and there.

And yet despite their very different personalities and ambitions, the bond between the women seems unbreakable. Elena is drawn back to Lila time and again, and towards the end of this book credits Lila as the inspiration behind her first professional success. In the novel's final pages, Elena seems positioned for great things and Lila's future is far less certain. But with two books remaining in the series, there are sure to be many more suitcases on the conveyor belt. It remains to be seen whether they follow a smooth path or fly open and scatter their contents everywhere. Either way, it's sure to be a fascinating tale of life, love, and friendship.
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LibraryThing member lit_chick
2015, Blackstone Audiobooks, Read by Hillary Huber

The Story of a New Name begins immediately where My Brilliant Friend left off, following friends Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo (now Lila Carracci) from their mid-teens through their mid-twenties. As the novel opens, Lila, at sixteen, is away on
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honeymoon, and Elena continues to pursue her studies. I could not have been more wrong when I predicted in my review of the first novel that Lila’s future was, at least for the time being, relatively predictable. On the contrary, marriage has imprisoned her: “… the condition of wife had enclosed her in a sort of glass container, like a sailboat sailing with sails unfurled in an inaccessible place, without the sea.” (Ch 11) Ferrante minces no words about the cyclical experience of young, uneducated women in working-class, 1960s Naples:

“Of course, the explanation was simple: we had seen our fathers beat our mothers from childhood. We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us.” (Ch 10)

Though the friends continue to share a complex bond, the position of authority (for lack of a better word) that Lila has always held in the friendship becomes ever more pronounced. She convinces Lena to leave her job and spend a summer at the beach with her. But the vacation turns toxic when Lila, undefeated in spite of the abusive circumstances of her marriage, turns betrayer – and, as she does so, unashamedly uses her friend to help carry out and conceal her deceit. The summer marks the beginning of periods of time during which the friends will fall out of favour – only to eventually collide once again. As The Story of New Name concludes, Lila has a son but nothing else, despite the affluence of the Carracci family; and Lena, who is finishing her degree, has begun to experience some professional success.

Ferrante’s meticulous portrayal of Lila and Elena’s entangled, complicated friendship ensures that, at least for me, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is up next. Having felt undecided about narrator Hillary Huber in the first volume, I’ve come to the conclusion she is perfect – that she and Ferrante make a formidable team. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member aileverte
Judging by the cover, I had (presumptuously) assumed that this book would not be my cup of tea, but it came recommended by a friend whose judgment I value, so I gave it a try. I read "My Brilliant Friend" in one sitting, and then waited impatiently to get my hands on "The Story of a New Name", and
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found myself instantly pulled into the web of Ferrante's fiction. There was not a sentence that I found superfluous or a turn of events that would feel unnecessary. Although these are very different narratives, the experience of reading Ferrante brought back the passion with which I had read Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" or, more recently, "Beloved" by Toni Morrison.

There is much more to Ferrante's novels than a compelling roller-coaster ride through the twist and turns of the protagonists' fortunes - although that is enough to keep you riveted. The Neapolitan trilogy (oh, I can't wait for the third volume to come out!) could also be described as a work in social criticism, and be placed in the company of writers such as, say, Zola or Balzac. There is poverty of the city slums, the exploited working class, the money lenders feeding off others' misfortunes... There are no stereotypes or stock characters here: money corrupts no less than destitution, and humanity and violence, kindness and betrayal, failure and perseverance are not attributes of a class: contradicting traits are often found in one and the same person.

But there is more to these novels than the realism of social situation: the books could also be described as a feminist work (the frank descriptions of women's lives, their subjection, the compromises they make to survive, as well as women's struggle, mainly in the figure of Elena Greco, to achieve something through education). They are also novels exploring human relationships, between husbands and wives, neighbors, partners, and above all, a story of a friendship, where in a magnetic reversal of poles, attraction and repulsion propel the destinies of two young women...

In many ways an "easy read", the novels become more complex the more you start thinking about them: cultural and political references emerge as historical and temporal markers; subtle mythologies come to reinforce the narrative structure...

One theme running through the books like a subterranean current is the theme of metamorphoses: coupled with the motif of blood (blood spilled; the blood of family ties, of family resemblance...), it bubbles up to the surface transforming the physical features of the characters who suddenly come to resemble their fathers and mothers, their delicate features cracked to release alien figures that they had perhaps worked hard to contain.

As a final note, not being able to read these books in the original Italian, I find the translation very sensitive to language, able to navigate between different registers with great skill, without ever losing sight of an binding narrative voice.
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LibraryThing member RandyMetcalfe
Picking up almost immediately from where the first novel of Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy concluded, The Story of a New Name traces the lives of Elena and her friend Lila from ages 16 to 23. Superficially they are on utterly disparate trajectories. Lila, married at 16, undergoes humiliation after
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humiliation, beatings and abuse from her husband, scurrilous gossip and innuendo from relatives and neighbours, and financial ruin. A brief summer of adulterous love spirals out of control and leaves Lila with an infant son, no husband, no lover, and, ultimately a need to re-establish her name as Cerullo, scrubbing away the years she has had to endure as Signora Carracci. By contrast, Elena goes from one academic triumph to the next, obtaining both her high school diploma, and, after a gaining a scholarship to the university in Pisa, eventually her university diploma as well. To top it off she writes a much-praised short novel that is published not long after she finishes at the university. But we would be wrong to think that Elena and Lila’s lives are any less entangled than they were in their first youth. The ‘Elena Greco’ on the cover of her novel is as much a constructed name and identity for Elena as the, now, ‘Signora Cerullo’ is for Lila.

I couldn’t help thinking of the relationship between Elena and Lila as comparable to an elaborate dance. Ferrante has structured their lives in such an intricate formal pattern (even their sexual relations are matched), yet the wonder is that the novel never once becomes forced or contrived. Each step in the dance seems both compelled and entirely free. It is a so well done that it can take your breath away.

Ferrante’s writing matches her two protagonists. At times it becomes almost formal and argumentative, as when the increasingly educated Elena tries to think through her emotional confusion. At other times it soars with near poetic and existential angst. And yet again it can be as basic as the most basic functions of life in the poorer neighbourhoods of Naples. Riveting. The only disappointment is that I will now have to wait impatiently for the final volume to appear. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member AlisonY
Well, I'm delighted to report that I found the "second book" to be as good as the first, if not better. The reason for the speech marks is that I don't believe this to be a second book at all. In the normal sense, a second book would mean maybe picking up a decade or so on, or perhaps would play
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with time and propel the reader back to an earlier point in time. Ferrante, however, picks up without drawing breath from the exact same scene that book 1 left on.

I therefore suspect we are being had, and that this is not a quartet of four novel but rather one big, ginormous, gargantuan mega novel that makes Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy look like a short story (this second book alone was 470 pages long).

That being said, hurrah for big, ginormous, gargantuan mega novels when they're as good as this! I was once again immersed in the characters and the tense setting of the backstreets of Naples, and the pages flew by.

Yet again the cover irked me, and my husband commented one morning without irony that it was a book that my Aunty Betty would probably enjoy. Aunty Betty is a spirited, much loved aunt of mine who reads, in my opinion, very poor quality romance novels that should never see the light of day. I told him he was mistaken and that this was 'literature' and not the type of book that Aunty Betty would ever read despite the cover, so he asked me to describe it to him. After I'd finished, he concluded "so it's a romance novel then".

I have to say it got me thinking. I said sneeringly in my review of Book 1 that the cover made it look like I was reading Barbara Taylor Bradford novel, but is that really so far from the truth? Fantastic as this Neapolitan quartet is, is the truth perhaps that this is just chick lit at its best but we're too snobbish to think of it as that so we're convincing ourselves it's literary fiction?

The jury is out in my head. However, I care less - whatever Ferrante is writing, I love it, and I can't wait to pick up the thread in Book 3.

4.5 stars - now where did I put that Danielle Steele book....
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LibraryThing member EBT1002
This is the second in the planned trilogy of "Neapolitan Novels" that tell the story of the friendship between Elena (our narrator) and Lila. Growing up in a working class Naples neighborhood in the 1950s and '60s, the two have an intense and tumultuous friendship as they navigate boyfriends,
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education (or not), marriage (or not), and adulthood. Lila marries young while Elena continues to pursue her education, neither turning out to be an easy road. The novel is peopled by an assortment of characters, each struggling to make a living and meaning without straying too far from the neighborhood or the mores tightly woven throughout its streets and tenements. Ferrante normalizes domestic violence and explores the territory of marital fidelity and filial loyalty -- and the consequences when the two are pitted against one another. Elena and Lila love one another, yes, and they each make sacrifices in order to ensure the other's happiness. But they also compete fiercely and harbor jealousies based on childhood notions of fairness and happiness. As Elena summarizes:

"I went away in great agitation. Inside was the struggle to leave her, the old conviction that without her nothing truly important would ever happen to me, and yet I felt the need to get away, to free my nostrils of that stink of fat. After a few quick steps I couldn't help it, I turned to wave again."
Ah, the ambivalence of attachment.

Ferrante is also exploring the fidelity of memory: "Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible." Still, I was never sure what the author wanted me to get out of her tale. I never cared much what happened to Elena or Lila and I was only rarely moved by the writing or the story. For me, this was a slog; it had enough moments of brightness to earn 2.5 stars. And I know this novel has gotten rave reviews. My bookstore-buyer-buddy can hardly wait for the third Neapolitan novel to be released. He has shared with sparkling eyes that the title will be something like "Those that stay and those that go." Okay. Whatever. I won't be reading it.
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LibraryThing member Larou
As the title of this second volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolian Novels already indicates, it is centred around marriage, and more generally, the relationship between the sexes. That had already been a subject in the second part of My Brilliant Friend but is even more in the foreground here, as
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the lives of the two friends Elena / Lena and Raffaela / Lila move steadily more apart, with each of them representing one of the ways and shapes a female life in sixties Italy could take: marriage and motherhood for Lila, education and a profession for Lena.

It is however, a bit of a simplification to say that the friends are drifting apart – while they while their geographical and social situations do differ markedly, they still remain bound to each other, each the other’s mirror image and inverted double: while Lena goes to college and university she never stops to envy Lila who to her seems to have received the happier lot, a husband and family. At the same time it becomes increasingly clear to the reader (although not to Lena who either does not or refuses to notice, thus showing herself to be a rather unreliable narrator) that to Lila, Lena fulfills the destiny she never could have herself, her brilliant career that was nipped in the bud when her parents did not let her attend middle school. The friendship between the girls (and this is what the two still mostly are at this stage, marriage and an increasing number of sexual experiences not withstanding) is probably at it most intense as well as its most ambivalent here, and the varying shapes this friendship takes continues to be one of the most fascinating aspects of this series of novels.

There is (as far as I remember) no mention made of the frame narrative established in My Brilliant Friend in this novel, but The Story of a New Name continues to spin out the metafictional thread in different ways.Language plays an important in all four novels of the series – most noticeably in the Neapolitan dialect all characters start out speaking, either retain or lose when they grow older or more educated and keep falling back into whenever they get emotional. It is a dialect that is consistently designated as ugly as violent – by the narrator Lena, who is clearly not all that reliable and who indeed herself strives to eradicate all traces of it from her own speech. We never get to read / hear the dialect ourselves, i.e. there is no attempt made by the author to render the Neapolitan way of speaking phonetically (and according to an interview with Elena Ferrante this is not due the translation but true for the original as well). The dialect, hence, remains a mystery for the reader, an unknown and inscrutable quantity – much like Lila for the narrator, in fact; and I think this does indeed constitute a strong parallel between the city of Naples and Lila, a parallel which will be made pretty much explicit in the third volume and which is a very important motif for the whole series.

“Elena Ferrante” is not the author’s real name; she is writing under a pen name and is as reclusive as any Salinger or Pynchon, avoiding any public appearances and carefully hiding her real identity. Apparently, and unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of discussion in the media, both in Italy and abroad, as to who may be hiding behind the pseudonym and just how autobiographical her novels are. Normally I would dismiss such debates as both futile and irrelevant, but things lie a bit different here: not only is the novels’ first person narrator called Elena, like their author, but she also publishes a novel and becomes a writer – in other words, there is a very strong suggestion coming from the novels themselves that they might be autobiographical and should be read as such. However, one will immediately have to ask, whose autobiography? For not only does the general reading public remain ignorant of the author’s identity, but since the name she and her character share is not her real one, i.e. is itself fictional – does that mean the “autobiography” is of a fictional person, too? It really is impossible to tell, and the only thing certain here is that there is another turn of the metafictional screw.

But what I liked most about The Story of a New Name is how unapologetically feminist it is. The main subject that Elena Ferrante returns to time and again is the way women live in the second half of the 20th century, and she never leaves any doubt that societal power structures are slanted very much in favour of males. Both Lila and Lena, as well as a host of minor female characters, try to cope with that in their different ways, but I do not think a single one among them actually succeeds in the end and patriarchy continues to maintain itself at the cost of women, their wishes and desires, their minds and bodies. While Ferrante is openly didactic, she never is preachy, and keeps her novels compulsively readable by making generous of the structures and tropes of high melodrama – questions of who loves who, whether they will get each other and overcome the obstacles of class or family rise at times to an almost soap-operatic level and drive the novels forward at a brisk pace. No doubt that this has contributed to the large world-wide success of those novels, but call me overly optimistic – I find it quite heartening that a series of novels with such an open and unashamed feminist bias ends up so very widely read. There may be some hope yet, after all.
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LibraryThing member strandbooks
I'm hooked. The writing isn't great. The characters, especially the minor ones, can be vapid and stereotypical. The best description is a soap opera set in Naples during the 1950s. But I like the main characters enough that I have book 3 & 4 on hold at the library.
LibraryThing member gbill
Ferrante’s coming-of-age story, the second in her ‘Neapolitan Novels’ series, has a voice uniquely her own, and her writing is direct and honest. She also creates a couple of great characters at the center of the novel. Anyone who has had to overcome childhood adversity or an environment
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where academia and higher pursuits are not the norm will identify with Elena. In her case, it’s the chaotic world of a small, close-knit neighborhood in Naples, and a family that has never had anyone attend college. Her destructive, larger-than-life friend Lina, who marries early and finds herself in an abusive relationship, is also fascinating. Through her characters, Ferrante occasionally gives us insightful commentary on politics or literature, e.g. about America’s dropping of the atomic bomb at the end of WWII, or Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, and I wish the book had just a teeny bit more of that sort of thing. At its worst, it’s a bit like a soap opera, with characters from the various families falling into various intrigues, but at its best, it’s riveting and a page-turner, and it’s easy to see why it’s so popular.
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LibraryThing member Widsith
I tore through this in a kind of furious curiosity, annoyed with myself for being so involved and annoyed with Ferrante for taking so long to do what she does. The plot, heavy on frustrated emotion, is drawn out with intense internal monologues and telenovela miscommunications – and yet the
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actual characters are so real, built with such psychological verisimilitude, that you are fascinated despite yourself. The effect is as though Doris Lessing spent a season guest-writing for Days of our Lives.

I personally find Ferrante's writing unexciting; there is something a little laborious about the way she assembles her story, something flat about the way narrative events are introduced. ‘The day went smoothly, apart from two episodes that apparently had no repercussions,’ she'll write. ‘Here's the first.’ Clunk, clunk. Sometimes the translation does not help, either:

I got mad, I said, “You are both mistaken: it's I who do what Lina wants, not the opposite.”

This just sounds so strange, so formal, especially for someone who's supposed to be angry. That ‘it's I who do’ is one of those weird artefacts of translationese where rigid grammatical correctness is placed above any sense of naturalism. When I hit a line like this, I drop out of the story until I've rewritten it in my head (You're both wrong: I'm the one doing what Lina wants, not the other way round). But despite all this, the characterisation is excellent: you just believe everything she says about these people. It's a talent some musicians have, too. Tom Waits can sing ‘Sha la la la la la la la’ and make it sound like an insight. Lenù and Lina are insightful, three-dimensional people, however bland I sometimes find the prose.

The characters' lifelikeness is perhaps the more surprising for how tightly constrained all their behaviour is by codes of convention. This is particularly true of the men, whose social obligations to be aggressive gave me faint but nevertheless exhausting flashbacks to the stupid expectations that groups of boys have about getting angry, about hitting people. And my upbringing was, by comparison, a ludicrously comfortable and middle-class one. Whereas in the Naples suburbi, the most innocuous comment about your sister or girlfriend can necessitate the extreme and immediate application of violence, thanks to what Ferrante describes as ‘the incredibly detailed male regulations’ dictating their lives.

It almost feels against the grain to talk about how men are treated in Ferrante, but I found it fascinating. She's not in the least censorious about their propensity for violence; she depicts it very organically as something imposed on them by an external – social – force. When Stefano is beating his wife, Ferrante describes him as

trying to assimilate fully an order that was coming to him from very far away, perhaps even from before he was born. The order was: be a man, Ste'…

And she is punctilious about showing how these imperatives are fostered by the women just as much as by the other men. ‘That was what we said, we girls, when someone didn't care much about us: that he wasn't a man.’ When Lila explains away her bruises by saying that she fell, Ferrante's understanding of the scene is exquisite:

She had used, in telling that lie, a sarcastic tone and they had all sarcastically believed her, especially the women, who knew what had to be said when the men who loved them and whom they loved beat them severely. Besides, there was no one in the neighborhood, especially of the female sex, who did not think that she had needed a good thrashing for a long time. So the beatings did not cause outrage, and in fact sympathy and respect for [her husband] increased—there was someone who knew how to be a man.

The curious thing about that passage is that she ascribes to Lila a command of irony that she, Ferrante, does not display herself. It's interesting in light of a line from a review in The Australian which has been splashed all over the covers of these novels: ‘Imagine if Jane Austen got angry’. This has the air of someone reaching for the only famous female novelist they can think of; but anyway, my point is that Austen would not have needed to explain that Lila's tone or her friends' belief was ironic, because for Austen the irony was embedded in the narrative voice itself – and was the more deadly for it.

In spite of all that stuff, let the record show that I have immediately started reading book three and that I hate myself.
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LibraryThing member asxz
I actually read the whole thing just today. Even more engaging and accessible than the first, I can't explain why this soapy tale of teenage girls in the 60s is so captivating. On the one hand it's feather-light, but it's also wise and clear-sighted about the capricious nature of young lovers.
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Joyous.
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LibraryThing member amaraki
Brilliant. Even better than the first book. It can be read on so many levels that it deserves a future reread as on the first pass I just devoured the book wanting to know how each character's story was going to play out (a bit like a soap opera).
LibraryThing member Eyejaybee
I am not sure what happened here. Having greatly enjoyed Elena Ferrante’s first Neapolitan novel, ‘My Brilliant Friend’, I eagerly embarked on the second, which picks up exactly where the first book left off. I had been making great progress, as enthralled with it as I had been with its
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predecessor, when I made the mistake of leaving it on my desk at work. Too tired, or perhaps just too plain lazy to go back for it (though in my defence I had been in the office for more than eleven hours), I started reading something else on the Kindle app on my phone on the journey home, expecting to pick it up the next day and resume my enjoyment on Elena and Lila’s travails in Naples in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Somehow, though, it never quite happened. Picking up the book the next day the magic had evaporated, and I found myself struggling to recapture the sense of thrill. In fact, I found it difficult even to care, and the latter part of the book became a challenge rather than a joy. Right now, I doubt if I can find the strength of spirit to press on with the next two volumes. On the other hand, I recognise that virtually everyone else I know who has read these books has raved about them, which had been my own response to the first volume, so I may leave it a few weeks and try again.
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LibraryThing member Narshkite
If possible, this is even better than book 1. We already care so deeply about Lila and Elena, start with such hope, only to have our hearts broken over and again. Please universe, please have good things happen in the next book. If that is possible for women in Italy in the middle of the 20th
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century. At this point it looks like the only way any of the women in this neighborhood can win is to lower their expectations enough that they can no longer be disappointed.

I listened to the audio for this, and the reader was excellent. The way she says "Salvatore " will remind you of the first time you ate pizza in Naples and listened to the chatter around you and fell in love with that voluptuous earthy dialect.
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LibraryThing member SamSattler
I recently completed The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth (and final) book in what has become known as the purposely-mysterious Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Series. The books explore the decades long friendship between two Italian women who met as children in one of the poorest neighborhoods in
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Naples. My Brilliant Friend, first published in 2012, seemed to come from nowhere as it became a 2015 bestseller in, I suppose, anticipation of the publication later in the year of the fourth book in the series, The Story of the Lost Child. Between these two came 2013’s The Story of a New Name and 2014’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.

With the exception of a few brief moments in the books during which Elena, the book’s narrator, addresses the reader about her current feelings regarding her old friend Lila, the books offer a chronologically linear progression of the pair’s more than fifty-year relationship. Seldom has a relationship between literary characters been more deeply explored than this one. Each book in the series comes in at around 400 pages, but the Neapolitan Series is easier to read than one might imagine. My Brilliant Friend, beginning as it does (after a brief word from the sixtyish Elena) when its two chief characters are preschoolers, is both charming and intriguing - and when it ends, some four hundred or so pages later, most readers will want to know more. And Elena Ferrante has a lot more to say about Elena, Lila, their working class families, their friends, their lovers, their children, and the lives the two little girls will live during the next six decades.

Bottom line, this is a fictional study of the kind of longtime friendship that can shape – for good or for bad - a person’s entire life. Even as children, Elena and Lila recognized in each other the best that their neighborhood had to offer. They were among the very brightest in their local school, they were often the most adventurous, and neither was much willing to put up with the foolishness of those around them. They simply could not imagine staying in the neighborhood forever, and they looked forward to the time when they could finally begin living their real lives.

It would not, however, be easy for either of them to make their escape from the neighborhood. Elena and Lila were, as it turns out, as much rivals as they were friends. At times, it can even be said that they were more rival than friend to each other. Their competitiveness drove each of them to achieve more than likely would have been possible if they had never met, but it may have been at too great a cost for them to enjoy what they achieved. Only they can answer that question.

Elena and Lila are two of the most memorable characters I have encountered in a long time, and their often-tragic relationship leaves the reader with a lot to ponder about life, fate, and trying to go home again after living in a bigger world.
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LibraryThing member brangwinn
The continuation of the story of two friends in a small town outside Naples. Readers need to read the books in order to understand the relationships of all the characters. The story is character driven by Elena who was determined to go to university and her friend Lina who chose to quit school as
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soon as possible and married the most important man in the village. Two lives so different yet so closely tied.
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LibraryThing member BethEtter
Can't stop reading this series! On to the next one immediately.
LibraryThing member Citizenjoyce
I can't recommend this series highly enough. Set in Naples it shows the difficulty of growing up female in a world of accepted and strictly enforced patriarchal dominance. Education is a big theme but also competition (for men, for money, for stature), physical abuse, and the oppression of a strong
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class system. Usually, I read about 4 books at once, but when I'm reading Ferrante I can't force myself to think about anything else. Her world will take over yours if you give it a chance.
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LibraryThing member bell7
Elena and Lila's friendship story continues with Lila now married to Stefano and Elena finishing high school at the age of 16. The girls grow apart as Lila's marriage quickly becomes unhappy and Elena finds herself at once jealous of Lila and her ability to have sex in a marriage bed and feeling
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lucky that she herself can continue school.

If I was surprised at how much I liked My Brilliant Friend when I read it a few months ago, I was just as surprised at how much more difficult to like I found the second book. It spans only a couple of years but felt very long and I found myself very frustrated with some of the behavior of the characters (not that it wasn't probably very true to Neopolitan life in the '60s) and the infighting that went on between "friends" and neighbors. It could just be that it took me over two weeks to complete, but I found myself just a little happier that I'd finished it than I did about the experience of reading it. I did, however, find myself curious enough about Lila and Elena to find out what happened in this book - I'm on the fence about continuing the series.
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LibraryThing member ansate
THESE BOOKS

such a great exploration of what friendship means and imposter syndrome and trying to keep up and little unspoken rivalries and how closeness changes but can still stay and how you can love someone but be IRRITATED TO DEATH by them
LibraryThing member crazeedi73
This one was even better than the first one! I can't wait to read the next one. Highly recommend this series. Very unique style and writing.
LibraryThing member mbmackay
Book 2 of the series, and I'm still a big fan.
This volume continues the style and the qualities of the first volume - great characters, wonderful atmospheric backgrounds and social milieu almost as an extra character.
Read Aug 2016.
LibraryThing member starbox
Absolutely stunning
By sally tarbox on 13 January 2017
Format: Kindle Edition
This series of novels is absolutely mind-blowing; the lead characters so vividly drawn, that I'm absolutely hooked and am about to start the 3rd in the sequence.
Following best friends - and rivals - studious narrator Elena
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and the equally brilliant Lila who was pulled out of school to follow a very different life - this volume takes us through Elena's years in upper school and university; her friend has married the wealthy Stefano, but can it be a happy union with the capricious and difficult Lila?
Their lives ebb and flow; they draw close together then go for months without meeting. Elena has times of teenage depression when she almost abandons her studies, but goes on to succeed. And around them are the characters we met in the first volume; the Mafia type Solara brothers, Nino Sarratore, whom Elena adores from afar, and the numerous others in their part of Naples. There are marriages, engagements, affairs, and violent feuds.
I can't recommend Elena Ferrante enough, this was unputdownable
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LibraryThing member annbury
This second volume of Elena Ferrente's amazing quartet takes up where Volume One left off -- at Lila's wedding, with all signs pointing to disaster. The story continues at a thundering pace, and the pages keep turning, propelled by the desire to find out what happens next, that most basic motive
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for novel reading. The central characters are now young women, and the time has moved forward to the 1960's. But the best features of the first novel remain intact -- brilliant characterization, a powerful sense of time and place, and a driving plot. For those who loved "My Brilliant Friend", this book will not disappoint; rather, it expands.
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LibraryThing member annbury
A wonderful and exciting book, arguably better than the first one. The writer of the story, Elena, has many adventures, including being raped by the father of her lover, and writes a great book about this which propels her to fame and fortune. The story of the book and its genesis is well done and
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almost worth the price of admission Her friend, Lila, designs shoes that sell like crazy, is attacked by her husband, and has an affair with Nino, wbo later becomes Elena's lover.
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Language

Original publication date

2012 (1e édition originale italienne)
2016-01-07 (1e traduction et édition française, Du monde entier, Gallimard)
2017-01-03 (Réédition française, Folio, Gallimard)

Physical description

480 p.; 5.29 inches

ISBN

1609451341 / 9781609451349

Local notes

fiction
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