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

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What are the consequences of emigration for political participation in sending countries? Has ‘exit’ hindered ‘voice’ at home? Has emigration diminished or rather transformed protest mobilization and electoral participation in sending countries? Elena Ferrante's Naples: A Visual Promenade." Le Nouvel Observateur, October 28, 2016. A tour of the novels' Neapolitan settings.

The Neapolitan novels, in form and content, necessitated for us a consideration of pettiness: of how pettiness, gender, criticism, and politics interact. By way of conclusion, we’d note another sphere where pettiness’s forceful ambivalent power seems necessary to consider: the election of Trump, the world’s pettiest candidate, over Hillary Clinton, a candidate who (because she is a woman, rather than for her questionable politics) was evaluated in the most petty way. 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. This petty state is often where we found ourselves in response to much criticism about the Neapolitan novels. Something about it irritated us. Criticism about these novels felt inadequate to the largeness of our feeling and thinking about these novels. The only talk about Ferrante we liked was private, non-argumentative . The critical takes, the arguments about authorship, the interpretive discussions placing the novels in various literary contexts and genealogies: all of it, bizarrely for people who passionately do critical work for a living, seemed mostly useless and entirely missing of the point. However: what was the point we so felt everyone else was missing? And why was it all so irritating? To the uninitiated, Elena Ferrante is best described as Balzac meets The Sopranos and rewrites feminist theory."— The Times 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.I really, really liked Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is an incredibly blase way to compliment a book so raw and confrontational and, well, brilliant. The remaining three books in the Neapolitan Novels series build on the strong momentum established by the first and, in the process, continue to be some of the most poignant reading I’ve experienced in ages. The feelings that these books provoked in me were strong and visceral, inflamed and tender in their ebb and flow. These are not feel-good stories, but they don’t feel gratuitous in their misery, either. As a woman, my vicarious anger has an undercurrent of resignation, because each injustice and pointed strike at Lila and Elena — the character — (but also, all of the other Neapolitan women in the books) rings a little too true to feel like emotional manipulation. Pietro represents everything she thinks she wants from life, Nino everything she thinks she wants to escape. Crucially, though, Nino is also entwined with Lila; she loved him, she had him, she lost him. Elena’s attraction to him is, equally, a desire to succeed where Lila failed. My Brilliant Friend". International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Archived from the original on 2015-07-22. Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. 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.

We embraced with a fury that I had never known, as if our bodies were crashing against each other with the intention of breaking. So pleasure was this: breaking, mixing, no longer knowing what was mine and what was his. Even if Pietro had appeared, if the children had looked in, they would have been unable to recognize us. I whispered in his mouth: The Story of the Lost Child; won the 2016 ALTA Translation Prizes, in the category translations form Italian. [28]

Enzo Scanno, Lila and Lenù's childhood friend, who starts a relationship with Lila after he helps her leave her abusive marriage. Shulevitz, Judith (2015-09-12). "The Hypnotic Genius of Elena Ferrante". The Atlantic . Retrieved 2023-02-27. A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. Lenù tells Lila she plans to leave her husband to be with Nino, which horrifies her friend. Nino tells her he can't leave his wife, and Lenù decides to leave Pietro with or without him. The book ends when they board a plane together. Pietro Airota, Lenù's husband, and father to Dede and Elsa. A young professor at the university, he believes his career and intellect are superior to his wife's, which she comes to resent. At the end of the novel, she leaves him for Nino Sarratore.