Elena Ferrante: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Description

Since the publication of My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan novels, Elena Ferrante's fame as one of our most compelling, insightful, and stylish contemporary authors has grown enormously. She has gained admirers among authors--Jhumpa Lahiri, Elizabeth Strout, Claire Messud, to name a few--and critics--James Wood, John Freeman, Eugenia Williamson, for example. But her most resounding success has undoubtedly been with readers, who have discovered in Ferrante a writer who speaks with great power and beauty of the mysteries of belonging, human relationships, love, family, and friendship.

In this third Neapolitan novel, Elena and Lila, the two girls whom eaders first met in My Brilliant Friend , have become women. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts of her marriage brought and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons. Both women have attempted are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seem them living a life of mystery, 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 see each other by a strong, unbreakable bond.

Review

"Reading Ferrante reminded me of that child-like excitement when you can't look up from the page, when your eyes seem to be popping from your head, when you think: I didn't know books could do this!" - Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge

"[Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels] don't merely offer a teeming vision of working-class Naples, with its cobblers and professors, communists and mobbed-up businessmen, womanizing poets and downtrodden wives; they present one of modern fiction's richest portraits of a friendship." - John Powers, Fresh Air, NPR

"Elena Ferrante's THE STORY OF A NEW NAME, book two in her Naples series. Two words. Read it." - Ann Hood, author of The Obituary Writer

"No one has a voice quite like Ferrante's. Her gritty, ruthlessly frank novels roar off the page with a barbed fury, like an attack that is also a defense...Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you'll have some idea of how explosive these works are." - John Freeman

"Ferrante's freshness has nothing to do with fashion...it is imbued with the most haunting music of all, the echoes of literary history." - The New York Times Book Review

Blurb

A 3rd novel in the "Neapolitan" series from the popular Italian author, translated by Ann Goldstein. Following on from "My Brilliant Friend" and "The Story Of A New Name", it follows Elena and Lila as they forge through adult life.