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

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In Florence, Lenù runs into Nino again when her husband Pietro brings him home. She discovers she is still attracted to him despite the fact that he abandoned her friend after their love affair. She feels inspired by Nino, who seems to recognize her intellect and blames Pietro for letting her be wasted by a routine with small children. Inspired by this, she writes a feminist text which Adele deems worthy of publication. She and Nino start an affair, which makes Elena realize how unhappy she is in her marriage. Storia della bambina perduta, L'amica geniale volume 4 (2014; English translation: The Story of the Lost Child, 2015). OCLC 910239891. 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.” Reclusive Author Elena Ferrante Talks 'My Brilliant Friend' HBO Adaptation". The Hollywood Reporter. 16 October 2018.

So on the one hand, Nino sees Elena’s marriage for what it is, and appeals to her resentment at years of being treated like an intellectual inferior. On the other – as the somewhat hindsight-possessing older-Elena narrator is aware – Nino’s an expert at grand passion. He knows just what to say to women to inspire them to drop everything and run off with them, and has unclaimed children all across Italy to show for it. There’s this moment when it looks as if Elena will leave Pietro in favor of independence and being single for a while and that seems like an excellent idea, but when did great fiction ever limit itself to good decision-making? 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?

Declining population – increasing populism? The impact of emigration on voting behaviour in Germany

Janine Läpple & Judith Möllers (Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies) 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] The tension between Lila and Lenu is often considered the central point of the novels, as Matteo Pericoli wrote for The Paris Review: "From a structural point of view, tension and compression often meld into each another. In this building, two volumes are interwoven by strong connecting rods, extended columns and daring beams, with one of the two seemingly suspended from the other. With its mass and swirled dynamism, the suspended volume (that we will call Lila) seems to be slipping away from the one that is holding it up (that we will call Elena) making it extend and stretch as if it was Lila that was shaping Elena and providing her with her dynamic energy, so vital to any piece of architecture." [7]Nino Sarratore (their eldest son, two years older than Lila and Elena, as an adult is a professor and politically active)

Schappel, Elissa (27 August 2015). "The Mysterious, Anonymous Author Elena Ferrante on the Conclusion of Her Neapolitan Novels". Vanity Fair . Retrieved 2023-02-27. Harnett, Emily (2016-07-03). "The Subtle Genius of Elena Ferrante's Bad Book Covers". The Atlantic . Retrieved 2023-02-27. Fischer, Molly (September 4, 2014). "Elena Ferrante and the Force of Female Friendships". The New Yorker. Our second essay on Ferrante simply asserted, over and over, that men (all men)—after one specific man outed Elena Ferrante’s real identity—should shut up, just shut up, about Ferrante “ forever, or at least for this week.” Where the piece about the book covers at least gestured toward the possibility of an argument, this essay refuses argumentative structure in the most fundamental way. Where the piece about the book covers made a deliberately broad polemic claim about how misogyny shapes taste, this piece instead makes a deliberately impossible claim and supports it only with a shrug and an exclamation point: “Sorry!” 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.

In Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante’s characters deal with love and strife in a changing world. Another possibility is that the irritation is a historical symptom. The years of Ferrante fever in the United States have coincided with the collapse of things more generally—politically, psychologically, informationally. We exist in a state now where the ability to demonstrate or assert what is “best that is known” is under particular stress. It’s clear that criticism in our present time—the best that is known, consensual knowledge—has a vital role. This conference aims to open a broader conversation on the consequences of global flows of labour and explore them from multiple, yet complementing disciplinary perspectives. We plan to organise also a panel with civil society activists and practitioners looking at this issue from a policy perspective. 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] The novel was adapted by HBO and RaiTV in their series My Brilliant Friend. The content of this novels corresponds to the third season of the show, which aired in February 2022. [1] Plot [ edit ]

Leaving Pietro for Nino isn’t really about creative self-realization… except it kind of is, because Nino inspires her to write. But does she care what Nino thinks about her work because she’s admired his brains since they were kids and respects his opinion, or because Nino Is Sex? Billington, Michael (March 14, 2017). "My Brilliant Friend review – triumphant staging of Elena Ferrante's quartet". The Guardian. 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.

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