Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: A Novel (Neapolitan Novels, 3): 03 (Neapolitan Quartet, 3)

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She was like the full moon when it crouches behind the forest and the branches scribble on its face.” I concluded that first of all I had to understand better what I was. Investigate my nature as a woman. I had been excessive, I had striven to give myself male capacities. I thought I had to know everything, be concerned with everything. What did I care about politics, about struggles. I wanted to make a good impression on men, be at their level. At the level of what, of their reason, most unreasonable.” Meghan O'Rourke (2014-10-31). "Elena Ferrante: the global literary sensation nobody knows". The Guardian . Retrieved 2015-07-20.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: middle age (Neapolitan Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: middle age (Neapolitan

Lenù had planned not to have children right away, but discovers too late that Pietro did not agree with that plan. She becomes pregnant in her honeymoon, giving birth to her daughter Adele (Dede), named after Pietro's mother. Two years later she has her second daughter, Elsa. At home with two young girls, Lenù has a hard time writing, and feels trapped and allienated. She manages at cost to write another book, based on her and Lila's childhood in Naples, but after Adele, Pietro's mother and her editor, judges the book to have no merit, she abandons the project. Anonymous' author on international Man Booker longlist". BBC News. 2016-03-10 . Retrieved 2023-02-27. Raffaella Cerullo (known as Lila or Lina), Lila's best friend. She starts a relationship with Enzo, and starts working at IBM. In The Guardian, it was noted the growing popularity of Ferrante, especially among writers: "Partly because her work describes domestic experiences – such as vivid sexual jealousy and other forms of shame – that are underexplored in fiction, Ferrante's reputation is soaring, especially among women (Zadie Smith, Mona Simpson and Jhumpa Lahiri are fans)". [9]a b O'Rourke, Meghan (2014-10-31). "Elena Ferrante: the global literary sensation nobody knows". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2023-02-27. How can I explain to this woman—I thought—that from the age of six I've been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?” In addition, the story of becoming an author is entangled for Lenu with the two previous points: with her friendship with Lila, because it's her goal to compete with the friend, to prove herself worthy, that fuels her writing. And with class struggle because writing a successful novel was how the two of them dreamed, as little girls, of making money and escaping the neighborhood, and, in fact, how Lenu finally achieves that. The new season launches Lila and Lenù into adulthood, navigating the conditions of work, marriage, and family in a society undergoing radical change. Our essay sought to interrupt what seemed to be a consensus opinion that the covers were, obviously, “bad.” But we didn’t want to argue that they were, in fact, “good.” We wanted to poke at what we maintain are the misogynistic value claims about good and bad taste. Critics seemed to agree, no matter where they were writing, that the “cheesy romance novel” quality of the covers was antithetical to good writing, good thinking, or even a good account of anarchic emotional life (and thus that if the covers had any merit, it was ironic, still buying into the same standards of taste). Yet, we argued, this was wrong. We wrote:

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I didn’t realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn’t like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew now to be not only a man in the right way, but also a woman.”The question the novels seek to answer—what happened to Lenù’s friendship with Lila?—is not a critical question; what went wrong is not a matter of reason or clarity. For what would it mean to evaluate a friendship in terms of “the best that is known?” How, in friendship, literature, and politics, do we evaluate what’s good, what’s interesting, what helps and what hurts? What standards guide our judgements, where do the standards come from, and whose power do they support or undercut? It's a matter-of-fact, serious, rigorously intelligent, deeply honest voice that pushes until it understands the truth behind what happens."