Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: A Novel (Neapolitan Novels, 3)
Part of the bestselling saga about childhood friends following different paths by "one of the great novelists of our time" (The New York Times).
In the third book in the New York Times-bestselling Neapolitan quartet that inspired the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, Elena and Lila have grown into womanhood. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts 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 are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance, and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up for women during the 1970s. And yet, they are still very much bound to each other in a book that "shows off Ferrante's strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series" (Library Journal).
"One of modern fiction's richest portraits of a friendship." --NPR
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Community Reviews
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
418 pages
What’s it about?
This is the third book in Elena Ferrante's Neopoloitan series and it continues telling the life of Elena Greco. In this book Elena marries and we see Lina continue to struggle with the lack of possibilities in her life.
What did it make me think about?
This book is as much about Italy, and the role of women in this country through the last fifty years, as it is about female friendships. Both are complicated subjects and Ferrante dissects them like a surgeon. She has such razor sharp insights and uses her plot and characters to tell you a larger story.
Should I read it?
Yes- but start at the beginning with Book 1.
Quote-
"They worked hard, that was obvious. And at least Enzo in front of him, in the factory, women worn out by work, by humiliations, by domestic obligations no less than Lila was. Yet now they were both angry because of the conditions she worked in; they couldn't tolerate it. You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn't happen to the women important to them and that- this was the idea they had grown up with- they had to protect her even at the risk of being killed."
If you like this try-
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
Lila by Marilynne Robinson
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