“Nothing quite like this has ever been published before,” proclaimed The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a sixty-year friendship between the brilliant and bookish Elena and the fiery, rebellious Lila with unmatched honesty and brilliance.… brilliance.
The four books in this novel cycle constitute a long, remarkable story, one that Vogue described as “gutsy and compulsively readable,” which readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.
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Maybe this 4 book set isn’t for everyone, but having seen the first 2 books on TV (in Italian, with subtitles), I was involved with the characters and wanted to know what happened to them. The books are told in first person, and seem so personal, that it is hard to believe that the author (who writes under a nom de plume) isn’t describing her actual experiences.
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Loved these books
Felt as if I knew these characters
She is a good writter
Once again, my favorite type of read. Historical, informative, and an engrossing story!
The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante (Neapolitan Novels)
Who is the brilliant one? Elena Greco or Lila Cerullo? In the 1950s two girls bond in a poor and violent slum in Naples. Both are ten years old as their epic story begins. One girl is fearless and bad, prescient––that’s Lila Cerullo, and the other, Elena (Lenu) Greco is shy, withdrawn, and compulsively drawn to Lila.
Their personas that seem inexplicably linked–Lila the stronger and Lenu the weaker– poignantly merged all their lives.
The four volumes span their relationship across 60 years. Lenu tells their story much against herself and she is the perfect narrator for this task since the transformation that lies ahead for the two make this a densely detailed, investigative account of the relationship. Lenu’s submissive passivity annoyed me no end: Lila, passionate, angry, dangerous fascinated me. But it is Lila, who is brilliant (in Lenu’s mind) Lila who goads and manipulates Lenu to go to high school and college to achieve everything that Lila is unable to, through poverty, dysfunction, and indeed, her own demons.
Lenu moves ahead, with Lila on hand to assist; she becomes a successful writer, gains status by marrying into the upper crust of society, establishes a worthy career, but continues to question her efforts, referencing everything she has achieved to Lila. Even as Lenu begins to claim herself and her place in society she cannot shake off Lila’s hold on her, becomes jealous of her, afraid of her. In a spiteful moment she writes:
“. . . at times I thought that she could have held crowded rooms fascinated, but then I brought her down to size. She’s a barely educated woman of fifty, she doesn’t know how to do research, she doesn’t know what the documentary truth is: she reads, she is excited, she mixes truth and falsehood, she imagines. No more.”
––Yet the two need each other–– Lila has to live through Lenu who, in turn, has to succeed to please her – a situation doomed to fail.
So, it is the relationship that thoroughly engages this reader. The two girls over the course of the story struggle to free themselves from the obsessive chains that merge them. Lila remains a mystery; she has a deep-seated sense of herself as a free individual who can do anything she sets her mind to, a feminist eschewing marriage and childbirth––still, she cannot abandon her roots and family!
Book 4: The Story of the Lost Child examines the tragedy that affects the lives of all the participants. . . Lila’s story is especially harrowing – the more so because despite her intelligence and self-will she remains a prisoner of her poverty-stricken childhood. Lenu observes:
“Lila didn’t have that type of ambition, she had never had ambitions. To carry out any project to which you attach your own name you have to love yourself, and she had told me, she didn’t love herself, she loved nothing about herself.”
But Lenu cannot be creative without Lila. Lila is Lenu’s Svengali to the end:
“As usual a half-sentence of Lila’s was enough and my brain recognized her aura, became active, liberated my intelligence. By now I knew that I could do well especially when she, even just with a few disjointed words, assured the more insecure part of me that I was right.”
Class, money, misogyny, technology play an engaging role in this poor district of Naples streaming all through the changing timeline. Lovers, husbands, children, neighbors, friends come and go; revolutions, protests, murders, crimes and treachery come and go. The friendship is always foreground, the rest, so much furniture. . .
Ferrante’s writing is superb, detailed, impeccable––at times dense, repetitive––the white space between the sudden paragraphs, compelling, goading the reader on . . .
“Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them. I did so then, and finally, it seemed that I had only come up against yet another proof of how splendid and shadowy our friendship was, how long and complicated Lila’s suffering had been, how it still endured and would endure forever.”
It is an extraordinary love story.
This collection takes you, as the reader, through many years of a relationship between two best girlfriends. You feel their struggles, their love and envy of each other and skip through their individual lives.
They are written with spunk, clarity and warmth. You wish there was more when you finished the last book.
Like nothing else I’ve ever read. Wonderful characters, reeks of reality. The culture of Naples in the ’50s is rendered so vividly you can smell the filthy streets, the pasta on the stove, the brutal code of life in a city with its own dialect so distinct that speaking proper Italian is viewed with suspicion.
I hardly looked up until I read all four of the Neapolitan novels. While it isn’t always easy to keep track of the large cast of characters through the four volumes, the writing is so exceptional that it made no matter to me.
Just a marvelous study of womens’ friendship over a lifetime. Stupendous read. You will be hooked after first book.
Excellent trilogy by Elena Ferrante. Very good read.
Probably the best books I’ve ever read, fabulous writing, completely spell binding, extremely well crafted, could not get enough of it totally absorbing, sorry to finish series, waiting for her next book/s