The Story of a New Name: My Brilliant Friend Book 2: Youth: 02 (Neapolitan Quartet, 2)

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Elena Ferrante’s gutsy and compulsively readable new novel, the first of a quartet, is a terrific entry point for Americans unfamiliar with the famously reclusive writer, whose go-for-broke tales of women’s shadow selves—those ambivalent mothers and seething divorcées too complex or unseemly for polite society (and most literary fiction, for that matter)—shimmer with Balzacian human detail and subtle psychological suspense . . . The Neapolitan novels offer one of the more nuanced portraits of feminine friendship in recent memory—from the make-up and break-up quarrels of young girls to the way in which we carefully define ourselves against each other as teens—Ferrante wisely balances her memoir-like emotional authenticity with a wry sociological understanding of a society on the verge of dramatic change.” 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.”

I personally find Ferrante's writing unexciting; there is something a little laborious about the way she assembles her story, something flat about the way narrative events are introduced. ‘The day went smoothly, apart from two episodes that apparently had no repercussions,’ she'll write. ‘Here's the first.’ Clunk, clunk. Sometimes the translation does not help, either: In The Story of a New Name, Lila has recently married and made her enteree into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighborhood that she so often finds stifling. Love, jealousy, family, freedom, commitment, and above all friendship: these are signs under which both women live out this phase in their stories. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times too much for Elena. Yet the two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and is a source of strength in the face of life's challenges. In these Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, the acclaimed author of The Days of Abandonment, gives readers a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging. Which means, as you can probably tell already, that reading Story of a New Name is not something I would recommend for anyone in a fragile emotional state. It isn’t for anyone who is still too close to being an insecure, bookish not-quite-teenager anymore with major self esteem issues. Even a few years ago, I think reading this might have sent me into a depressive, melodramatic spiral like when I saw Melancholia, which had to have been the literal worst thing I could have chosen to see while writing my thesis in a foreign country at a school full of people smarter than me. I saw it three times and lost a weekend before I could see straight again.Lila starts to work in the shoe shop her family is opening with the Solara brothers. She becomes pregnant, but has a miscarriage. Both Lila's and Stefano's families pressure her into becoming pregnant again, blaming Lila's independence for the miscarriage. A doctor recommends that she spends a season at sea to increase her fertility, and Lila, desperate to not be alone with her mother and sister-in-law, talks Elena into coming with her. Elena, who is secretly in love with Nino Sarratore, agrees on the condition that they go to the island of Ischia, knowing Nino will be there. Lila, Lenù, Nino, Lila's pregnant sister-in-law Pinuccia and Nino's friend Bruno Soccavo spend the days discussing literature and politics. Pinuccia develops a crush on Bruno, while Nino and Lila fall in love and begin an affair. When they spend the night together, Lenù, depressed and alone at the beach, gives in to the advances of Donato Sarratore, Nino's father, who harassed her a few years before, and with whom she has sex.

Need an original book title, and fast? We got you. Here are 8 ways to come up with book title ideas. 1. Start free writing to find keywords Man mano, questo libro è diventato una droga in senso letterale: non ne potevo fare a meno, non potevo lasciarlo – ho perfino messo da parte il Dampyr del mese, che di solito brucia nelle mani finché non lo leggo, e invece questa volta è passato in secondo ordine. stars Update: Bumping this one up to a 5 stars because after a few months of thinking about it, it's definitely my favorite in the series. I keep finding myself thinking of certain scenes and elements of this installment, and I love it.Regardless of who is behind the name Elena Ferrante, the mysterious pseudonym used by the author of the Neapolitan novels, two things are certain: she is a woman and she knows how to describe Naples like nobody else. She does so with a style that recalls an enchanted spider web with its expressive power and the wizardry with which it creates an entire world.”

Ferrante and Lessing are both fascinated by hallucinatory states that break down the boundaries and structures that uphold imprisoning, conventional social forms, including relations between the sexes, or adherence to the Communist party line. The threat of madness is central to The Golden Notebook but I’m also thinking of the strange fugue-like interludes exploring the ghostly house in The Memoirs of a Survivor, and many other moments in Lessing’s work. The novel starts with the return of Lila and Stefano from their honeymoon in the Amalfi coast. Lila has a bruised face, and tells Lenù that she was beaten and sexually assaulted when she tried to resist Stefano in their vacation. To their horror, they realize that most of the neighborhood respects Stefano more after this, having considered Lila too unruly for a young girl. I really, really liked Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is an incredibly blase way to compliment a book so raw and confrontational and, well, brilliant. The remaining three books in the Neapolitan Novels series build on the strong momentum established by the first and, in the process, continue to be some of the most poignant reading I’ve experienced in ages. The feelings that these books provoked in me were strong and visceral, inflamed and tender in their ebb and flow. These are not feel-good stories, but they don’t feel gratuitous in their misery, either. As a woman, my vicarious anger has an undercurrent of resignation, because each injustice and pointed strike at Lila and Elena — the character — (but also, all of the other Neapolitan women in the books) rings a little too true to feel like emotional manipulation. When you have played the game a few times, you may want to try combining the bad girl and good girl roles. You may for example be a bad girl who gets married and tries to stay faithful to her husband, or a good girl who writes a daring and truthful novel about her life. Note however that none of these strategies will actually let you win.Of course, the explanation was simple: we had seen our fathers beat our mothers from childhood. We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us." I tore through this in a kind of furious curiosity, annoyed with myself for being so involved and annoyed with Ferrante for taking so long to do what she does. The plot, heavy on frustrated emotion, is drawn out with intense internal monologues and telenovela miscommunications – and yet the actual characters are so real, built with such psychological verisimilitude, that you are fascinated despite yourself. The effect is as though Doris Lessing spent a season guest-writing for Days of our Lives. Elena Ferrante is a very great novelist . . . In a world often held prisoner to minimalism, her writing is extremely powerful, earthy, and audacious.” The Story of a New Name ( Italian: Storia del nuovo cognome) is a 2012 novel written by Italian author Elena Ferrante. It is the second volume in her four-book series known as the Neapolitan Novels, being preceded by My Brilliant Friend, and succeeded by Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child. It was translated to English by Ann Goldstein in 2013. Other obvious connections: Ferrante and Lessing both focus on women involved in radical politics and radical sexual relations whose strongest primary relation is with another woman, and who may or may not be “free women” as the ironically titled embedded novel in The Golden Notebook proclaims. As Margaret Drabble writes in a review of Ferrante:

Lina is a capricious figure, endowed with artistic intelligence and psychological insight that is too much for her to handle at her young age, especially when coupled with her fiery temper and seemingly contradictory emotions. Crippled in her hostile environment by skills that in another context would be gifts, she careens through her life seemingly blithely oblivious to her destructive, compelling force, intent on accomplishing goals that only she knows about. This force is what brings her environment -and indeed her friend Elena, the narrator – to oscillate between heedless devotion and uncomprehending animosity towards her. The reader too is pulled into this seesaw of emotions, as frustrated as her environment yet compelled to try to understand her, unable to leave her and return to peace.Ferrante draws an indelible picture of the city’s mean streets and the poverty, violence and sameness of lives lived in the same place forever . . . She is a fierce writer.” Elena finally consents to see her; Lila apologizes for her behavior and sees the doctor, who says she isn’t strong enough to stay pregnant. He recommends a vacation. Stefano rents a house on Amalfi, and Lila begs Elena to come, promising to pay her whatever she’d have made at the bookstore. Elena thinks of Nino and agrees if they can go to Ischia instead. She was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of one brain echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.”