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

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Meghan O'Rourke (2014-10-31). "Elena Ferrante: the global literary sensation nobody knows". The Guardian . Retrieved 2015-07-20. In the third book in the Neapolitan quartet, Elena and Lila, the two girls whom readers first met in My Brilliant Friend, have become women. 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 opportun This sentence stages our most polemic claim—“taste is just another name for internalized misogyny”—as a truth claim at the foundation of an argument rather than the argument itself. More, the claim can’t hold, argumentatively: it is out of scale with itself. It contains a multitude of debatable assumptions about how taste, culture, gender, and even psychology work, yet we were uninterested in debating any of them. Because the very fact of having to debate them, carefully, with evidence and expertise, dissipates the deep feelings—of love, of irritation—that the covers cause us to feel and, importantly, what the discussion of the covers lead us to know but to know other than through agreed upon standards of argument. The knowledge, here, came from the accrued feeling of living for years in a world that finds a pastel aesthetic distasteful. Criticism’s carefulness would defuse the power of experience behind this claim. Billington, Michael (March 14, 2017). "My Brilliant Friend review – triumphant staging of Elena Ferrante's quartet". The Guardian.

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. 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]In a recent interview, Ferrante explained that, for her, “the passion to write never coincided with the desire to become a writer .” In Italy, where the cult of celebrity can be especially toxic, her anonymity is not a denial of the presence of herself in her works (“what lies silent in the dep­ths of me”) but, rather, of “the media emphasis, the predo­minance of the icon of the author over his work.” She repeats again and again in Fragments that although she brings her novels to life, they must then be allowed to stand alone, separate from her. There seemed to us, thus, to be a mismatch between the novels’ dissatisfaction with public writing and the act of publicly writing about them. As critics tried—in essays, even in Facebook threads—to fit their encounters with the novels’ pettiness into critical forms, the pettiness lost its vitality, was in fact called out as petty, which was, in our experience, irritating.

Declining population – increasing populism? The impact of emigration on voting behaviour in Germany Elena reflects, at one point, on whether or not she ever harbored sexual feelings for her friend, admitting that she admired her body yet concluding, chillingly, “we would have been beaten to death.” The threat of violence over their childhoods precluded any sort of experimentation. But Elena is beguiled by Lila’s sexuality, by her teenage marriage and passionate affair. In one of his first conversations with Elena in Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Nino bitterly tells her that Lila is “really made badly: in her mind and in everything, even when it comes to sex.” Elena becomes obsessed with those words, at once viciously glad to hear of Lila’s failing and terrified that she will receive the same censure.The series was also adapted for radio, produced by Pier for BBC Radio 4 and first broadcast in July 2016. What’s most interesting about all the novels is (again, of course) the Lila-Elena relationship. But a close second is all that Nino business. Nino is that rare thing: a childhood crush who remains alluring into adulthood. But more than that, he’s deeply entangled with Elena’s other loves: Lila (who was his lover, and who may have born his child), and professional ambition as a writer. The Lila aspect isn’t all that explored, at least in Book 3 – early on in the book, Nino tells Elena that Lila had been bad in bed, but that’s almost it. Bernofsky, Susan (2016-10-10). "2016 ALTA Translation Prizes Announced". TRANSLATIONiSTA . Retrieved 2023-02-27.

How does emigration counter or feed into existing inequalities between countries, but also between regions and cities? What has been the interplay between practices and discourses of emigration and immigration in our inequality-ridden geographies? Finally, what have been the economic consequences of emigration for sending countries? How has emigration affected the Welfare State, taxation policies and skills distribution in sending countries? Lenù is a critic and a novelist, and yet neither of those modes of writing or evaluation have helped her answer the most urgent questions she has. For Lenù, criticism is not even an objective mode of evaluation: instead, it manifests narratively mostly as a series of bad boyfriends and bad moms, counterweighted for a while, Nancy Meyer-ishly, by increasingly nice apartments. In other words, as a life. Throughout Elena’s narrative the reader gets small glimpses of Lila’s life. In the beginning of the novel, Lila lives in a squalid apartment with Enzo Scanno and her son. She works long hours at a sausage factory and is treated abominably. By chance she is introduced to a group of young, elite Communists, who wish to use Lila’s cleverness and natural leadership ability to infiltrate the workers union. Lila’s involvement causes a near physical and emotional breakdown, not to mention a fearful run-in with Michele Solara, who works for the Fascists. Perhaps you all know how this ends. Perhaps it is hardly surprising for me to tell you that we are scattered now, that many of us no longer talk at all. I never told them this, but I didn’t want to live in California anyway. 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.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. Storia della bambina perduta, L'amica geniale volume 4 (2014; English translation: The Story of the Lost Child, 2015). OCLC 910239891. Because obviously these books are gendered, are about gender, are written through, read in, and talked about in a condition of gender. This is difficult to talk about, because gender too is all petty differences. When we leave pettiness for criticism, we feel a pressure to transcend gender’s petty differences into a space where interpretation and meaning can be debated, discussed, and agreed upon. But the thing that’s just true—this is another sweeping, untenable, and necessary claim—is that women lose more, and have more to lose, in that space. Janine Läpple & Judith Möllers (Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies)

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. Melina Cappuccio (the mad woman, in love with Donato Sarratore, cleans the neighborhood's buildings' staircases) Then again, Ferrante’s entire literary career, stretching over the past quarter of a century, could be seen as a study of the boundary line between doing and redoing. In a letter to Sandra Ozzola, her Italian publisher and one of the founders of Europa Editions, Ferrante writes: To the uninitiated, Elena Ferrante is best described as Balzac meets The Sopranos and rewrites feminist theory."— The Times In speaking about pettiness we are not making a value claim: we are making a significance claim. Pettiness is important, but it is not necessarily good. It is not, as we have said, ennobling. Terrible people use it to terrible ends; brilliant people use it to brilliant ends. But assuming that pettiness is something that critics can “get over” on their way to “knowledge” is a mistake, and it is partly a mistake because “getting over pettiness” repeats the very political, often misogynistic, blindness it aims to reveal. In a better world maybe we wouldn’t need pettiness. But that seems not to be where we live.Robinson, Roxana (2014-09-05). "Between Women". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-02-28.