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A novel in the bestselling quartet about two very different women and their complex friendship: “Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it” ( The Boston Globe).
One of the more fascinating atmospheric elements that Ferrante added demonstrated the stage of development where you become aware that you are not the center of the universe in a variety of ways- in this case for characters living in poverty and powerlessness, most of them borne in forcibly upon you whether you like it or not. Ferrante starts to introduce the gradual intrusion of politics and political identity- tellingly, it mostly shows in one more tribal identity, one more way for the kids to divide themselves- mostly in increased accusations of “Fascist pig!” and “Red communist!” thrown around in place of remarks on one’s face and person, and one kid going to one meeting and one going to another. Elena also encounters this world, but again, not in itself, but as a piece of currency in the game of the class system, another piece of another kind of tribal mask that she’s trying hard to don: 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. Behind the Neapolitan novels is a sense of "the violence in every house, every family" based in an unspeakable "before": the brutality and betrayals of the Second World War. I’m always surprised when someone points out as a flaw the fact that my stories contain no possibility of transcendence.” 1Elena Ferrante‘s The Story of a New Name is the second chapter in the series, following 2012’s acclaimed My Brilliant Friend, featuring the two friends Lila and Elena. The two protagonists are now in their twenties. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila. Meanwhile, Elena continues her journey of self-discovery. The two young women share a complex and evolving bond that brings them close at times, and drives them apart at others. Each vacillates between hurtful disregard and profound love for the other. With this complicated and meticulously portrayed friendship at the center of their emotional lives, the two girls mature into women, paying the sometimes cruel price that this passage exacts. Writing, then, and maybe even moreso, stolen writing, is of central importance to identity in the books. For Lenù, Lila, is the woman who doesn’t write or rather who is suspected of writing secretly, a writing that would be magical if it existed—that would be more like life than writing, like presence. For Lenù writing matters, but Lila matters even more. As Lenù’s daughter Dede says: The bus ride starts from a Naples train station one stop removed from the main train station; the dead end last stop with rows of worn graffitied regional trains parked side by side almost in the dark. The seats in these regional trains are metal and miniature like cable car seats making them hood on the outside but dainty and refined on the inside. Once you leave Naples, the Naples-Torregaveta bus ride is almost entirely along the coast, like the Almalfi Coast route but less winding and less steep. This bus ride requires almost no attention from the bus driver, who frequently had his eyes off the road. Meanwhile, Stefano and Rino have gone into business with the Solara brothers, to open a shoe store in Naples on the Piazza. The Solaras have also invested in Stefano’s new grocery store. Lila helps Stefano in the grocery store, although Michele Solara thinks she would be effective working in the new shoe store. On the piazza in Naples, Michele sees a photo of Lila in her wedding dress that the dressmaker has displayed. Stefano goes to the shop, with Elena, and asks the dressmaker to remove it, but it is a very popular photo. Since Lila is very beautiful and she is wearing Cerrullo shoes, Michele asks if they can take the photo, enlarge it, and hang it in the store. When Stefano will not agree to this, Elena and Lila make a bet. If Stefano changes his mind , Elena must make perfect marks the next year in high school. If not, Lila must return to school.
Lila ed Elena crescono, maturano, cambiano, evitano la smarginatura: e intorno a loro l’orizzonte si allarga, dal rione, da Napoli, passiamo al resto d’Italia, il Centro e anche il Nord, Pisa, Milano…
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If you decide to get serious about WOMAN™, there are several excellent books which will help you improve your skills. Elena Ferrante's series is particularly good. Go out and buy a copy tomorrow, you won't regret it! In Elena Ferrante’s second Neapolitan novel “The Story of a New Name,” Torregaveta makes an appearance when one of the characters tells her husband she wants to go to the beach with her small son, and her husband, who no longer loves her, tells her to take a bus to Torregaveta. The women’s fraught relationship and shifting fortunes are the life forces of the poignant book”— Publisher’s Weekly Compelling, visceral and immediate . . . a riveting examination of power . . . The Neapolitan novels are a tour de force.” Elena Ferrante is proving that literature can cure our present ills; it can cure the spirit by operating as an antidote to the nervous attempts we make to see ourselves reflected in the present-day of a country that is increasingly repellent.”
The Story of a New Name takes place immediately after Lila’s marriage to the neighborhood grocer, the young man in charge of one of only two of the neighborhood’s prosperous families. Getting bogged down in the details of the plot of each book is kind of missing the point, so I will try to avoid doing it, but I mention the marriage because this is the single moment that changes the two women’s lives. It is the first and most concrete piece of evidence that the lives they are “meant” to have, as women, are not for them. Lila begins chafing at her vows and new identity (her new name) before the ceremony is even over, and the rest of this installment is, for her, about how she struggles to carve out necessary freedoms for herself, both inside and outside of her marriage. Meanwhile, Elena has left the neighborhood to attend secondary school and university. Academically, there is no denying her talent, but she has what we would, now, instantly identify as impostor syndrome, in spades, and she is nearly undone on multiple occasions by a crippling sense of inauthenticity. When she speaks among her educated friends, she always feels like she is pretending at intelligence, only hiding her poor vulgarity; when she as at home in Naples she simultaneously desires to impress with her accomplishments and be accepted as one of them, unchanged. It’s the story of moving within of two communities, but not truly being a part of either. Ho l'impressione che manchi perfino più che nel primo episodio di questa saga, e quasi se ne sente la mancanza: forse perché a volte Ferrante si prodiga a spiegarci il tipo di dialetto che sta usando un suo personaggio invece di farcelo leggere, invece di farcelo sentire. If you were the person who, like me, was utterly destroyed by that moment, then you need to read this book. If you were any of the people described above, or if you have that ugly place, you need to read this book. If you’re looking to be transported, if you’re looking for something that can consume you for days, you need to read this book. While preparing for her thesis, Lenù remains disturbed by her relation with Donato Sarratore, and writes about it in a notebook. One day, she receives a box with the possessions of her old schoolteacher, professor Oliviero, which includes The Blue Fairy, the book she had written with Lila when they were little girls, and recognizes in the book the heart of her writings. She gives the story she wrote to Pietro, who passes it on to his mother, Adele, who works at a publishing house. To Lenù's surprise, Adele calls her to say that she wants to publish the tale as a book. If you’ve gone through all of the above and are still wringing out your brain trying to come up with the golden formula — fear not! There are other ways to get the cogs whirring and inspiration brewing, such as title generators.
Elena Ferrante is a very great novelist . . . In a world often held prisoner to minimalism, her writing is extremely powerful, earthy, and audacious.”
I first encountered her through her scalding 2002 novel, The Days Of Abandonment, whose narrator, Olga, may be the scariest jilted wife since Medea. What makes Olga scary is not what she does, but what she thinks and feels, and her ferocious precision in describing everything from lousy sexual encounters to her not-altogether-maternal feelings about her children. It was kind of confusing. I didn’t like the beating the women received but I finished the book and the ending was worth it.” – Sue Campbell My Brilliant Friend, translated by Ann Goldstein, is stunning: an intense, forensic exploration of the friendship between Lila and the story’s narrator, Elena. Ferrante’s evocation of the working-class district of Naples where Elena and Lila first meet as two wiry eight-year-olds is cinematic in the density of its detail.”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. Ferrante’s novels are intensely, violently personal, and because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader.”— James Wood, The New Yorker It makes sense why, later in the novel, there’s a passage about how so many characters are confused when Lila wants to go take a job in the center of the city. She’s a veritable queen in the old neighborhood, and can lord it over anyone there, lend them money, show them up in clothes, people are now afraid to cross her…. Why would she want to go to the nicer part of town, where her illusions will be shattered? Why would she want to take that away that illusion from herself?
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