The Story of a New Name: A Novel (Neapolitan Novels, 2)

I am so happy that I have had this wonderful series by Elena Ferrante recommended to me. I just finished "The Story of a New Name" after reading "My Brilliant Friend" and am feeling that wonderful euphoria that only a real lover of literature feels when there are two more books to look forward to that will continue my enchanting experience with these expertly drawn characters. I have hit a bit of a dry spell lately in my reading and feel like I have discovered a spectacular secluded beach with a sparkling azure sea surrounded by a forest of Redwood trees among a tired old smelly city full of toxic odors and blighted buildings. These books have added an exponential lovely aura to my early summer days and the fact that I have two to still read is just such a comforting feeling. In these times when there seems to be nothing new under the literary sun I am so pleased that I have found Elena Ferrante. The characters in this story are so expertly drawn that they stay with me all day long after I have closed the book for a few hours. This is really something of a soap opera drawn against the backdrop of post WW2 Naples, Italy. "The neighborhood" with all of it's many inhabitants become a character all to it's self. The class struggle among the political and social turbulence wrap themselves around these young girls who have a friendship that is the heart of the story. Poverty, class differences, and blight come alive to carry the love lives and personal crisis' along on the putrid smelling wind of the landscape. The story begins in 1950's Naples....but it could really be in any time and in any place. The foundation of the narrative is how omnipotent class, money, and social standing are in who we will all eventually become. I grew up in a tired little industrial town in Southern California in the same time period. The situation was identical. Young people, girls especially it seems, are totally at the mercy of the families that they are born into. Poverty is bone crushing. When education is not important to parents their children suffer horribly. Yet, if they have not been exposed to rising above poor and oppressive circumstances themselves, they are predestined to raise their children in the same depressing mode. Violence is the foundation of many of these homes. Large families stuffed into tiny and squalid dwellings filled with cigarette smoke, cheap food, alcoholism, violence, and always pervasive misery. How to escape? Young girls literally radiate towards men who are violent because that is all they know. This is the crux of Ferrante's brilliant narrative. Her protagonists Lila and Lennucia choose different paths....mainly because of Linnucia's father's willingness to pay the small fee for her to continue into middle school while Lila's shoemaker father didn't believe in educating his girl child. Lila is beautiful and a man magnet....this is her "way out". So the tale is a universal one. It happens every day and everywhere. This is such a fascinating fact of life and Elena Ferrante weaves her narrative with so much honesty and brutal reality that the reader is spellbound with the facts of what is nothing more than the universal truth of life. All over the world it is the same. Give yourself the gift of the Neapolitan Series this summer. It is actually very relevant to the current presidential race in the USA and the current brexit situation. Globalism and classism and how they affect young lives are the themes of these wonderful books. Since the best seller list is looking rather bleak this summer...I cannot recommend this reading experience more enthusiastically. This is a GIFT....don't miss it.

The story holds. The fascination with Neapolitan life in the 60’s remains. The gritty violence of the friends’ early lives contrasted with the striving of Lenu to uplift herself is touching, poignant, and keeps me riveted. I am halfway through this series and I am already sad to know that it will end. As Lenu struggles to separate from her early life, while simultaneously still being drawn to the neighborhood and to Lila, her internal life resonates with me and pulls at my consciousness. “Is it possible that our parents never die, that every child inevitably conceals them in himself? Would my mother truly emerge from me, with her limping gait, as my destiny?” This is the conflict that I encounter throughout my life. How do I separate myself from the embedded parent?

The Story of a New Name is the second in Elena Ferrante's highly-praised Neapolitan Quartet. In it, we again meet the two friends. Lila and Elena, both born in August 1944 and now in their late teens and early twenties. By the end of the first book, My Brilliant Friend, teenaged Lila was already married to the wealthy grocer Stefano. Their marriage had continued the neighborhood pattern of rape and beatings. The "brilliant" Lila, who, like Elena, had longed for a different kind of life away from the impoverished neighborhood where they grew up, had escaped the poverty of her childhood in her marriage to Stefano, but she couldn't escape the culture of male domination and physical abuse. That was simply the accepted way of the world. It was inevitable that the spirited Lila would eventually rebel and seek more from life. The only surprising thing about that was where and from whom she sought that "more." Elena, meanwhile, with the help and encouragement of her teachers and her own hard work, as well as a little bit of luck, continued her progress through the educational system. She escaped the trap of an early marriage and managed to continue to college, which opened up a whole new world to her. The story of Elena's first trip away from her neighborhood to go to the college at Pisa brought back some vivid memories for me. I could relate very well to the apprehension and anxiety of a girl who had lived all her life in an insular neighborhood as she struggled to find her way and her place in this new world she had entered. Been there. Done that. Got the tee shirt. This really is, in so many ways, a heartbreaking story. The barriers that life throws up for these two young women must seem almost unreal to younger women readers living in Western societies today, but their older mothers, aunts, grandmothers can testify that the barriers really did exist and, in all too many instances, still do, even if in modified form. Elena continues to be the narrator of this story, but her narration is informed by some notebooks of Lila's. Lila had given them to her and pressed her to keep them - but not read them - so that Stefano would not find them. They were notebooks containing her writing about her feelings and experiences from the time of childhood right up through her marriage. Of course, Elena could not resist the temptation of reading them, and so she is able to tell us what Lila was feeling concerning many of the events of both their lives. The two young women had always been competitive, especially about school, but, as they reach adulthood, they also become competitive about men. They are attracted to the same young man, although Elena denies her attraction. This attraction will have important consequences for their friendship and for their lives. Throughout these years, the friendship undergoes repeated trials. The lives of the two have diverged in very significant ways and, at times, they are emotionally distant as well as physically distant from each other. But always something brings them back together. I loved this book. I thought it was even better than My Brilliant Friend. From the very first page of The Story of a New Name I was mesmerized. I would have liked to read the entire book in one sitting, but, unfortunately, life intervened. I had work to do, places to go, appointments to keep, but I always returned to it as soon as I could, because I just couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen next. My only real problem with the book was one of the same ones I had with the first entry, namely trying to keep the cast of thousands straight! All those confusing names and all those families and their interrelationships. Had the author not again included that index of characters at the beginning as a handy reference, I might have been irretrievably lost. As it is, I now feel that I know and understand Lila and Elena. The drama of their lives seems so real, so well-written, and so engrossing that one can't help feeling that it must be based upon real life. The author herself is something of a mystery, but she grew up in Naples and it seems likely that she experienced or observed events similar to the ones that she describes in her books. Or maybe she just has a really vivid imagination.

Here is a taste of Ferrante's "The Story of a New Name": Lena, the narrator, has finally broken away from Naples to become a university student in Pisa. She is reflecting on her relationship with Lila, her closest friend, the one who married at 16 and is now carrying on an affair with Nino, a radical university student, whom Lena first loved: "Yes, it's Lila who makes writing difficult. My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine, in the words that I've uttered, in which there's often an echo of hers, in a particular gesture that is an adaptation of a gesture of hers, in my less which is such because of her more, in my more which is the yielding to the force of her less. Not to mention what she never said but let me guess, what I didn't know and read later in her notebooks. Thus the story of the facts has to reckon with filters, deferments, partial truths, half lies: from it comes an arduous measurement of time passed that is based completely on the unreliable measuring device of words." What's so fascinating to me about this novel is that we are dealing with two brilliant working class women, one of whom, LIla, drops out of high school to marry a man who turns out to be both violent and a criminal, while Lena, breaks away from Lila, their families and their neighborhood against all odds to attend university, going on to a life of academic success and writing. It is Lena who narrates the novel. It is her language, her voice. both objective and intellectually searching, while still deeply immersed in the native dialect, that we hear in the novel. There is a knowingness in this novel, an inescapable maturity, which you often only find in European fiction. Behind Ferrante there is Moravia, Morante, La Capria, the great Modernist novelist of Naples, and possibly even Pratolini, who wrote so surely about working class life in Florence. But Ferrante is also herself. She writes about women as no Italian novelist since perhaps Grazia Deledda, who won the Nobel Prize in 1926, has written about them. Her psychological acuteness is breathtaking. The third and final volume of the trilogy "Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay," will be released in early September. I can't wait to read it.

This second installment is even more intense than "My Brilliant Friend" and, after a couple of pages, picks up right where the first left off. It is even more engrossing and emotionally compelling. The girls are in a stage of their lives where sexual encounters and complicated feelings of desire and pride are felt so deeply. And I suspect this book is also deeply enmeshed in the politics of social strata, gender, nationhood, the portrait of an artist--yet I can't recite any specific cases or agendas, as I read these so quickly for the characters and the plot, and the language is so natural it feels devoid of art until you hit upon a passage that is so artful in its keen evocation of human motive and behavior. Or just the way the grass was wet and how it smelled. And the plot hides any artful mechanics as well. Sometimes the propulsion of storytelling makes me surprised this is not some middlebrow fiction, not so hailed by critics. But with any other author, you would've seen something coming. Maybe I'm reading this with no notions, but I never see anything coming. I am always freaking surprised. And then I see it was set up to be this way all along. I kind of love the way these end like TV seasons--there is really no closure or elegiac endings to the first two. If you like them, you must just keep reading the next. And I shall. (I do think critics are partly enamored with these books because they exalt the inner life, the life of the mind. Reading, writing, the way you speak and express yourself is the way these girls set themselves apart from their origin story and hardscrabble neighborhood.) The American paperback editions are handsome in the way the paper and the cover feels. But I do not understand the covers at all. It's like they just used a stock photo.

I barreled into this book and sailed through the first 200 pages, but then it flagged for me in the middle, picking up again in the last 150 pages - but that may just have been because the end was near! I was so torn about this book. On the negative side, all of the characters are detestable human beings. All of them are awful in their own way and it just becomes a question of degrees. The people in the "neighbourhood" are not people I would want to spend time with. Maybe day-to-day they are perfectly pleasant, ordinary people, but in the story of their lives as recounted by Lenu they are deficient in character and action. There is violence, selfishness and base motivations - money and sex primarily. No one looks good in this story. And if they do, it's not for long. Even though Lenu is the narrator, this is Lila's story. Lila may be fragile and broken in ways that no one can truly understand, least of all Lila herself, but she is still a horrible human being. She is a terrible wife, she is an even more terrible friend. She is manipulative and selfish and capricious. If she was my friend I would break up with her. But the friendship is complex and the codependency of the two friends is the meat of the story and there is a lot of juice there to keep you in there with them. They are also still very young and in addition to their major character defects there is a layer of immaturity that can be missed because so much has happened in their lives. They are both completely unaware and totally, starkly aware of all that they don't yet know and perhaps can never know. On the positive side, Ferrante draws these human failings so well. She draws a community mired in all this awful human weakness that was born in poverty, that cannot seem to extricate itself even as they become more affluent. She writes with recognition and surety of the human condition and it is a wonder to read. Also on the positive side, I liked very much where Ferrante is taking Elena. She is growing and changing and I liked particularly her observations on how hard it is move into another class. Elena may be educated and have a degree, but she recognizes that she will never belong in the class that she aspires too. Those scenes where she sees clearly and yet still feels the pull of the neighbourhood are poignant. Elena is the least horrible of the characters, but she also has the advantage of being the narrator. I liked that Lila's position is such a stark commentary on the position of women in Italy in the 1960's and that Elena's juxtaposes that and pulls against it as she tries to gain her independence in work, socially and sexually. It mirrors their friendship in a lot of ways. The book is masterful on so many levels. The themes of poverty and friendship continue to dominate, but are now interwoven with those of social change and social mobility. But, ugh! They are so hard to be around! They are fascinating and complicated and there is so much to chew on, but they are awful and annoying at the same time. The people in this story are a train wreck that you want to turn away from with discomfort because there is nothing you can do for them and it is so embarrassing for them to have you see, but you rubberneck anyway because you want to know if anyone is going to make it out alive. I will probably return to Elena and Lila for the third book, but I think I need a little break from them. A solid 3.5 stars reaching for 4.

I read all 4 of these Neopolitan Novels. You know, these books received so much hype and I wanted to love them for a lot of reasons, one being that my ancestors came from Campania. There was something to like in the novels, an intermittent breakthough of some lyrical writing, a few insights into human nature, and a lot about Naples that I truly enjoyed. There was however, much that drove me nuts! The narrator, Elena, analyzes every nuance of life and feelings to DEATH, over and over again. She second guesses herself constantly, until I got a headache. I couldn't for the life of me understand her fascination with this childhood friend, Lela, who is never anything but mean to her. Her character is so undeveloped and one demensional. The books are so repetitive, unabashedly telling the same story over and over. Surprising that I read all 4. I kept wanting to see where in the hell this was going. Was it going to get better. Would I somehow get why it was touted as so great? It gripped me like a bad soap opera can grip you. I wanted to know what was going to happen, though I was pretty certain I knew.

This is the continuing story of Elena Greco and her intriguing friend, Lila Cerullo. Lila is now married--very unhappily so--and Elena (Lenu, as she is called) narrates both Lila's tale and her own story of maturation. Elena has excelled academically and has received a full-ride scholarship in Pisa. Lila, back home in Naples, flounders dysfunctionally in an effort to individuate herself. I love these books and I find Ferrante's writing to be stimulating and evocative. I am of course waiting for book number three in this trilogy. I do want to note that her characters are very much flawed. Ferrante's portrayal of them is consistently sympathetic, although like all good authors she leads us down a path to occasional shock and revulsion. Lila is eminently self-destructive -- a fascinating personality to be sure, and I think all ardent readers of this trilogy hope for her redemption. Elena, on the other hand, is a much more stable personality, although her fascination with Lila sometimes leads me to internally exclaim, "Sheesh, get a life!" I do appreciate Elena's retrospective calm as she assesses with great candor how Lila's misfortunes and neediness often lifted her (Elena) up and fed her ego. I think that is what I appreciate the most about this series -- the depth of personal insight.

I enjoyed My Brilliant Friend and all it revealed of Naples in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Best of all I loved the exploration of the friendship and lives of the 2 protagonists. This 2nd book takes these themes to a new level and allows us to see the role of class. Politics and education in its various manifestations and the rewards and costs of education. Opportunity and hard work are counterpointed with fate and choice. Then add the ingredients of family, love and friendship, and now we have the unbeatable combination that drives Ferrante's story telling in the context of the changes and developments in Italy in the 1960s. Hard to put it down! I will look forward to the next 2 volumes with a certain pleasure and great admiration for such a deep rich writer of our times.

Personagens envolventes, muito bem escrito, amei!

De hele serie is adembenemend - als je eenmaal begint, wil je alle boeken achter elkaar lezen wat ik ook gedaan heb dus zorg dat je tijd hebt om dit te doen. Het geeft een bijzondere inkijkje in de samenleving in Napels en hoe een vriendschap een rol kan spelen in je hele leven. Zeer de moeite waard !!

This is the second book of a quadrilogy the author wrote about the friendship of two women that lasted all their lives. In the first book - "My Brilliant Friend" - the author narrates their childhood in the slums of Naples, Italy, soon after the II W.W. In this book she follows them in their adolescence and precocious young years; the story will continue in the last two with their adoolthood and old age. It is the friendship between Lina and the narrator Lenù. For deep psychological reasons, Lenù falls under the spell of her friend Lina, in spite of her unpleasant character. And so it happened to me, and after the first book I had to go on, and I bought the four of them. It's a frienship made of love and hatred, of jealousy and envie. The two girls grow up in a world of misery, filled with anger and frustration; entangled in a net of violence and ingnorance.The only way to escape is through money or education. Some merchants have become rich through the black market of their parents practiced during the war. Now it is their choice to make. So the two teenagers soon learn to desperately grab their moment of happiness, even risking their lives. It's a powerful portrait of the two main characters, through the intelligent self analysis of the narrator, and a deep psychological insight into her friends'demons. Lenù narrates their story following the details of their every day life. These facts seem to be banal, instead they are poignant in building the extraordinary character of Lina, and every event is charged with a powerful tension. The narration flows easily, never boring. The reader is captivated and feels like never putting down the book. While giving us the portrait of Lina, who seems to embody Good and Evil, the narrator paints also her neiborhood and its many characters which form a portrait of human existence itself and an excellent study of the human soul. An amazing story of an amazing frienship, where one, the narrator, tries desperately to be like her savage friend, and feeling inferior, she sacrifices herself and her choices to live her life through Lina. At the same time, Lina realizes that is Lenù who has made the right choice. Two desperate human beings who try to find a balance, try to reach beauty, a moment of happiness and the fullness of life among the frears, the banalities and the entanglements of their existence.

My book arrived sooner than expected and was as described. Very good.