Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: A Novel (Neapolitan Novels, 3) by Elena Ferrante
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Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: A Novel (Neapolitan Novels, 3)

by

Elena Ferrante

(Author)

4.4

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13,787 ratings


Part of the bestselling saga about childhood friends following different paths by “one of the great novelists of our time” (The New York Times).

In the third book in the New York Times–bestselling Neapolitan quartet that inspired the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, Elena and Lila have grown into womanhood. 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 opportunities that opened up for women during the 1970s. And yet, they are still very much bound to each other in a book that “shows off Ferrante’s strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series” (Library Journal).

“One of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship.” —NPR

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ISBN-10

160945233X

ISBN-13

978-1609452339

Print length

400 pages

Language

English

Publisher

Europa Editions

Publication date

September 01, 2014

Dimensions

5.27 x 1.27 x 8.23 inches

Item weight

2.31 pounds


Popular Highlights in this book

  • My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her.

    Highlighted by 1,202 Kindle readers

  • The solitude of women’s minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it’s a waste to be separated from each other, without procedures, without tradition.

    Highlighted by 1,112 Kindle readers

  • The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.

    Highlighted by 1,078 Kindle readers


Product details

ASIN :

B079MHDBZ2

File size :

4691 KB

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Editorial Reviews

''Rising far above the melodrama of a typical coming-of-age story, this third in Ferrante's four Neapolitan novels exhibits keen intellectual curiosity and heartfelt passion as it continues to explore the lives of childhood friends Lina and Elena Superbly translated, this tour de force shows off Ferrante's strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series.'' --Library Journal (starred review)

''Ferrante continues to imbue this growing saga with great magic, treating the girls' years of marriage and motherhood with breathtaking honesty while envisaging the turbulence of political and social unrest in 1970s Italy. Though originally planned as a trilogy, the story doesn't finish here, as this book ends with a hook that will leave readers eagerly awaiting the next installment.'' --Booklist (starred review)

''Ferrante writes with the kind of power saved for weather systems with female names, sparing no one, and Those Who Stay is a tour de force. I don't want to read anything else.'' --Jennifer Gilmore, New York Times bestselling author

''Surpass[es] the rapturous storytelling of the previous titles in the Neapolitan Novels.'' --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

''Ferrante has authored a 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman' that captures not only the forging of a self but the salvaging of it.'' --Vogue, praise for the series


Sample

MIDDLE TIME

1.

Isaw Lila for the last time five years ago, in the winter of 2005. We were walking along the stradone, early in the morning and, as had been true for years now, were unable to feel at ease. I was the only one talking, I remember: she was humming, she greeted people who didn’t respond, the rare times she interrupted me she uttered only exclamations, without any evident relation to what I was saying. Too many bad things, and some terrible, had happened over the years, and to regain our old intimacy we would have had to speak our secret thoughts, but I didn’t have the strength to find the words and she, who perhaps had the strength, didn’t have the desire, didn’t see the use.

Yet I loved her, and when I came to Naples I always tried to see her, even though, I have to say, I was a little afraid of her. She had changed a great deal. Age had had the better of us both by then, but while I fought a tendency to gain weight she was permanently skin and bones. She had short hair that she cut herself; it was completely white, not by choice but from neglect. Her face was deeply lined, and increasingly recalled her father’s. She laughed nervously, almost a shriek, and spoke too loudly. She was constantly gesturing, giving to each gesture such fierce determination that she seemed to want to slice in half the houses, the street, the passersby, me.

We had gone as far as the elementary school when a young man I didn’t know overtook us, out of breath, and shouted to her that the body of a woman had been found in a flowerbed next to the church. We hurried to the gardens, and Lila dragged me into the knot of curious bystanders, rudely opening a path. The woman was lying on one side; she was extraordinarily fat, and was wearing an unfashionable dark-green raincoat. Lila recognized her immediately, but I did not: it was our childhood friend Gigliola Spagnuolo, the ex-wife of Michele Solara.

I hadn’t seen her for several decades. Her beautiful face was ruined, and her ankles had become enormous. Her hair, once brown, was now fiery red, and long, the way she’d had it as a girl, but thin, and spread out on the loose dirt. One foot was shod in a worn, low-heeled shoe; the other was encased in a gray wool stocking, with a hole at the big toe, and the shoe was a few feet beyond, as if she had lost it kicking against some pain or fear. I burst into tears; Lila looked at me in annoyance. Sitting on a bench nearby, we waited in silence until Gigliola was taken away. What had happened to her, how she had died, for the moment no one knew. We went to Lila’s house, her parents’ old, small apartment, where she now lived with her son Rino. We talked about our friend; Lila criticized her, the life she had led, her pretensions, her betrayals. But now it was I who couldn’t listen. I thought of that face in profile on the dirt, of how thin the long hair was, of the whitish patches of skull. How many who had been girls with us were no longer alive, had disappeared from the face of the earth because of illness, because their nervous systems had been unable to endure the sandpaper of torments, because their blood had been spilled. For a while we sat in the kitchen listlessly, neither of us decisive enough to clear the table. Then we went out again.

The sun of the fine winter day gave things a serene aspect. The old neighborhood, unlike us, had remained the same. The low gray houses endured, the courtyard of our games, the dark mouths of the tunnel, and the violence. But the landscape around it had changed. The greenish stretch of the ponds was no longer there, the old canning factory had vanished. In their place was the gleam of glass skyscrapers, once signs of a radiant future that no one had ever believed in. I had registered the changes, all of them, over the years, at times with curiosity, more often carelessly. As a child I had imagined that, beyond the neighborhood, Naples was full of marvels. The skyscraper at the central station, for example, had made a great impression, decades earlier, as it rose, story by story, the skeleton of a building that seemed to us extremely tall, beside the ambitious railroad station. How surprised I was when I passed through Piazza Garibaldi: look how high it is, I said to Lila, to Carmen, to Pasquale, to Ada, to Antonio, to all the companions of those days, as we made our way to the sea, to the edges of the wealthy neighborhoods. At the top, I thought, live the angels, and surely they delight in the whole city. To climb up there, to ascend—how I would have liked that. It was our skyscraper, even if it was outside the neighborhood, a thing that we saw growing day by day. But the work had stopped. When I came back from Pisa, the station skyscraper no longer seemed the symbol of a community that was reviving but, rather, another nest of inefficiency.

During that period I was convinced that there was no great difference between the neighborhood and Naples, the malaise slid from one to the other without interruption. Whenever I returned I found a city that was spineless, that couldn’t stand up to changes of season, heat, cold, and, especially, storms. Look how the station on Piazza Garibaldi was flooded, look how the Galleria opposite the museum had collapsed; there was a landslide, and the electricity didn’t come back on. Lodged in my memory were dark streets full of dangers, unregulated traffic, broken pavements, giant puddles. The clogged sewers splattered, dribbled over. Lavas of water and sewage and garbage and bacteria spilled into the sea from the hills that were burdened with new, fragile structures, or eroded the world from below. People died of carelessness, of corruption, of abuse, and yet, in every round of voting, gave their enthusiastic approval to the politicians who made their life unbearable. As soon as I got off the train, I moved cautiously in the places where I had grown up, always careful to speak in dialect, as if to indicate I am one of yours, don’t hurt me.

When I graduated from college, when, in a single burst, I wrote a story that in the space of a few months became, surprisingly, a book, the things of the world I came from seemed to me to deteriorate even further. In Pisa, in Milan, I felt good, at times even happy; upon every return to my own city I feared that some unexpected event would keep me from escaping, that the things I had gained would be taken away from me. I would be unable to reach Pietro, whom I was soon to marry; the tidy space of the publishing house would be barred to me; I would no longer enjoy the refinements of Adele, my future mother-in-law, a mother as mine had never been. Already in the past the city had seemed to me crowded, a crush from Piazza Garibaldi to Forcella, to Duchesca, to Lavinaio, to the Rettifilo. In the late sixties the crush seemed to intensify, while impatience, aggressiveness spread without restraint. One morning I ventured out to Via Mezzocannone, where some years earlier I had worked as a clerk in a bookstore. I went because I was curious to see the place where I had toiled, and also to see the university, where I had never been. I wanted to compare it with the university in Pisa, the Normale, I was even hoping I might run into the children of Professor Galiani—Armando, Nadia—and boast of what I had accomplished. But the street, the university buildings had distressed me. They were teeming with students from Naples and the province and the whole South, well-dressed, noisy, self-confident youths, and others, rough yet inferior. They thronged the entrances, the classrooms, stood in long, often quarrelsome lines in front of the secretaries. Without warning, three or four started hitting each other a few steps from me, as if the mere sight of one another were sufficient for an explosion of insults and blows, a fury of boys shouting their craving for blood in a dialect that I myself had difficulty understanding. I left in a hurry, as if something threatening had touched me in a place that I had imagined safe, inhabited only by good reasons.

Every year, in other words, it seemed to me worse. In that season of rains, the city had cracked yet again, an entire building had buckled onto one side, like a person who, sitting in an old chair, leans on the worm-eaten arm and it gives way. Dead, wounded. And shouts, blows, cherry bombs. The city seemed to harbor in its guts a fury that couldn’t get out and therefore eroded it from the inside, or erupted in pustules on the surface, swollen with venom against everyone, children, adults, old people, visitors from other cities, Americans from NATO, tourists of every nationality, the Neapolitans themselves. How could one endure in that place of disorder and danger, on the outskirts, in the center, on the hills, at the foot of Vesuvius? What a brutal impression San Giovanni a Teduccio had left on me, and the journey to get there. How brutal the factory where Lila was working, and Lila herself—Lila with her small child, Lila who lived in a run-down building with Enzo, although they didn’t sleep together. She had said that he wanted to study computers, and that she was trying to help him. I still remember her voice, as it tried to erase San Giovanni, the salami, the odor of the factory, her situation, by citing with false expertise abbreviations like: Cybernetics Center of the State University of Milan, Soviet Center for the Application of Computer Science to the Social Sciences. She wanted to make me believe that a center of that type would soon be established even in Naples. I had thought: in Milan maybe, certainly in the Soviet Union, but here no, here it is the folly of your uncontrollable mind, into which you are dragging even poor, devoted Enzo. Leave, instead. Get away for good, far from the life we’ve lived since birth. Settle in well-organized lands where everything really is possible. I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.

I talked about it with Lila that afternoon, in the winter of 2005, emphatically and as if to make amends. I wanted to acknowledge openly that she had understood everything since she was a girl, without ever leaving Naples. But I was almost immediately ashamed, I heard in my words the irritable pessimism of someone who is getting old, a tone I knew she detested.

In fact, in a nervous grimace of a smile that showed her old teeth, she said: “Are you playing the know-it-all, the moralizer? What do you intend to do? You want to write about us? You want to write about me?”

“No.”

“Tell the truth.”

“It would be too complicated.”

“You’ve thought about it, though, you’re thinking about it.”

“A little, yes.”

“Let me be, Lenù. Let us all be. We ought to disappear, we deserve nothing, neither Gigliola nor me, no one.”

“That’s not true.”

She had an ugly expression of discontent, and she scrutinized me, her pupils hardly visible, her lips half parted.

“All right,” she said, “write, if you want, write about Gigliola, about whoever you want. But about me no, don’t you dare, promise.”

“I won’t write about anyone, not even you.”

“Careful, I’ve got my eye on you.”

“Yes?”

“I’ll come look in your computer, I’ll read your files, I’ll erase them.”

“Come on.”

“You think I’m not capable of it?”

“I know you’re capable. But I can protect myself.”

She laughed in her old mean way.

“Not from me.”

2.

I have never forgotten those three words; it was the last thing she said to me: Not from me. For weeks now I’ve been writing at a good pace, without wasting time rereading. If Lila is still alive—I imagine as I sip my coffee and look out at the Po, bumping against the piers of the Principessa Isabella bridge—she won’t be able to resist, she’ll come and poke around in my computer, she’ll read, and, cantankerous old woman that she is, she’ll get angry at my disobedience, she’ll want to interfere, correct, add, she’ll forget her craving to disappear. Then I wash the cup, go back to the desk to write, starting from that cold spring evening in Milan, more than forty years ago, in the bookstore, when the man with the thick eyeglasses spoke derisively about me and my book in front of everyone, and I replied in confusion, shaking. Until suddenly Nino Sarratore stood up and, almost unrecognizable with his unruly black beard, harshly attacked the man who had attacked me. Right then my whole self began to silently shout his name—how long had it been since I’d seen him: four, five years—and although I was ice-cold with tension I felt myself blushing.

As soon as Nino stopped talking, the man, with a slight gesture, asked to respond. It was clear that he was offended, but I was too agitated by violent emotions to immediately understand why. I was aware, naturally, that Nino’s words had shifted the conversation from literature to politics, and in an aggressive, almost disrespectful way. Yet at the moment I gave that little importance; I couldn’t forgive myself for my failure to stand up to the challenge, for having been ineffectual in front of a sophisticated audience. And yet I was clever. In high school I had reacted to my disadvantages by trying to become like Professor Galiani, I had adopted her tones and her language. In Pisa that model of a woman hadn’t been enough; I had had to deal with highly experienced people. Franco, Pietro, all the best students, and of course the renowned teachers at the Normale expressed themselves in a complex manner: they wrote with deliberate artifice, they had an ability to classify, a logical lucidity, that Professor Galiani didn’t possess. But I had trained myself to be like them. And often I succeeded: it seemed to me that I had mastered words to the point of sweeping away forever the contradictions of being in the world, the surge of emotions, and breathless speech. In short, I now knew a method of speaking and writing that—by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn’t supposed to fail—sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object. But that evening things didn’t go as they should have. First, Adele and her friends, whom I imagined as very sophisticated readers, and then the man with the thick eyeglasses intimidated me. I had become again the eager little girl from the poor neighborhood of Naples, the daughter of the porter with the dialect cadence of the South, amazed at having ended up in that place, playing the part of the cultured young writer. So I had lost confidence and expressed myself in an unconvincing, disjointed manner. Not to mention Nino. His appearance had taken away any self-control, and the very quality of his speech on my behalf had confirmed to me that I had abruptly lost my abilities. We came from backgrounds that were not very different, we had both worked hard to acquire that language. And yet not only had he used it naturally, turning it easily against the speaker, but, at times, when it seemed to him necessary, he had even dared to insert disorder into that polished Italian with a bold nonchalance that rapidly managed to make the professorial tones of the other man sound out of date and perhaps a little ridiculous. As a result, when I saw that the man wished to speak again, I thought: he’s really angry, and if he said bad things about my book before, now he’ll say something even worse to humiliate Nino, who defended it.

But the man seemed to be gripped by something else: he did not return to my book; he didn’t bring me into it at all. He focused instead on certain formulas that Nino had used incidentally but had repeated several times: things like baronial arrogance, anti-authoritarian literature. I understood only then that what had made him angry was the political turn of the discussion. He hadn’t liked that vocabulary, and he emphasized this by inserting a sudden sarcastic falsetto into his deep voice (And so pride in knowledge is today characterized as pretension, and so literature, too, has become anti-authoritarian?). Then he began to play subtly with the word authority, thank God, he said, a barrier against the uncultured youths who make random pronouncements on everything by resorting to the nonsense of who knows what student-run course at the state university. And he spoke at length on that subject, addressing the audience, never Nino or me directly. In his conclusion, however, he focused first on the old critic who was sitting next to me and then directly on Adele, who was perhaps his true polemical objective from the beginning. I have no argument with the young people, he said, briefly, but with those educated adults who, out of self-interest, are always ready to ride the latest fashion in stupidity. Here at last he was silent, and he prepared to leave with quiet but energetic “Excuse me”s, “May I”s, “thank you”s.

The audience rose to let him pass, hostile and yet deferential. It was utterly clear to me by now that he was an important man, so important that even Adele answered his dark nod of greeting with a cordial Thank you, goodbye. Maybe for that reason Nino surprised everyone a little when, in an imperative and at the same time joking tone, evidence that he was aware who he was dealing with, he called him by the title of professor—Professor, where are you going, don’t run off—and then, thanks to the agility of his long legs, cut off his path, confronted him, spoke to him in that new language of his that I couldn’t really hear from where I was, couldn’t really understand, but that must be like steel cables in a hot sun. The man listened without moving, showing no signs of impatience, and then he made a gesture with his hand that meant move aside, and headed toward the door.

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About the authors

Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante is the author of seven novels, including four New York Times bestsellers; The Beach at Night, an illustrated book for children; and, Frantumaglia, a collection of letters, literary essays, and interviews. Her fiction has been translated into over forty languages and been shortlisted for the MAN Booker International Prize. In 2016 she was named one of TIME’s most influential people of the year and the New York Times has described her as “one of the great novelists of our time.” Ferrante was born in Naples.

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Reviews

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

13,787 global ratings

Charles R. Myers

Charles R. Myers

5

I can't remember when I have been so completely taken with a series of novels as I have been with these beautifully written and

Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2015

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Those Who Leave is the third book in the author's "Neapolitan Novels" (with the fourth, The Story of the Lost Child, scheduled for publication in the U.S. in September 2015) and it is as gripping and enthralling as the first two. The series is set in a somewhat insular neighborhood of Naples. It is now the late 1960s and 1970s and the two main characters, whose friendship constitutes the center of the books, are now somewhat estranged as their lives have grown complicated and divergent. Still living in Naples, Lina has separated from her husband and is raising her young son while Elena has graduated from college and published a novel. But the actually events of the narrative are not the author's primary concern. Rather, it is the internal life of the two characters and how their own idiosyncratic reactions provide a shape to their stories. In addition to drawing complex characters, Ferrante provides a fascinating portrait of the culture of this slice of Italy during rapidly evolving times. Taken together, the novels are both a coming-of-age story and a coming-into-maturity tale of two diverse women who somehow maintain their own complex, and often convoluted, relationship. I can't remember when I have been so completely taken with a series of novels as I have been with these beautifully written and deeply realized stories, and I am having trouble waiting for the final volume. I recommend Those Who Leave and the two previous books in the series with absolutely no reservations.

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2 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Amazon Customer

5

you can't quite figure out why you like it so much

Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2016

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In book one you realize Elena Ferrante is a powerful storyteller with an authentic female voice; something nags at you, you can't quite figure out why you like it so much. Maybe because is seems so personal and brave-- she talks about the things we hide in ourselves. In book two, there is a certain point where you realize how brilliant she is and how subtle and layered that brilliance is; it shines new light on book one. In this book, book three (yes read them all and read in order to see the way she evolves her writing) there is a point where I actually laughed with delight to discover something new about her characters and her writing-- a layer of metaphor and universal pull that further underscored the intelligence she is so comfortable with she never has to let it dominate. Only the story, the characters, the sweep of human emotion dominate is such a gentle way that you find yourself suddenly crying or in awe or gasping-- and you have no idea why, all she is just slowly finds it's way into your soul. When I hear there's a book that a lot of women love, that's sweep the country in sales just on word of mouth, I generally run in the other direction. But when I saw the fourth book on the NYT ten top books of the year, I had to reconsider and am so glad I did. Yes it is a book women will especially love but not because it is light and silly and romantic-- because it is harsh and beautiful and brings life into a city and a friendship in a way we all understand but have never heard expressed in such a bold and completely vulnerable way.

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2 people found this helpful

propertius

propertius

5

Shelve This Series Between Proust And Faulkner

Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2014

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It appears that Elena Ferrante is intent upon surprising her readership constantly not only in the intensity and complexity of her work, but also in the form. It had been anticipated that this book would be the capstone of her Naples trilogy, the other two books being "My Brilliant Friend" and "The Story of a New Name." This is not the case since the ending of this book indulges the reader by indicating that a fourth "Naples volume" is in the making.

This book indicates that her ambition is almost Proustian or Faulknerian in scope for this series. There is the continuation of the tortured relationship between the narrator Elena and her childhood friend Lila and the ebb and flow of all the tributaries that haunt these two, whether it be the old neighborhood, the mangled relationships of old lovers, families, regional disputes etc. Where this volume diverges from the other two is that there is more theoretical talk between Elena, Lila, and Elena's lover and her husband. When a writer has a character talk about the art of writing and the creative process, you should pay close attention to those sections.Yet this novel does not yield an inch to its predecessors in dramatic intensity and I feel that it surpasses them substantially.

Not only is there an intensity but also an urgency conveyed in this book that accelerates to the last chapter which ends with all the force of old Hollywood cliffhangers. However whereas the other two books in this series could almost be read as stand-alone works, this one does require that the reader to have acquainted himself with the at least the second book in the series.

There is a constant sense of wonder in that Ms. Ferrante conveys the "woman's perceptive" or sensibilities throughout the novel without falling into preaching or propagandizing. This is certainly art, after all we do not limit say a Hemingway by saying he writes for men or T S Eliot's "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" is only for shy middle-aged men, we would be doing them and us a disservice. And so it should be for Ferrante. No one can read this book and not come away with a heightened sense of the human condition and one may start thinking of the story of and the relationship of Elena and Lila in the same way with think of Caesar and Cleopatra or Achilles and Hector. It is that great.

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54 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Amazon Customer

5

I enjoyed reading all the four books of Neapolitan novels

Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2015

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Elena Ferrante made me revive trhough her vivid writing the time and the places where I grew up. I enjoyed reading all the four books of Neapolitan novels. I think that she lived trough those novels, then she decided that was time to let her readers disclose that period of very hard time people lived trough it. The emphasis of friendship between Lena and Lila has been the focal point of the many changes that took place in that dilapidated area of Naples. For us Neapolitans having lived during the postwar period, friendship was something sacred to cherish. Ferrante is also telling us that education is very important in order to overcome the emptiness and the ignorance of a past regime had was imposed on our parents.She also describe the struggles and sacrifices the young people had to overcome in a time of have and have not. Lena helpd by her friend Lila made her life in the right way, but Lila as the other girls preferred to follow the life of married women and being provided for what they never had as children. Ferrante ,however, empower Lena's ambition as a writer just like herself.Fiction or Not?....I myself could identify ,as I already said, trough the different stages of these young women of the old neighborhood.I decided to leave and made my life in the USA. Very sad to read the story of the lost child. Ferrante's description of greed and self-destruction, of once content and simple people, now living trough drugs addiction, smuggling goods, abuse of the working class, political dishonesty, camorra, killings,robberies. I've seen all the described changes, visiting throughout the years my relatives and my childhood friends.

decided to leave and take a different path in my life

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5 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Amazon Customer

5

Love These Books!

Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2022

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I saw the series before reading the books and I am so very glad I am reading them! Ferrante is an amazing writer - so much detail & insight, you understand how these character's personalities easily after the first book. I still have the fourth in this series to go & definitely plan on reading her other works as well.

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