Elena Ferrante: The Furies & Visceral Pleasures of Italy's Greatest Living Novelist - Westwood In-Person
F 2021

Please dive in and join us in our highly provocative SDG using the last two Ferrante novels as our core books. Once you start reading the story, you’re hooked as in paraphrase of the old Lays Potato chip ad: bet you can’t eat read just one. However, attending Part 1 is NOT necessary to understand the story. The story begins in postwar Southern Italy. Elena Ferrante's novels explore the discordant yet loving trajectories of two female friends from childhood to adulthood. This story gained such widespread international acclaim that HBO bought the rights to these books and turned them into one of the most highly watched series in HBO history. Ferrante is that rarest of authors—one who is equally adept at depicting both sides of the romance and not-so-romantic transactions between men and women. 

According to the Los Angeles Review of Books each of the Ferrante books should be not read but “devoured”: Ferrante’s novels — My Brilliant Friend (2011), The Story of a New Name (2012), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013), and The Story of the Lost Child (2014) — are often described as “a tale of female friendship,” but that’s  like describing The Beatles as “a band with many hits.”

The four-part saga is so much more than that. It’s the story of Naples as it crawls its way back from the ruins of World War II. It’s an epic of Italian feminism. It’s a sociological study on violence, poverty, and gender — and the vicious cycle that connects all three. I invite all Plato members to join this SDG, reading the first two books is NOT necessary to understand the story. This SDG covers the final half of the Neapolitan Quartet, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child.

The New Yorker review loudly proclaims:

“…the sensation...a hungry, relentless urge to keep

going, the same feeling that drives you to borrow all

someone’s clothes, or pinch them as hard as you can

when they don’t understand you. Ferrante shows us

the friction that generates human heat—she reminds

us what the experience of liking is like.”

Ferrante's gift, one critic argues, is her "unflinching

willingness to lead us toward 'the mutable fury of

things'" —in particular, toward the passion and

bitterness between women and men, and women and

women. Ferrante's novels explore the recesses and

limits of intimacy: "How many words," one of her

heroine's asks, "remain unsayable even between a

couple in love?"

1. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013), pp. 23 - 89

2. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, pp. 89 - 154

3. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, pp. 154 - 222

4. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, pp. 222- 288

5. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, pp. 288 - 353

6. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, pp. 353 - 418

7. The Story of the Lost Child  (2014), pp. 23 - 80

8. The Story of the Lost Child, pp. 80- 134

9. The Story of the Lost Child, pp. 134 - 191

10. The Story of the Lost Child, pp. 191- 247

11. The Story of the Lost Child, pp. 247- 302

12. The Story of the Lost Child, pp. 302 – 360

13. The Story of the Lost Child, pp. 360 - 418

14. The Story of the Lost Child, pp. 418 - 473

The HBO series My Brilliant Friend, provides two seasons that correspond with the first two books in the Neoplototine Quartet. We may want to draw on this for reference or in order to catch up, for those that need it.

Watch the official Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2Yk8xJkMKQ

For rabid devotees such as myself, I recommend The Days of Abandonment (2005). At 188 pages, this is a short novel in which Ferrante lays out her major themes in her mature style. Her husband, also a widely successful Italian writer, penned the book Ties (2017), which is the flip side of The Days of Abandonment, see this New York Times article  see this New York Times article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/books/review/ties-domenico-starnone-jhumpa-lahiri.html

Bibliography: 

Core Books

1. Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013) Europa Editions, Edizioni E/O, 473pp

2. Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child  (2014) Europa Editions, Edizioni E/O, 418pp

Recommended Readings

In addition to the novels listed above, here are a few readings (one by Ferrante herself) that are worth looking at:

Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journal (2017), 400 pp.

Sarah Chihaya et al., The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. Columbia University Press, 2020.

Rachel Vorona Cote,"In 'My Brilliant Friend,' Companionship and Survival Are Forever Linked," Bitchmedia (February 1, 2019).

James Wood, "Women on the Verge," New Yorker (January 14, 2013).