Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: Neapolitan Novels, Book Three

By Elena Ferrante

Soon to be an HBO series, book three in the New York Times bestselling Neapolitan quartet about two friends in post-war Italy is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted epic by one of today's most beloved and acclaimed writers, Elena Ferrante, “one of the great novelists of our time.” (Roxana Robinson, The New York Times)

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 opportunities that opened up during the nineteen-seventies. Yet they are still very much bound to each other by a strong, unbreakable bond.

Ferrante is one of the world’s great storytellers. With the Neapolitan quartet she has given her readers an abundant, generous, and masterfully plotted page-turner that is also a stylish work of literary fiction destined to delight readers for many generations to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Sep 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781609452230

Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), and The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), now a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, and Jessie Buckley. She is also the author of Incidental Inventions(Europa, 2019), illustrated by Andrea Ucini; Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (Europa, 2016); and a children’s picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night (Europa, 2016). The four volumes known as the “Neapolitan novels” (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child) were published by Europa Editions in English between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018 and is in its third season. Ferrante’s most recent novel is the instant New York Times bestseller, The Lying Life of Adults (Europa, 2020).

Reviews for Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

[sarahebear · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The third book in the Neapolitan quartet continues on where the story left off. The woman are now in their early twenties and are dealing with marital issues, child rearing, career development and most importantly trying to find their place in the world. Our protagonist has left Naples for greener pastures, but is constantly drawn back into her past. This is a wonderful examination of the socio-economic issues during the later 50s and 60s in post-war Italy as well as a gripping tale of friendship, love and loss.

[starbox_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Lina, when we were children dazzled us both...You ended up attributing to her capacities that are only yours"By sally tarbox on 16 January 2017Format: Kindle EditionYou know you're enjoying a read when you get through two volumes, each of 400+ pages, in four days!This continuation of the story of the two friends, Lila and Elena, takes us through the late 60s and early 70s, against a world of protests and militancy. Having left her husband, Lila now lives - platonically- with old friend Enzo. While she labours in a gruesome salami factory, Enzo also works and studies computers into the night... Elena has enjoyed celebrity with her first book and is engaged to be married....These books work because the characters are so believable, their uncertainties, difficult relationships, jealousies make them totally 3 dimensional and real. The friendship between the two women is complex: on the one hand she goes to great effort to help Lila when she falls ill (or is she just glorifying in her new-found wealth and power?); on the other, she withholds things from her, and even wishes her dead.This volume ends on a cliffhanger...needless to say I've ordered the final volume!

[narshkite · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ferrante continues to dazzle me with her plain-spoken prose and the depth of her understanding of the characters and motivators of such a varied group of people. Perhaps most gripping is the examination of the ways in which societal strictures on women limit not just the accomplishments and choices of those women, but of the men around them. I am sunk so deep into these characters that I think my heart will break when I finish the series.

[creighley_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Lila married at 16 now has a son, has left her marriage and it’s advantages, and works as a common laborer in horrendous conditions. Elena has left the neighborhood, graduated from college, and has published a successful novel opening a new world to her. Both women fight against a world of oppression amidst a time of great opportunities that were opening for women during the seventies.

[gayla.bassham · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In the end, I think I liked the idea of this trilogy more than I liked the books themselves.

[imperfectcj · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Another wonderful Neapolitan Novel! I really related to the issues of identity Elena addresses in this one. So glad I have #4 already and can start on it right away!

[mbmackay · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Still enjoying the series, and still enjoying the characters and the environments (especially the social environment) painted by Ms Ferrante, but starting to wince at some of the plot development.I find myself knowing, in rough terms, what is about to happen, and where I don't like the anticipated content, I find myself putting the book aside for a while - hours, sometimes days.But, I enjoyed finishing the book and am absolutely signed up for the final volume.Read Sept 2016.

[jolynne-4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

novels keep getting better and better

[lit_chick_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

2015, Blackstone Audiobooks, Read by Hillary HuberIn this third Neapolitan novel, Elena and Lila have become women. Lila, who married at sixteen, has a son. But she has left her abusive marriage and is reduced to working as a common labourer. But, as always with Lila, I predict that her fortunes will change again. Elena has long since left Naples, earned her degree, and published a successful novel, which has opened doors for her to the academic world and richly furnished salons. She marries a professor with whom she will have two little girls. For the greater part of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the friends are apart. And yet when Lila is unwell and calls for Elena, her friend is by her side without hesitation. Still, the relationship is an odd one: the balance of power has never been equal. I am beginning to wonder about Elena’s take on the friendship, which, because she is the novel’s sole narrator, we only ever perceive through her eyes. Anyhow, in spite of how she loves her friend, Lenù says this of her:“With her, there was no way to feel that things were settled; every fixed point of our relationship sooner or later turned out to be provisional; something shifted in her head that unbalanced her and unbalanced me. I couldn’t understand if those words were in fact intended to apologize to me, or if she was lying, concealing feelings that she had no intention of confiding to me, or if she was aiming at a final farewell. Certainly she was false, and she was ungrateful, and I, in spite of all that had changed for me, continued to feel inferior ... For years after that, we didn’t see each other, we only talked on the phone. We became for each other fragments of a voice, without any visual corroboration. But the wish that she would die remained in a far corner, I tried to get rid of it but it wouldn’t go away.” (Ch 60)Ferrante continues to do a marvelous job of this series. I’ve read listened the novels consecutively and look forward to the final installment. Narrator Hillary Huber is wonderful! One final observation on Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: what on earth do these women see in Nino Sarratore? Brilliant he may be, but I find him small: a user and a manipulator. And, yes, I’m fully aware that it takes great literature to extract such an emotional response!

[shazjhb · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I did not love this book as much as the other two. It seemed somewhat predictable which was annoying. The friends seemed to have lost their selves in this book. Hopefully it ends on a high note in book 4.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay continues the story of the lifelong friendship between Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo. In this third book in the series, the women are in their mid- to late-twenties and their lives have diverged. Lila works in a factory in Naples, and Elena is a published author who has married and moved away from her hometown. She visits only occasionally and finds her visits difficult and emotionally draining. During the late 1960s/early 1970s, Italy was rife with political unrest and terrorism. Lila somewhat unwittingly gets caught up in labor issues at the factory, which ultimately lead to violence. The Solara family, who controlled much of Elena and Lila’s old neighborhood during their youth, becomes even more powerful and Elena finds that even though she moved away, she is not completely free from their influence. Elena also struggles against the societal forces that hold women back. Throughout this novel, whenever one character experiences a high point socially, romantically, economically, or intellectually, the other is at a low. Occasionally they support each other but more often than not the situation only serves to highlight their differences.Eventually, it becomes clear that Elena’s storybook marriage to a promising young academic is just as unsuccessful as Lila’s marriage, much earlier, to a working-class shopkeeper. And just at that point, Nino Sarratore re-enters her life. The book ends on a cliffhanger that lends new meaning to the title. Although I will be sad when this series comes to an end, I can’t wait to read the last book.

[juliestielstra · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I'll be honest: I didn't finish it. I liked the first two of her Neapolitan series a lot, and stuck with this one as long as I could. But finally I decided I didn't want to be around these people any more. I got tired of them, of their miseries and cruelties. The women are trapped, the men (well, almost all of them) are boors or thugs. Absolutely no one loves anyone in any kind of generous, kind way: it's all about desire and possession and subjugation. The sex ranges from just joyless to brutal. The boy-now-man that the narrator Elena has been mooning over for two and a half volumes and many years is a jerk, so even if she gets together with him, I won't like it. The mothers can barely even stand their own kids. The complexity has ceased to be personal, emotional, or developmental... it's all just plot now, with the same cast going through the same wringer. Tedious.

[mjlivi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's increasingly hard to figure out how to rate these books - the series is so engrossing and all encompassing that they all feel essential. In this, the third in the series, Lina and Lenu's friendship continues to fray as the political situation in Italy explodes into violence. These are such rich books that it's impossibly to summarise what they're about - class, feminism, friendship, politics, love, creativity and on and on and on. Ferrante is a marvel.

[crazeedi73 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This series will get under your skin and stay there. I can't wait to read the 4th book. Highly recommend

[janeajones · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I found Ferrante's quartet a sophisticated and psychologically elegant Bildungsroman of two women whose lives are inextricably entwined for over 60 years beginning with their childhood in the 1950s. In an act of love (or, perhaps revenge), Elena Greco sits down to write the life story of Lila Cerullo, who has disappeared. Lila is overdoing it as usual, I thought.She was expanding the concept of trace out of all proportion. She wanted not only to disappear herself, now, at the age of sixty-six, but also to eliminate the entire life that she had left behind.I was really angry.We'll see who wins this time, I said to myself. I turned on the computer and began to write -- all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory.The poor, working-class neighborhood in Naples in which the girls grew up, one rife with corruption and nearly incestuous family ties, is a kind of collective antagonist to Lila and Elena's struggle to survive and succeed in the tumultuous last half of the 20th century. Ferrante plays with warring philosophies and ideologies, class conflict, Italian politics, the student and worker protests of the the 1960s and 70s, the sexual revolution, the rise of feminism, the sea-change in economy and work brought about by the introduction of computers as integral aspects of the friendship and competition between Lila and Elena. The reader sympathizes first with one, and then the other, but rarely both at the same time, as their lives follow very different paths, yet remain tangled together.Ferrante's Neapolitan series is a great read, and I expect the ideas and memories generated will remain with me for a long time.

[samsattler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I recently completed The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth (and final) book in what has become known as the purposely-mysterious Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Series. The books explore the decades long friendship between two Italian women who met as children in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Naples. My Brilliant Friend, first published in 2012, seemed to come from nowhere as it became a 2015 bestseller in, I suppose, anticipation of the publication later in the year of the fourth book in the series, The Story of the Lost Child. Between these two came 2013’s The Story of a New Name and 2014’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.With the exception of a few brief moments in the books during which Elena, the book’s narrator, addresses the reader about her current feelings regarding her old friend Lila, the books offer a chronologically linear progression of the pair’s more than fifty-year relationship. Seldom has a relationship between literary characters been more deeply explored than this one. Each book in the series comes in at around 400 pages, but the Neapolitan Series is easier to read than one might imagine. My Brilliant Friend, beginning as it does (after a brief word from the sixtyish Elena) when its two chief characters are preschoolers, is both charming and intriguing - and when it ends, some four hundred or so pages later, most readers will want to know more. And Elena Ferrante has a lot more to say about Elena, Lila, their working class families, their friends, their lovers, their children, and the lives the two little girls will live during the next six decades. Bottom line, this is a fictional study of the kind of longtime friendship that can shape – for good or for bad - a person’s entire life. Even as children, Elena and Lila recognized in each other the best that their neighborhood had to offer. They were among the very brightest in their local school, they were often the most adventurous, and neither was much willing to put up with the foolishness of those around them. They simply could not imagine staying in the neighborhood forever, and they looked forward to the time when they could finally begin living their real lives.It would not, however, be easy for either of them to make their escape from the neighborhood. Elena and Lila were, as it turns out, as much rivals as they were friends. At times, it can even be said that they were more rival than friend to each other. Their competitiveness drove each of them to achieve more than likely would have been possible if they had never met, but it may have been at too great a cost for them to enjoy what they achieved. Only they can answer that question.Elena and Lila are two of the most memorable characters I have encountered in a long time, and their often-tragic relationship leaves the reader with a lot to ponder about life, fate, and trying to go home again after living in a bigger world.

[patsymurray · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a well-crafted novel whose attraction lies in the deft characterization of the two women at its center: Lila and Elena. Through Elena's narration, the reader can feel the forces at work in their lives. Family, friends, feminism and politics press in on them, insisting that they take up a position, hold an opinion, do something when what Lila and Elena are truly seeking is simply a way through life that will allow them to be safe, productive and happy. In their effort to find their path, they fight, make mistakes, and mistrust one another and those around them. This, to me, was the most intriguing question asked in the book: how do you know if what you feel, what you think is the right thing to feel and think? The book ends with Elena taking a decisive step that will redefine her life, but is it the right step?A word about the series: I read this, the third book, first. Once you get grounded in the names (and there's a glossary to help), you don't need to have read the first two books to follow the story. Now, though, I am going to read the first book, despite wanting terribly to read the fourth to find out what happened!

[snash_44 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Third in series. Engrossing story of the early adulthood of the two friends.

[bobbieharv · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Enjoyed this just slightly less than the first two because of the politics of the sausage factory. But the ending ... Can't wait to read the last one.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a difficult book to review, both because it is the third of a four book series, and because I sped through it, not so much that I needed to find out what happened next, but because I was enjoying it too much to stop reading. And, having inhaled Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, I now feel that I consumed it too quickly to have given it the attention that [[Elena Ferrante]]’s novel deserved. [Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay] continues the story of Lila and Lena, although their life circumstances and the nature of their relationship has kept them largely apart. While Lena continues on as a university graduate and author, Lila can’t continue in her role as the wife of a man she hates. Both come face to face with the changes beginning to sweep Italy, Lena through contact with student activism and Lila seeing the need for workers to unionize and in the clashes between communists and fascists. I don’t know how successful this book would be without the two that came before, but each segment of the larger story is more compelling than the last. I’m planning on reading the final book, [The Story of the Lost Child], as soon as it's released in English in September.

[laura400 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Every bit as good as My Brilliant Friend, this third installment of the story recaptures the first installment's propulsive pace while chiseling further to bring out the themes and preoccupations of the work as a whole.It's really an extraordinary achievement, illuminating, excoriating and brutally honest. It's historical, and political and feminist. It's bracing. It's revelatory. It's as detailed and specific about its world as it is universal.I haven't yet read My Struggle, but I feel that this must be the counterpart to that.

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I didn't review this when I read it...guess I wanted to finish the four novels in the series before committing myself....and now it's too late as I don't really recall each novel individually! However, I remember enjoyed each one and found the entire series well worth reading.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Life is full of entanglements. And when two lives are as entangled as those of the protagonists of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels it becomes a moot point as to who it is that really leaves and who remains. Elena Greco has found literary success with the publication of her first novel, as well as a certain notoriety, and an enduring confidence in her power to effect change — she thinks it is positive change — in the lives of those dear to her. Her counterpart, Lila Cerullo, has found obscurity and destitution after a failed marriage, a failed love affair, and an unwanted birth. Yet, as ever, it is Lila and not Elena who seems to be in control of her own destiny. Even Elena’s marriage to a well-connected but dull academic and her new life in Florence cannot free her from the suspicion that far from escaping the mire that is her childhood neighbourhood in Naples, she is ever at risk of sinking back into petty jealousies and crude emotions that suffocated her in her youth.The contrast between Lila and Elena is both sharper in this third novel in the series as it is more subtle. Elena is full of high politics and ideas about the class struggle, while Lila is being abused and maltreated by voracious overlords in a dismal Neapolitan factory. Elena has access to the power of the press and highly placed friends, but Lila knows that real power still lies at the sharp end of a knife. Elena is frustrated by her inability to help Lila in any meaningful way. Lila, on the other hand, desires only that Elena live the life of integrity that would somehow, in its purity, redeem Lila’s sorry and sordid present condition. But for Ferrante, all contrasts are at best momentary and reversal after reversal consistently inverts expectation and interpretation. The effect is bewildering.At times this third novel can feel cerebral, almost passionless, as Elena self-consciously narrates the raising of her own consciousness. Have we strayed into the politics of the personal? Perhaps. But the real has its own demands and Elena’s suppression of her own passionate nature has repercussions, unlooked for but perhaps not unexpected. By the end of the novel, Elena is literally taking flight for the first time (a journey from Rome to Montpellier, in France) even as, she can’t help noticing, the floor under her feet trembles.I remain riveted. And somewhat in awe of Ferrante’s skill at juggling huge political themes whilst rooting everything in the clinging mud of that Neapolitan neighbourhood from whence Elena and Lila sprang. Who knows what might yet flower in the remaining books in this series? I, for one, can hardly wait to read on.

[breic-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Book two in this series was quite a disappointment after being swept away by book one. Yes, the characters were teenagers, but still. So melodramatic! This book, #3, was much stronger. The characters grow a lot, and the plot is compelling. I should ration out book four, but it won't be easy.

[asxz-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Remarkable. These books have been so alien and yet so compelling. What could there possibly be in these soapy, dramatic fictions laced with political turmoil and both political and domestic violence set in and away from Naples in the 50s and 60s that is so mesmerizing? This third volume was as inexplicably delicious as the previous two. Only one more to go.

[joecanas_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

4.5 stars. Very good, but just shy of the coveted "perfect" rating. I'm already into book four, so may need to adjust my ratings across the four volumes once I'm done.

[lkernagh · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Turbulent – and sporadic – are good terms to describe the ongoing friendship between Elena and Lila, and the overall impressions of this installment. The story follows their very separate lives during the upheaval, both social and political, of 1960s / 1970s Italy, fueled by struggles between Fascist and Communist factions, along with other societal changes. Against this backdrop the story is really a whole lot of minutiae I wasn’t particularly interested in and I found myself feeling let down with the story. An overall feeling of melancholy continues to permeate the series, due, I believe in a large part to the excessive amount of navel-gazing on the part of Elena. I find it disturbing that while Lila and Elena are now adults - with adult responsibilities - they both seem to have tendencies to revert to the (petulant for Elana and antagonistic for Lila) self-absorption of their adolescence. Yes, Elena does discover feminism and Lila become a what some might classify as a working-class hero by exposing the deplorable work conditions of a sausage factory, but I am actually growing weary of both characters. Neither one appeals to me. So, why do I keep reading? In part, because I like the frank honesty with which Ferrante writes. She tells the story without having to delve into melodrama. Lila and Elena’s friendship is not rock solid, but there is something elusive that keep them connected. It is not the BFF one encounters in other books. If anything, the friendship is tenuous at best, waxing and waning between tensions of hostility and tenderness. It is the examination of this friendship as the two travel through life that continues to hold my interest. Maybe it is the familiarity I have developed for the characters... kind of like the neighbours that you really don't want to associate with but still cannot help observe their comings and goings.

[widsith_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In this book Lenù grows up, and suddenly Ferrante's meandering internal monologues swing into orbit around the twin poles of SEX and POLITICS. Perhaps this is why I found it more successful than the first two – the experiences of 60s student politics, the fight for workers' rights, Elena's gradual feminist awakening, all embed the neighbourhood of the earlier novels satisfyingly into a larger context, while her tangled relationships seemed more meaningful to me than the stuff she was worrying about as a teenager. Or maybe I am just enjoying Ferrante's style more now.Her technique depends, I think, on a talent for generating frustration in the reader. When Elena gets involved with the wrong guys, she does not, as in some other writers, describe it by means of a lot of tortured expressions of regret and confusion. There's no justifications like I knew he was a dick, but I just couldn't help myself. Instead she just tells you what she did, and it's left to you as a reader to scream mutely at the page.Such outbursts tend to revolve around the presence of Nino Sarratore. ‘Oh, this dickhead again,’ you mutter whenever he appears – but Elena, who's now engaged to a nice professor, loses her fucking mind every time he slouches into her life. ‘Even as I was holding [my fiancé's] hand, even as I was affirming that I wanted to marry him, I knew clearly that if he hadn't appeared that night at the restaurant I would have tried to sleep with Nino.’ This despite the fact that he seems to do little but waltz around ‘sowing children’, as she puts it, among her friends and acquaintances.I realized that precisely because all women wanted him and he took them all, I who had wanted him forever wanted him even more.This is getting close to a lit-fic treatment of the kind of dynamic that gets posted to erotic fiction websites, tagged alpha-male, harem, cheating, breeding-fetish. At least she is finally getting some decent sex, though, which didn't seem to be much in evidence from past boyfriends, or indeed from her new marriage (an institution which, she says coolly, ‘stripped coitus of all humanity’). She behaves extremely badly, but as a narrator, Elena's willingness to show herself as dislikable, without offering any excuses, charmed me.It also clashes interestingly with her growing status, in the novel, as a feminist icon. In fact the disparity between her reputation and her behaviour is so glaring that Ferrante is almost playing it for comic effect, no less so because Elena's feelings on the status of women are deeply felt, and grounded in a lived experience that we, as readers, have been following for nearly a thousand pages. Her instinctive sense for injustice runs up against her pragmatic frustration with the earnestness of political activism, in a way that probably feels familiar to many people.It seemed to me I knew well enough what it meant to be female, I wasn't interested in the work of consciousness-raising.It's in this new swirl of intellectual stimulation that Lenù re-examines her relationship with Lina, through lenses both political (Lina as working-class revolutionary) and psycho-erotic (‘With difficulty I reached the point of asking myself: had she and I ever touched each other?’). And so all this book's many strange and wonderful tangents only serve, in the end, to add further facets and layers and accretions to that central relationship – which is still, somehow, as mysterious as it's ever been.

[markus.bauer · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Italienische Soap, wie italienisches TV, schrill, kitschig, viel Drama und Spektakel, lest Elsa Morante!

[miss.mesmerized · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Italien, 1970er Jahre. Elena Grecos Buch wird ein großer Erfolg in Italien, selbst im Rione hat man es gelesen und die Leute schwanken zwischen Bewunderung und Ablehnung ob der für ihr Empfinden expliziten Szenen. Nur Lila will der Freundin keine Anerkennung zollen. Sie ist jedoch auch zu sehr mit dem eigenen Überleben beschäftigt, nachdem sie sich von ihrem Mann getrennt hat und in einer Wurstfabrik schuftet. Die Strömungen der Zeit machen auch vor Neapel nicht Halt und die Gewerkschaften werden zunehmend stärker. Lila liefert ihnen Futter und bringt sich damit in höchste Gefahr. Auch Elena lässt sich von der Kampfeslust anstecken und schreibt erfolgreich über die Ausbeutung und schlechte Behandlung der Arbeiter, doch schon kurz nach ihrer Hochzeit mit Pietro ändert sich ihr Leben vollends: ungewollt schwanger wird sie mehr und mehr in das Leben einer Hausfrau und Mutter gedrängt, das an ihren Nerven zerrt und sie vom Schreiben abhält. Während ihrerseits Lila nun ihre Karriere als Programmiererin vorantreibt, geht Elenas Stern langsam unter. Der Rione versinkt im Chaos von Gewalt und Korruption, keine Familie kann sich dem Supf entziehen, nur Elena bleibt fernab der Heimat Zaungast. Und plötzlich tut sich die Chance zum Ausbruch aus dem inzwischen verhassten Leben auf.Elena Ferrantes Saga um die beiden Kindheitsfreundinnen geht mit Band drei weiter. Aus den beiden Mädchen sind erwachsene Frauen und Mütter geworden. Das Leben schenkt keiner von ihnen etwas. Beide haben unterschiedliche Kämpfe auszutragen und es scheint fast, als sei ihr Schicksal aneinandergeknüpft: geht es bei der einen bergauf, geht es mit der anderen bergab, bis das Rad der Zeit sich weiterdreht und die Verhältnisse wieder umkehrt. Immer noch besteht zwischen ihnen eine Art Hass-Liebe: sie unterstützen sich und sie bekämpfen sich. Keine kann sich von der anderen lösen, argwöhnisch beäugen sie sich gegenseitig und geradezu gehässig schlagen sie immer wieder zu und verletzten sich gegenseitig. Es ist vor allem die Faszination der Erzählerin für ihre Freundin, die einen gewissen Reiz ausmacht und man versteht, weshalb diese nun erwachsene Frau, die immer noch so bösartig und hinterhältig sein kann, wie man sie als Kind bereits erlebt hat, sie nicht loslässt. Auch andere Figuren spüren das Unbegreifliche an Lila, „das zugleich verführte und beunruhigte, die Kraft einer Sirene.“ (S. 169). Alle verfallen ihrem Charme eher oder später und bezahlen für die Zuneigung, die sie ihr entgegenbringen. Auch Pietro ist nicht gefeit davor, versucht sich jedoch durch seine distanzierte Analyse davor zu schützen, was auch ihm nur mäßig gelingt.In diesem Band fand ich neben der geradezu bizarren Freundschaft der beiden vor allem Elenas Loslösung von der Familie interessant. Sie heiratete in eine andere Welt, lebt fernab von Neapel und bekommt von den Alltagssorgen nichts mit. Sie eilt jedoch immer wieder nach Hause, wenn erforderlich, nur um dort auf Ablehnung zu stoßen: sie gehört nicht mehr dazu, sie versteht ihre eigene Familie nicht mehr und kann vor allem nicht nachvollziehen, wie sich die Strukturen wandeln. Hier greift die Autorin geschickt die politischen Entwicklungen und vor allem das Erstarken der Mafia auf, das immer nur am Rande thematisiert wird. So wie man vor Ort niemals darüber sprechen kann, wird dies auch im Buch nicht offen thematisiert. Elena erfährt immer nur am Telefon von den Morden und den möglichen Verdächtigen, nie ist sie präsent, die Taten bleiben an der Peripherie. Der Schreibstil Elena Ferrantes ist unverkennbar und knüpft nahtlos an den Vorgängerband an. Die Seiten fliegen einmal mehr nur so dahin und wie gewohnt bleibt auch am Ende ein großes Fragezeichen bezüglich der Zukunft der Figuren. Man darf auf den Abschluss der Reihe gespannt sein.