Neapolitan Novels


The Neapolitan Novels, also known as the Neapolitan Quartet, are a four-part series of fiction by the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, published originally by Edizioni e/o, translated into English by Ann Goldstein and published by Europa Editions. The English-language titles of the novels are My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child. In the original Italian edition, the whole series bears the title of the first novel L'amica geniale. The series has been characterized as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. In an interview in Harper's Magazine, Elena Ferrante has stated that she considers the four books to be "a single novel" published serially for reasons of length and duration. The series has sold over 10 million copies in 40 countries.
The series follows the lives of two perceptive and intelligent girls, Elena Greco and Raffaella Cerullo, from childhood to adulthood and old age, as they try to create lives for themselves amidst the violent and stultifying culture of their home – a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Italy. The novels are narrated by Elena Greco.
The series was adapted into a two-part play by April De Angelis at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, in March 2017. The Rose production, starring Niamh Cusack and Catherine McCormack, transferred to the Royal National Theatre in November 2019. The series has been adapted into an HBO television series entitled My Brilliant Friend.

Synopsis

''My Brilliant Friend'' (2011)

The series begins in the 1950s in a working-class neighborhood of Naples, where Elena, the narrator, meets Lila. They become best friends as six year-olds, though their relationship is complex and frequently antagonistic. The two remain close into adolescence, their paths diverging as Elena continues her education while Lila, despite her brilliance, goes to work. The novel ends in the midst of Lila's wedding at the age of sixteen.

''The Story of a New Name'' (2012)

In The Story of a New Name, Lila quickly becomes disillusioned with her marriage, and sees herself trapped with a violent man. She also starts an affair, risking her life. Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies beyond what she ever thought would be possible, and explores the world outside of the neighborhood. The two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and a source of strength in the face of life's challenges.

''Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay'' (2013)

Elena and Lila have grown into womanhood. Lila, married at sixteen, now has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts her marriage brought and now works in awful conditions in a factory in Naples. Elena has left the city, earned her college degree, and published a novel, but now finds herself also trapped in a stifling marriage. Both women are pushing against the walls, afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up for women during the 1970s.

''The Story of the Lost Child'' (2014)

Both Lila and Elena once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up. Elena married, moved to Florence with her husband, started a family, and published several well-received novels. In this final novel of the quartet, she returns to Naples to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, meanwhile, has become a successful entrepreneur, but she finds that it only draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood.

Themes

Female friendship

Central themes in the novels include women's friendship and the shaping of women's lives by their social milieu, sexual and intellectual jealousy and competition within female friendships, and female ambivalence about filial and maternal roles and domestic violence. Isabelle Blank wrote about the complex, mirrored relation between the protagonists Lenu and Lila: "Lenù and Lila are foils for one another. Lenù is blonde, studious, eager to please, self-doubting and ambitious, whereas Lila is dark, naturally brilliant, mercurial, mean and irresistible to those around her. The story is told from Lenù's point of view, but the two friends understand one another on such a deep and complex level that the reader is often privy to Lila's perceived inner thoughts."
The tension between Lila and Lenu is often considered the central point of the novels, as Matteo Pericoli wrote for The Paris Review: "From a structural point of view, tension and compression often meld into each another. In this building, two volumes are interwoven by strong connecting rods, extended columns and daring beams, with one of the two seemingly suspended from the other. With its mass and swirled dynamism, the suspended volume seems to be slipping away from the one that is holding it up making it extend and stretch as if it was Lila that was shaping Elena and providing her with her dynamic energy, so vital to any piece of architecture."
Suzanne Berne also wrote about the relation between the pair for the LA Review of Books, commenting on how they are perceived by critics: "Some reviewers see them as two halves of female creativity — the actualized versus the potential — or as inverse sides of the feminine psyche. Others view them as sisters in arms, struggling against the hostility and brutality of a male-dominated culture, or use them to ponder the line between fiction and nonfiction in these clearly autobiographical novels. One reviewer insists they are a Faustian pair, with Lila as the "genius demon." But the real astonishment of this long, digressive, unclassifiable narrative is its portrayal of the dynamic experience of a close female friendship. A friendship, as registered through Elena, that changes page by page, sometimes sentence by sentence. And the question Ferrante finally forced me to ask is how that experience, in fiction, could feel so exalting."
According to The Guardian, this tension goes beyond the relation between Lila and Lenu, encompassing all women in the narrative: "Ferrante's subject – it is almost an obsession – is the way women are shaped, distorted and sometimes destroyed by their social milieu. Voicing what can still seem unvoiceable, she delves into the darker tensions between daughters and mothers, the tug-and-pull of being a wife or a mother and wanting to retain some sense of independent self."

Motherhood and ambivalence

The series was praised for its portrayal of an intelligent young woman who finds motherhood stifling, something not often portrayed, as presented by Roxana Robinson for The New York Times: "She has joined the intelligentsia and is about to marry into the middle class, yet her life is still rife with limitations. Her distinguished husband is narrow-minded and restrictive, and she finds motherhood numbing."

Class struggle

The novels also portray class struggle, especially in the context of Italian factory strikes of the 1970s. Writer Valerie Popp has written on the class portrayal in the novels "So I find that reading Elena Ferrante's work affords me a rare pleasure: the pleasure of recognition. Here in the United States, the working-class dimensions of Ferrante's work tend to get elided, ignored, or attenuated into something charming and "primitive" that the literary coterie—who, for the most part, are middle- or upper-class born—can admire from a distance." The novel was also praised for its social themes, showing the neighborhood's changes under the Camorra's influence, and the struggles during the 70s Lead Years in Italy: "During the struggles of the 1970s between the Communists and the Socialists she turns to politics, only to find that the Camorra rules here too."

''Künstlerroman''

The novel's protagonist being called Elena invited readers to wonder how much her story has in common with the author's. As Katherine Hill writes in the Paris Review: "Most autofiction trades on the understanding that the author is just playing, or just theorizing, and not really revealing herself, but Ferrante's work invites the opposite reading."
The question was posed by reader Paolo Di Stefano to Elena Ferrante in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, "how autobiographical is the story of Elena ?". Ferrante replied, in "her characteristically direct yet elusive manner, 'If by autobiography you mean drawing on one's own experience to feed an invented story, almost entirely. If instead you're asking whether I'm telling my own personal story, not at all'."
In addition, the story of becoming an author is entangled for Lenu with the two previous points: with her friendship with Lila, because it's her goal to compete with the friend, to prove herself worthy, that fuels her writing. And with class struggle because writing a successful novel was how the two of them dreamed, as little girls, of making money and escaping the neighborhood, and, in fact, how Lenu finally achieves that.

Naples

According to Sarah Begley, writing for Time magazine, the city of Naples itself is one of the main characters of the book, "portrayed in gritty detail throughout the novels." The city is portrayed in the novels as a place of violence, poverty and social unrest. Rutgers University Associate Professor Paola Gambarota has linked this portrayal of Naples to the issues the city experienced after being bombed during World War II. Ferrante portrays well known issues, such as the black markets and the rising influence of the Camorra. Gambarota writes that, "the socioeconomic situation in Naples...was worse than anywhere else" and that education was a luxury.

"Southern Question"

Another theme always present in the novel is the difference between the South and the North of Italy, and the prejudice suffered by people from the South. This is more often portrayed through the character of Elena, who goes to study and live in the North. As Pasha Malla wrote for Slate: "She never fully identifies with Naples and its brutality, yet she remains an impostor among refined Northerners, 'the daughter of the porter with the dialect cadence of the South,' who is only 'playing the part of the cultured writer'."

Reception

In 2019, The Guardian ranked My Brilliant Friend the 11th best book since 2000. The overall series was also listed in Vulture as one of the 12 "New Classics" since 2000. In 2024, the New York Times ranked the series' first installment "My Brilliant Friend" as the best book of the 21st century.
Elissa Schappel, writing for Vanity Fair, reviewed the last book of the Quartet as "This is Ferrante at the height of her brilliance." Roger Cohen wrote for the The [New York Review of Books|New York Review of Books]: "The interacting qualities of the two women are central to the quartet, which is at once introspective and sweeping, personal and political, covering the more than six decades of the two women's lives and the way those lives intersect with Italy's upheavals, from the revolutionary violence of the leftist Red Brigades to radical feminism."
In The Guardian, it was noted the growing popularity of Ferrante, especially among writers: "Partly because her work describes domestic experiences – such as vivid sexual jealousy and other forms of shame – that are underexplored in fiction, Ferrante's reputation is soaring, especially among women ".
Darrin Franich has called the novels the series of the decade, saying: "The Neapolitan Novels are the series of the decade because they are so clearly of this decade: conflicted, revisionist, desperate, hopeful, revolutionary, euphorically feminine even in the face of assaultive male corrosion."
Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic, praised particularly how the books circle back to its start, to Lila and Lenu's childhood games, in the final installment. Maureen Corregan has also praised the ending of the novels, calling it "Perfect Devastation".

Awards

Book covers

The book covers of the Neapolitan Quartet have long been criticized for their kitschness. Emily Harnett wrote for The Atlantic: "On Twitter and beyond, readers have described Ferrante's covers as "horrible," "atrocious," "utterly hideous," and as a "disservice" to her novels." The publishers have however defended the choice in an interview to Slate, claiming that "We also had the feeling that many people didn't understand the game we were playing, that of, let's say, dressing an extremely refined story with a touch of vulgarity."

Characters

Greco family

  • Elena Greco
  • * two daughters, Adele and Elsa Airota, by husband Pietro Airota
  • * one illegitimate daughter, Immacolata "Imma" Sarratore, by a later affair with Nino Sarratore
  • Vittorio Greco
  • Immacolata Greco
  • Peppe, Gianni, and Elisa Greco

Cerullo family

  • Raffaella Cerullo
  • * one son, Gennaro, by husband Stefano Carracci
  • * one illegitimate daughter, Nunzia "Tina" Scanno, by Enzo Scanno
  • Fernando Cerullo
  • Nunzia Cerullo
  • Rino Cerullo
  • several unnamed younger siblings of Rino and Lila

Sarratore family

  • Donato Sarratore
  • Lidia Sarratore
  • Nino Sarratore
  • * One illegitimate son, Mirko, with Silvia a university activist
  • * One son, Albertino Sarratore with wife Eleonora
  • * One daughter, Lidia Sarratore, by Eleonora
  • * One illegitimate daughter, Immacolata "Imma" Sarratore, by a later affair with Elena Greco
  • Marisa Sarratore
  • Pino, Clelia, and Ciro Sarratore

Carracci family

  • Don Achille Carracci
  • Maria Carracci
  • Stefano Carracci
  • * one daughter, Maria Carracci, by a later affair with Ada Cappuccio
  • Pinuccia Carracci
  • Alfonso Carracci

Solara family

  • Silvio Solara
  • Manuela Solara
  • Marcello Solara
  • * son, Silvio Solara, by a relationship with Elisa Greco
  • Michele Solara
  • * unnamed sons with wife Gigliola Spagnuolo
  • * two children, by a later affair with Marisa Sarratore

Spagnuolo family

  • Gigliola Spagnuolo
  • Signor Spagnuolo
  • Rosa Spagnuolo
  • Gigliola's younger brother

Peluso family

  • Pasquale Peluso
  • Carmela Peluso
  • Alfredo Peluso, their father
  • Giuseppina Peluso

Scanno family

  • Nicola Scanno
  • Assunta Scanno
  • Enzo Scanno
  • other children

Cappuccio family

  • The late father Cappuccio
  • Melina Cappuccio
  • Antonio Cappuccio
  • Ada Cappuccio
  • other children

Airota family

  • Guido Airota
  • Adele Airota
  • Mariarosa Airota
  • Pietro Airota

Teachers

  • Maestro Ferraro
  • Maestra Oliviero,
  • * Nella Incardo,
  • Professor Gerace
  • Professor Galiani, high-school teacher.
  • * Nadia Galiani
  • * Armando Galiani
  • ** Has a son named Marco with wife Isabella

Other characters

  • Gino
  • Bruno Soccavo
  • Franco Mari
  • Silvia
  • * Mirko, her son by Nino Sarratore

Adaptations

My Brilliant Friend, a two-part, five-and-a-half-hour stage adaptation of the Neapolitan Novels, opened at the Rose Theatre, Kingston in March 2017. The play was adapted by April De Angelis, directed by Melly Still, and starred Niamh Cusack as Lenu and Catherine McCormack as Lila.
A 32-part television series, The Neapolitan Novels, is also in the works and will be co-produced by the Italian producer Wildside for Fandango Productions, with screenwriting led by the writer Francesco Piccolo. On 30 March 2017, it was announced that HBO and RAI would broadcast the first eight episodes which are an adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, the first of the four Neapolitan Novels, and they premiered on HBO on 18 November 2018.
The series was also adapted for radio, produced by Pier for BBC Radio 4 and first broadcast in July 2016.