The Story of a New Name: A Novel (Neapolitan Novels, 2) Paperback – September 3, 2013

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.

I'm fully engaged in this series, and I'll read them all. This is number 2 of 4. I'm now on number 3. I'm so engaged I don't have the distance to say if they are brilliantly written -- it is not writing that draws attention to itself, which can be a very good thing. But the main reason one doesn't notice the craft is that the characters and the evocation of a place (the poor end of Naples) and an era (50s-60s so far) are wonderful. The two main characters, poor girls who grow up to very different fates, are heart rending, lovable, infuriating, insightful and obtuse, admirable and badly-behaved: like real people. The supporting cast -- the kids from the neighbourhood with limited horizons and prospects, the parents generation that suffered in the War and struggles to get by, the petit (and not so petit) intelligentsia that the narrator encounters as she gradually escapes the neighbourhood's gravity -- are a world of real life. The book has a feminist sensibility -- in what and how it observes -- without being "about" feminism or gender inequality per se. I'd highly recommend the series to any reader.

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.

Both books in great shape but absolutelytoo hard to read. Telling of stories is laborious and so much detail and so many characters. I just did not enjoy the first and didn’t start the second. Will donate