Review: Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay

The third novel in Elena Ferante’s Neapolitan novels picks up where the second left off. Precocious narrator Elena has just had her first book published, a novel, and at a publicity event in Milan her young love Nino has appeared. Elena is engaged to young professor Pietro Airota. The novel charts the course of this relationship, her marriage and children, as she wrestles with what she is going to do with her life, fuelled by the nascent second wave feminist movement: housewife, or something more?

Meanwhile her double Lila Cerullo is still at work at the sausage factory back in Naples, where she has sought refuge from her disastrous marriage. At the factory, she becomes embroiled in the politics of the decade, as fascists, unionists and communists fight it out on the stoop of the factory for control of the narrative and soul of the nation.

The story is still being told by an older Elena, in her sixties, as we build towards the disappearance of Lila that began the series. In this novel, Elena starts with a memory of a meeting with Lila five years earlier, where they found one of their childhood friends, Gigliola, dead in a garden bed in the neighbourhood where they grew up. It’s a poignant episode that reaches back through time to the characters’ youth as the novel investigates the costs of leaving and staying.

Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay widens the timescale of the Neapolitan novels, following Lila and Elena from their early twenties into their fourth decade. As the two become more worldly, the geography of the novel expands. Returning to one of the series’ preoccupations, the inherent corruption of society, Elena notes:

it’s not the neigbourhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth.

Unlike the previous two instalments, this one has no title (My Brilliant Friend was divided into two discrete sections; The Story Of The New Name one long part titled simply Youth), inviting the idea that the third part continues without break from the second. But even with a broader scope, it is still tightly focused on the finely balanced scales between Lila and Elena. If the previous novel saw Elena escape at the expense of Lila, in this the tables may turn. They spend even less time together than previously — a couple of short visits, otherwise mostly phone calls — but it is clearer than ever that these two are bound at the most fundamental level. Undercutting the novels’ insistent realism is a pervasive sense of all-powerful, hidden forces and there is a ritualised aspect to the exchanges between the protagonists.

But as Elena becomes more aware of these forces (it seems to me that Lila has always understood them intuitively), there is the possibility of escape. For Elena, this comes through her experiences of feminism:

To what secret pacts with myself had I consented, just to excel. And now, after the hard work of learning, what must I unlearn. Also, I had been forced by the powerful presence of Lila to imagine myself as I was not.

But will they be able to enjoy their hopes and dreams together, without one sacrificing for the other? These novels derive their tension and poignancy by withholding that answer.

Gay rating: 2/5 for a character who comes out, and Elena’s questioning of her relationship with Lila.