Reviews with content warning for Pedophilia - Storia del nuovo cognome

disrespectfully, I need nino sarratore to drop dead !

ahhhhh the drama in this installment was crazy. Lila + Lenu make me insane, actually. They’re relationship is so complex. The girls are fighting, battling the shared restrictions of their environment in very different ways, and remain inseparable despite the animosity between them!

your honor, they love each other, I know it! They’re just so, so bad at expressing it, and men 😐 keep getting in the way!!!

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iuniper's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

It took me two volumes to understand the brilliance of this story, the exquisite craft hidden in the plain words, the gripping power of these characters' lives. They are raw and flawed and powerful. They explode off the page in their complexity, pulling you in into their world, in the Napoli of the 60s. Elena Greco tells the story with the precision of a surgeon. She analyses her feelings and the world surrounding her as if she were in the OR, dissecting every single thought that passes through her mind, trying to understand its origin in an attempt to understand herself better, and the world. But she is not a Mary Sue. Elena Ferrante knows how to expose her protagonist's biases and flaws and flawed judgement through clear, raw writing. Lenu and Lila are two stories that mirror each other, two peas in the same pond. They both lied to become part of a world that was outside their reach. They both were disappointed, heartbroken, angry. They both wanted to become better than the sum of their parts, their history, of their family. They grow apart, and they grow closer because, in the end, they only have each other. I am so excited to read the next books.

Hands down one of the best books I have read in recent years.

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issyd23's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This book ripped my heart out and tore it into a thousand pieces!! Trigger warning for teen heartbreak 5⭐️

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kell_xavi's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0

Picking up from the very scene that dramatically closes My Brilliant Friend, this novel charts marriages, businesses, schooling, holidays, love affairs, a good deal of domestic violence, betrayals, sexual beginnings, lies, kindnesses, pregnancies, and changes with Elena (Lenu), Lila, and the neighbourhood in Naples at the centre of an ever-expanding world. Where the first book follows the two girls from ages 7-16, The Story of a New Name tells the story of a similar time span, ages 16-24.

Lila is hot-headed, distant, abrupt, creative, listless, passionate, quickly moving between big emotions and a sense of dissociation, with a growing anxiety about the framework of her life and the expansiveness of the world around her. She has a difficulty with uncertainty, trying to hold on or shape things until she understands them, at which point she can accept any new development. She is brave around the men who appear to lose body and fall to pieces before her, she is sensitive to pregnancy and to certain locations, she is resolute and sometimes, exhausted, she is easily moved.

Harder to capture is Lenu, our narrator. There are times when she explains the events of her life aside from Lila’s, at different jobs, with boyfriends, at school and new cities, and once she writes that these experiences are seen again, anew, when she imagines her friend in the same scenes and places. Lenu’s convictions, stubbornness, keen observation, careful responsiveness, are all elements of her character that strengthen as she moves from the familiarity of her poor streets to the intelligence and cultivation of high school, of Nino and his friends, as she grows into the educated, modern, refined classes of Italy. These traits are also ones that allowed her to be friends with Lila, to follow her as children, to take risks, to work hard for herself, to develop the creativity and toughness that underlie her trajectory to adulthood.

Lila and Lenu are both spirited, smart, and independent. They face so much anguish and pain, but they’re both so often alone with their minds, unable to tell each other the truth.

Yes, yes, let me be punished for my insufficiency. Let the worst happen, something so devastating that it will prevent me from facing tonight, tomorrow, the hours and days to come, reminding me with always more crushing evidence of my unsuitable constitution.

Ferrante both cares for these characters and allows them volition, volatility, forays into melodrama and a dignified, or nervous, or demanding womanhood on the other side of experimental choices and their torments.

I considered her happy, with that tempestuous happiness of novels, films, and comic strips. The only kind that, at that time, truly interested me. That is to say, no conjugal happiness, but the happiness of passion, a furious confusion of evil and good that had befallen her, and not me.

They’re often seen with distance, hostility, or misplaced desire by others, fighting to inhabit similar spaces until they find separate niches and fight to prove their own the greater success and assuredness.

In the past, there had been Lila, a continuous happy detour into surprising lands. Now, everything I was, I wanted to get from myself. I was almost nineteen. I would never again depend on someone, and I would never again miss someone.

I wasn’t immediately lost within this book, in part because of the immediate ironing out of the shocking kink in the fabric of Lila’s marriage that we conclude the previous book with. Much of the beginning is stage-setting, with a few remarkable moments of friendship and Lila’s artistic endeavour to destroy or disappear herself. The domesticity and high school stories were less captivating than I hoped for, and it didn’t pick up intensity again until the final days of a summer on Ischia. The breakage, often, is an occasion for brightness in Ferrante’s stories.

Ferrante writes with a depth and realism that washes over everything, making sharp and kinetic the gossip of women; making smooth and dry the blunt scene of a sexual encounter; making warm and heady a follow-through to freedom. There is so much emotion, so much anger and love and shame and fear in these pages.

She was explaining to me that… in the world, there is nothing to win, that her life was as full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often, to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound in the brain of the other.

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theyley's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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anna_catherine73's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This series of books draws you in like nothing else I have ever read and moves you in such an intense way. Some of the best books I have read in a really long time, I have a never ending love for the Neapolitan novels.

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mermaidreef's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

The Neapolitan novels are like something Tolstoy would write, if Tolstoy were Italian, a woman, and wrote more interesting books.

This second installment in the series was...heavy. Relationships going wrong left and right, people having affairs, domestic violence, sexual assault, basically every type of relational trauma you can imagine. I also would not recommend this book if you're a) a woman or AFAB person that b) doesn't want to be angry about being born with a female body and doesn't want to hate men.

Ferrante examines the way that men think of and interact with women: as inanimate objects for them to claim, control, and use how they like. Defiance is met with physical and sexual violence. Inability to fulfill whatever feminine role is expected based on their stage of life is met not only with aggression from husbands, but with the reproach of the community as well. In this environment, women grow up believing that when married, women need to be "brought to heel" by their male companions from time to time. Violence by men is natural and a deserved consequence for a woman who fails to fulfill her "duties."

I could write pages and pages on this but long story short so good so beautifully written so profound so insightful so gorgeous. Please read these books.

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vittotosatto's review

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adventurous emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

mi ha dato una sensazione abbastanza diversa dal primo, e devo anche abituarmi all'idea che i personaggi stanno crescendo, non sono più bambini. comunque bello, forse preferisco il primo

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