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jenkepesh 's review for:
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
by Elena Ferrante
Throughout this saga, Elena's relationship with Lila has overtly taken center stage, whether as a positive force or as a drain on Elena. In this volume, it is ever clearer that the childhood neighborhood of Naples is as great a push-pull force for her; each time she returns, she sees her own efforts to rise above her roots as a failure, and yet, from one dizzying moment to the next, she switches allegiances between the life and people in the wider world and the those in the few blocks she is from, just as her friend Lila is at one moment unreachably brilliant and in another merely words and caprices, in one a victim and in another a manipulator, in one a friend and in another a stranger. In this volume, for long stretches, Elena herself no longer strives, just floats on the river of expectations and accepted wisdom until she is completely becalmed and less convinced than ever of any personal merit. It is only late in the book that first a feminist awakening and then a soap-opera romance propel her back into life. Where once she left Naples, to settle and stay at home in Florence, she is now leaving, breaking all bonds, and believing in nothing but a perfect future with her perfect love, despite knowing his history of at least four such previous romances that all end abruptly.
As a reader, I continue to be enthralled by the story setting, both in place and time, the little writ large and vice versa. But as the book ended, I am of course fed up with Elena, who seemingly within minutes of publishing an important feminist study blows up her whole life and those of two spouses and three children to run away with a man whose whole history is as anti-feminist as can be, no matter what his words. In fact, at the moment she is writing about the way that men write women to prove that they can create the perfection of Woman that no woman can create on her own, she is writing it to get the attention and approval of a man so that he will bed her. Her fulfillment is in playing out the teenage potboiler, despite destroying her children's lives. Elena, are you really so dumb?
As a reader, I continue to be enthralled by the story setting, both in place and time, the little writ large and vice versa. But as the book ended, I am of course fed up with Elena, who seemingly within minutes of publishing an important feminist study blows up her whole life and those of two spouses and three children to run away with a man whose whole history is as anti-feminist as can be, no matter what his words. In fact, at the moment she is writing about the way that men write women to prove that they can create the perfection of Woman that no woman can create on her own, she is writing it to get the attention and approval of a man so that he will bed her. Her fulfillment is in playing out the teenage potboiler, despite destroying her children's lives. Elena, are you really so dumb?