A review by kell_xavi
The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

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. 
Expand filter menu Content Warnings