Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Storia del nuovo cognome (original 2012; edition 2012)by Elena Ferrante (Author)
Work InformationThe Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante (2012)
Books Read in 2017 (33) Books Read in 2016 (94) Italian Literature (61) » 14 more Top Five Books of 2014 (367) Books Set in Italy (49) Top Five Books of 2015 (256) Books Read in 2019 (410) Top Five Books of 2018 (788) Female Author (577) Books Read in 2020 (3,545) Five star books (1,099) Finished in 2020 (8) 2022 (1) Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Reading this is like having someone who is a subpar storyteller catch you up on drama from a different group of friends of theirs: it’s entertaining, and may even teach you something, and you wanna hear how it all ends, but the fact that you’re being held at arms length the hold time creates such a separation from you and the material that it’s impossible to fully become immersed. Our narrator, made omniscient from her place in the current day, reflects on her history with equal parts affection and mild horror. The storytelling moves quickly, with emotion effectively separating what mattered and what didn’t (there are three deaths in as many minutes, but we can spend more time than that reflecting on a single isolated night after feeling betrayed). This device works well for young women navigating their intelligence and education, but largely without anyone they trust to advise them. The loneliness and fragility of social (im)mobility are depicted over and over again through new lenses, and again we are left with a powerful final image to haunt us until the next book in the series. 6/10 When reading the first installment of this series I immediately got behind both Elana & Lila, two young girls coming of age in the slums of Naples. In this installment they are in their early 20'ies and, again and again, I found myself dismayed by the life changing mistakes they made. Most of these mistakes involved men. Sorry to all you Italians out there, but let's face it. Most of these men were creeps. And while Elana and Lila had there differences, they always stood behind each other ; and so do I. Making mistakes is part of the process of growing up, and i'm counting on both of these strong & determined women to learn from their mistakes and make the best out of their lives. To be continued... It took me a long time to read this, but it was not a slog. Rather, it is such a densely detailed story of two women growing up with entwined lives, it was almost like I physically couldn't read it quickly. So the story of Elena and Lila continues, with Elena continuing on the path to education and the intellectual life, and Lila settling into the life of a married woman. Sometimes I had to pause and remind myself that these are the lives of teenagers! Neither Elena nor Lila has an easy path. Elena is constantly wracked with self doubt, and Lila's pervasive and somehow seemingly misplaced arrogance, maybe a sense of entitlement, sets her ultimately down a path that leads somewhere other than into happiness. By the end of the volume each woman seems to have found an uneasy peace, yet if history serves, their lives and their relationship will hold many more twists and turns in the future.
Every so often you encounter an author so unusual it takes a while to make sense of her voice. The challenge is greater still when this writer’s freshness has nothing to do with fashion, when it’s imbued with the most haunting music of all, the echoes of literary history. Elena Ferrante is this rare bird: so deliberate in building up her story that you almost give up on it, so gifted that by the end she has you in tears. Is contained inAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
The second book, following last year's My Brilliant Friend, featuring the two friends Lila and Elena. The two protagonists are now in their twenties. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila. Meanwhile, Elena continues her journey of self-discovery. The two young women share a complex and evolving bond that brings them close at times, and drives them apart at others. Each vacillates between hurtful disregard and profound love for the other. With this complicated and meticulously portrayed friendship at the center of their emotional lives, the two girls mature into women, paying the cruel price that this passage exacts. No library descriptions found.
|
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)853.92Literature Italian Italian fiction 1900- 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
Lila, married and forced to be done with formal schooling as a teenager, is tortured by her circumstances. She is supremely incapable of substituting the role of grocer's wife and mother for the role of student and intellectual that she was born for, and her fierce will ensures her suffering. But she will desperately try to keep her true self alive, with apparently self-destructive choices and outcomes.
Lenu, conversely, escapes. She wins a scholarship to a university in Pisa, studies, immerses herself in intellectual life, and graduates, despite her fears of inadequacy based on her background, with a bright future. Lenu has always felt that, at their cores, Lila is the smarter and would have done even better than she. And that in compensation for being frustrated in this, Lila has always sought to outdo her wherever else possible, despite their friendship and alliance. One of Lenu's first impulses after receiving her degree illustrates this central dynamic of the series: That distance, sadly, is vast, at least at this point in time. It's a brutal comment. Now I can't wait to see where the third volume in the series takes Lila and Lenu. These characters are deep, complicated and vivid, and their struggles and actions compelling. The writing is detailed, sharp and just so on point. The translator deserves serious applause for bringing these novels into the English reading world with the same immense qualities that they evidently carry in Italian. ( )