Editors Reads Verdict
The first volume of Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet is a masterpiece of female friendship and Italian social history — intense, specific, psychologically brilliant, and utterly addictive. Reading it feels like receiving a great secret.
What We Loved
- Female friendship rendered with unprecedented psychological specificity
- Postwar Naples is one of fiction's most richly evoked settings
- Ferrante's interior characterization is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction
- Structurally irresistible — each chapter ends in a way that demands the next
Minor Drawbacks
- The first novel ends mid-story — the full experience requires the quartet
- The social world is extremely specific to its time and place
- Some readers find Elena's submission to Lila's brilliance frustrating
Key Takeaways
- → Female friendship can be as fierce, competitive, and consuming as any romantic love
- → Intelligence in women is simultaneously valued and punished by the societies that possess it
- → Class and neighborhood shape possibility more than individual talent
- → Brilliance recognized but not educated is its own particular tragedy
- → The observer in a friendship is not necessarily the less significant partner
| Author | Elena Ferrante |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Europa Editions |
| Pages | 331 |
| Published | September 25, 2012 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Best For | Literary fiction readers; anyone who has had an intense female friendship; Italian literature enthusiasts. |
The Missing Lila
Elena Greco is in her sixties when her friend Lila Cerullo disappears completely — methodically erasing every trace of herself. Elena begins writing the story of their friendship from the beginning, as both a search for understanding and an act of witness. What follows is the Neapolitan quartet: four novels spanning sixty years of two women’s lives, set against the social and political transformation of Italy from postwar poverty to contemporary life.
The Neighborhood
The rione — the Naples neighborhood where Elena and Lila grow up — is one of fiction’s most fully realized settings. It is poor, violent, internally hierarchical, governed by the Solara family’s casual brutality, and alive with the specific texture of working-class postwar Italian life. Ferrante renders this world with the authority of someone who knows it from the inside, and the neighborhood becomes a force in the story as powerful as any character — shaping what is possible, what is permissible, and who gets to leave.
Two Girls, One Story
The novel’s central relationship — between Elena, the narrator, and Lila, the brilliant friend — is one of the most psychologically complex female friendships in all of fiction. Lila is dazzling: she teaches herself to read, grasps mathematics intuitively, has a mind that processes the world at a speed Elena can barely follow. Elena is also intelligent, but in the presence of Lila she always feels insufficient. Their friendship is love and competition and mutual formation, each girl shaping herself partly in response to the other’s example.
Why You Cannot Stop Reading
Ferrante writes with a compression and directness that removes the usual distance between reader and text — her narrators speak from inside their experience rather than from above it. The result is a reading experience of unusual intensity: the neighborhood feels real, the friendship feels real, the stakes feel real. By the final pages of the first novel, the reader is helplessly committed to the entire quartet.
Our rating: 4.4/5 — One of the great literary achievements of this century, the beginning of a quartet that will consume and transform every reader who enters it.
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