Editors Reads Verdict
Ferrante's second volume is darker and more devastating than the first, as Lila's marriage becomes a trap and Elena's education takes her further from the neighborhood — and closer to understanding how much she has left behind. Devastating and essential.
What We Loved
- The portrait of a bad marriage is one of fiction's most devastating
- Elena's education sequences are beautifully rendered
- The friendship's evolution under increasing strain is psychologically precise
- Ferrante's control of narrative tension is absolute
Minor Drawbacks
- Requires My Brilliant Friend — cannot be read independently
- Lila's suffering is relentless and difficult to witness
- The Naples milieu requires patience from readers unfamiliar with Italian social history
Key Takeaways
- → Marriage in patriarchal systems can be a form of capture for women who outrun their origins
- → Education changes not just what you know but who you are
- → The friendship that shapes you in youth becomes complicated when you diverge
- → Brilliance without institutional access is a kind of torture
- → Leaving your origins behind is always also a loss
| Author | Elena Ferrante |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Europa Editions |
| Pages | 471 |
| Published | September 3, 2013 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Best For | Readers who finished My Brilliant Friend; literary fiction enthusiasts. |
Marriage and Its Costs
Lila Cerullo, the most brilliant person in the Naples neighborhood, has married Stefano Carracci at sixteen for reasons of economic desperation and family pressure. The second Neapolitan novel opens on their wedding night, with a violation that sets the tone for everything that follows. Lila’s marriage is a prison with a comfortable interior — money, status, no escape. Elena, studying for the university entrance exams that might remove her from the neighborhood entirely, watches from a distance and then from closer than she wants to be.
The Diverging Paths
The second volume is fundamentally about divergence — the way two girls who grew up as nearly a single consciousness begin to become separate people with different lives. Elena studies, passes her exams, enters university, discovers a world of intellectual life that her neighborhood could not have imagined. Lila works in her husband’s grocery store, is used by her husband and his brother, and survives through the same ferocious intelligence that had no permitted outlet. The gap between their lives widens, and their friendship has to stretch to accommodate it.
Ferrante’s Technique
Ferrante uses Elena as narrator to create a doubled portrait — Elena’s developing understanding of her own life intersects constantly with the more limited information she has about Lila’s. This creates dramatic irony that is almost unbearable: we understand what Elena doesn’t yet know about Lila’s suffering, and we see what Elena can’t yet admit about her own motivations. The technique renders both women more fully than either can perceive herself.
The New Name
The title refers to Lila’s married name — Lila Carracci, a new name for a new identity that erases rather than expresses the person she was. It is also, more broadly, about the way women in this world are renamed by their relationships — their identities defined by whose wife or daughter or lover they are rather than by what they think and create and know.
Our rating: 4.4/5 — A devastating, essential second volume that deepens and darkens the Neapolitan quartet’s portrait of women constrained by history and circumstance.
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