Editors Reads Verdict
The third Neapolitan novel is the most politically charged of the series, expanding the frame from neighbourhood to nation as the 1970s convulse Italy. The divergence between Elena's relatively privileged literary life and Lila's physical, dangerous factory work produces the series' sharpest account of class, feminism, and the costs of escape.
What We Loved
- The political dimension — Italy's 1970s worker movements and left-wing violence — adds historical richness to the personal story
- Lila's factory sequences are among the most viscerally powerful writing in the series
- Elena's growing awareness of her own compromises as a published writer is rendered with unflinching honesty
- The divergence of the two women's paths generates the series' most acute class analysis
Minor Drawbacks
- The momentum slows in Elena's domestic sections, which deliberately mirror the constriction of her circumstances
- Some secondary political characters are less developed than the first two volumes' neighbourhood cast
Key Takeaways
- → Escaping your origins does not free you from them — Elena's success is shadowed by guilt and inauthenticity
- → The body is a political site — Lila's factory labour makes abstract political theory unbearably concrete
- → Female friendship survives enormous divergence but is changed by it
- → The 1970s Italian left reveals how political movements can simultaneously liberate and exploit the people they claim to serve
- → Marriage and motherhood are not neutral — they impose structural constraints that intellectual achievement cannot dissolve
| Author | Elena Ferrante |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Europa Editions |
| Pages | 418 |
| Published | September 3, 2013 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Fiction |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Best For | Readers following the Neapolitan series; readers interested in Italian history, feminist literature, and 20th-century political fiction; fans of literary fiction about friendship, class, and ambition. |
Two Paths Through Naples
By the third volume of the Neapolitan series, Elena Greco has published a novel, married a university professor from a respectable northern Italian family, and moved away from Naples to Florence and then Genoa. Lila Cerullo has left her husband, worked in a sausage factory under conditions that are destroying her body, and become involved with the worker organising movements that are beginning to reshape Italian industrial life. The divergence of their paths — which began in My Brilliant Friend when Elena stayed in school and Lila did not — is now absolute, and the novel’s central question is what their friendship can possibly mean across that gulf.
Ferrante is unsparing about both women. Elena’s life of relative privilege — a husband with connections, a literary career, a comfortable apartment — is rendered as a series of compromises that she does not fully acknowledge. Her feminism is the feminism of women with options. Lila’s existence in the sausage factory, by contrast, is a matter of physical endurance: the cold, the machinery, the supervisors’ control over her body and time, the way the work erodes her health systematically and without interest in the fact of her intelligence.
The Factory as Political Reality
The factory sequences in Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay are the series’ most politically direct writing. Ferrante uses Lila’s experience not as symbol but as material fact — the labour movement is not an idea here but an organised response to conditions that the novel makes you understand in your body rather than your mind.
The 1970s Italian context is essential. Italy’s autunno caldo — the hot autumn of 1969 — set off a decade of worker agitation, political violence from both left and right, and the broad social transformation that the previous volumes’ characters had glimpsed only theoretically. The third novel puts its protagonists inside that history, and the result is the series’ most explicitly political volume.
Elena’s Compromises
Elena’s storyline in this volume is a study in the costs of assimilation. She has arrived at the place she spent her childhood desperate to reach — published, educated, married into a respectable family — and finds it hollow in ways she struggles to articulate. Her second-wave feminist awakening, catalysed partly by the movements around her and partly by a chance encounter with a feminist collective, begins to provide language for what she has been feeling, but the language comes with its own contradictions: she is a woman writing feminist essays while managing a household and two children for a husband who treats her intellectual work as a hobby.
The friendship with Lila, renewed when Elena returns to Naples and finds Lila in the factory, shakes Elena out of the particular complacency that success imposes. Lila’s reality functions as a corrective — brutal, inconvenient, and impossible to aestheticise.
A Series That Keeps Deepening
What distinguishes the Neapolitan series from comparable multi-volume literary fiction is that each volume does not simply advance the same story but expands the frame of what the story is about. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is the volume that makes the series’ personal drama explicitly political, and the connection between the women’s intimate lives and the history surrounding them becomes, for the first time, not backdrop but structure.
Our rating: 4.4/5
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