Ferrante creates vivid characters in 70s Italy

 ROME - Elena Ferrante has had amazing success in the Anglo-Saxon world with her novels: James Woods in The New Yorker lauded them as “admirable, lucid, austerely honest” while the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, now a Rome resident, says the Ferrante Neapolitan novel cycle is an “unconditional masterpiece” which she reads and rereads.

  The latest in the cycle Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay continues the story of the Neapolitans Lina and Elena, friends since their schooldays.   Lina is the leader, a brilliant and rebellious school drop-out who is working in a factory – she is one of those the title refers to as staying- while Elena is one of those who leaves: she wins a scholarship to the Scuola Normale in Pisa, writes a successful novel, marries a university professor and lives in Florence.  Elena tells the story.

  The period is the late 1960s, early 70s with student revolts, terrorist violence and evolving versions of feminism.   Elena participates in all the movements and the discussions they provoke but remains tied to her Neapolitan neighbourhood.

  She narrates it all with vigour, clarity and frankness.  Without talking explicitly of the camorra, she conveys a Naples where violence has a key role.  She is excellent also on the encounter between bright students and well-off, cultured Leftists whose children have gone one-step further than them into drugs and terrorism.

 Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, although on a higher plane, is rather like the TV series Dallas with its large cast of characters and twists of plot.   Elena is capable of analysing any event until it changes hue. At times this reader felt like urging her just to let matters be. She emphasises how fascinating Lina is but shows her to be, yes, unpredictable, certainly pig-headed but also just rude.

  Elena becomes convinced that desires should not be thwarted which is not a formula for stable relations. She leaves her husband and flits off with a Neapolitan boyfriend.  The sequel might be “Those Who Return”.  There are several unexplored ironies here which could explored in a further novel adding to the speculation about the identity of the author who has always refused live interviews.  There is even speculation that Elena is a man.  Given the rate at which Elena Ferrante books appear, it might be thought that it is the name of a writers’ collective.

  Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, by Elena Ferrante, Europa Editions, $US 18,