Meantime, Elena’s success while rewarding, feels less colourful without Lina sharing in it. We see Lina’s chaos inspire Elena: her roles as grocer’s wife, as adulteress falling pregnant by her lover, and as cuckolded mother. The series begins with Lenù and Lila’s childhood as they grow up in a poor Neapolitan neighborhood and traces their. This second novel’s title refers to Lina’s change of surname with her marriage – but also, interestingly, to Elena’s retention of hers as her published pen name, even after she weds the fiancé she meets while studying at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. The Neapolitan Quartet: Escapism through balance and separation The world of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet remains at arm’s length, even when one is in its midst, making the series a vital source of grounding escapism, writes Martha French. Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s operatic Neapolitan Quartet, a series that spans four volumes and six decades of friendship, traces the intertwined lives of characters Lila and Lenù.

And I admit that many others absolutely hate the bookshence the controversial. I confess that I have become a fan of Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous author. I came late to these controversial novels, but the old cliché of Better late than never certainly applies. This and the other two books in the series are narrated by Elena – or Lenú – who grows to become a famous novelist and who, from a position of late adulthood, remembers their lives after Lina’s son reports that his 66-year-old mother has gone missing. The Neapolitan Quartet, by Elena Ferrante. It continues her sweeping telling of the tangled, complicated friendship between Elena Greco and Lina Cerullo, which began in 1950s Naples in the pages of My Brilliant Friend, before closing with Lina’s rejection of further education to get married at age 16. The second in the Neapolitan Novels series by evasive Italian author Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name elicited the Guardian to dub Ferrante a ‘writer of the unsayable’. Now an HBO series, book four in the New York Times bestselling Neapolitan quartet about two friends in post-war Italy is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted epic by one of today's most beloved and acclaimed writers, Elena Ferrante, one of the.