The Neapolitan Novels. Three of the four novels have been published in English: My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, and, now, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Taken together, the novels span some 50 years, chronicling the life-long friendship between Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo.
Girls’ secret.. by Mario Cattaneo
A girl’s Neapolitan childhood and adolescence, in the late nineteen-fifties. The neighborhood is a book unto its own, a lively, dirty, poverty-stricken ghetto in Naples, a chaotic, impoverished world where adults grease the palms of the Camorra aka The Solara Brothers, and where irons and furniture and children fly out of windows during domestic disputes, and where even mild-mannered fathers routinely beat their children and their wives. The city of Elena’s childhood is a poor, violent place, with the snatched richness that comes from deprivation (i.e. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn ); a holiday at the sea; novels from the library; the encouragement of a teacher; a best friend who is a demon of creativity and intellect; the unnerving and beautiful elements of human relationships; a wedding, the promise of getting your article published in a local journal, a conversation with a boy whose intellect is deeper and more liberal than your own. Ordinary-seeming occurrences take on a special luminosity against a background of poverty, ignorance, violence, and parental threat, a world in which a character can be casually described as “struggling to speak in Italian” (because mostly people in this book are using Neapolitan vernacular). I was entirely caught up in this story, as it evoked those familiar yet almost indescribable feelings about long friendships, adolescence, and home. You’re inextricably tied to a person, a place, but you hate how strong the connection is, how it drags you back in when you try to escape it; slowly it tears you apart.
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