Author: Elena Ferrante
Started: February 1, 2018
Finished: February 26, 2018
Pages: 473
Genre: Fiction
First Sentence: From October 1976 until 1979, when I returned to Naples to live, I avoided resuming a steady relationship with Lila.
Summary: [From BN] Here is the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery uncontainable Lila. In this book, life’s great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women’s friendship, examined in its every detail over the course of four books, remains the gravitational center of their lives. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. But now, she has returned to Naples to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood. Yet somehow this proximity to a world she has always rejected only brings her role as unacknowledged leader of that world into relief. Ferrante is one of the world’s great storytellers. With the Neapolitan quartet she has given her readers an abundant, generous, and masterfully plotted page-turner that is also a stylish work of literary fiction destined to delight readers for many generations to come.
Thoughts: The last book in this series seemed like the best book. The writing and the characters hadn't changed, but I came to love their story. This is not a friendship I would like to find myself in (and I'm not exactly a fan of Elena as a person) but it was a dynamic story that enthralled me at times. My main complaint is that I became so aggravated by the characters. They grew throughout the model but they never really matured out of their childhood. That might have been what Ferrante intended, but it made me want to smack some sense in to them.
What I found most interesting was how Ferrante constructed a whole neighborhood that felt real. It pops off the page and I feel like I could walk down the street in Naples and run into these characters. There was life to this book. I may not have enjoyed the decisions the characters made, but they lived.
I still think this series is a bit overrated, but that might only be because of how many rave reviews saturated the market. It's a good series and one I am glad I read, but it's not one I will be rereading.
Rating: 7/10 [Very Good]
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