Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic, praised particularly how the books circle back to its start, to Lila and Lenu's childhood games, in the final installment. The novel begins in the 1950s, in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, where the narrator Elena meets Lila, her best friend, her mirror, and at times her fiercest critic.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay - Harvard Review

Lodged in my memory were dark streets full of dangers, unregulated traffic, broken pavements, giant puddles. Nino, now married with a young son, unexpectedly reappears in Elena’s life when he begins travelling frequently to Florence on business. Goldstein's elegant translation carries the novel forward toward an ending that will leave Ferrante’s growing cadre of followers wondering if this reported trilogy is destined to become a longer series. Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta, L'amica geniale volume 3 (2013; English translation: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, 2014). They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn’t happen to the women important to them and that—this was the idea they had grown up with—they had to protect her even at the risk of being killed.Pasquale and Nadia convince Lila to go to a meeting of the Italian Communist Party, where she shares about her working conditions. She is quickly disillusioned by the marriage, and which further unravels when she meets again her childhood love, Nino Sarratore. For those who have yet to experience the pleasure of My Brilliant Friend, I would suggest not jumping in here, as both personal and political histories weigh heavily on the characters and their relationships.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay | Elena Ferrante Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay | Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), and The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), now a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, and Jessie Buckley. Lila, meanwhile, has become a successful entrepreneur, but she finds that it only draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood. These petty modes are insufficient to the role of understanding either literature or our present, and yet they are still, we would claim, necessary. One woman is always leaving the other behind, or, rather, “fleeing” her, as the original “fugge” of the Italian title puts it. And no one knew better than I did what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men; I had done it, I was doing it.We wanted to say something that asserted itself as the best without subjecting itself to the test of bestness.

My Brilliant Friend review – this gorgeous drama is

She has gained admirers among authors—Jhumpa Lahiri, Elizabeth Strout, Claire Messud, to name a few—and critics—James Wood, John Freeman, Eugenia Williamson, for example. The next night I went back to the sea dressed in 1950s silk travel scarves – Paris with the Eiffel tower and ladies in hats and pink poodles, Venice with bronze horses and gondoliers, New York in celestial blue and silver. With Naples and the looming specter of Vesuvius once again forming the ominous background to the girls’ lives, Elena travels from the city of her childhood, first to the university in Pisa, and then beyond upon her marriage to Pietro, the intellectual heir to an influential Milanese family. Emily Harnett wrote for The Atlantic: "On Twitter and beyond, readers have described Ferrante's covers as “horrible,” “atrocious,” “utterly hideous,” and as a “disservice” to her novels.The two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and a source of strength in the face of life's challenges. Part of the bestselling saga about childhood friends following different paths by “one of the great novelists of our time” ( The New York Times). We have cheered on her petty battle to improve her life in any limited way that she can, just as we are invited not to condemn her daughters for their pettiness toward their mother. While they are dressed up to appear just a little older, with makeup and wigs, their obvious youth gives the effect of young women adrift in the world, and sometimes they look like children playing at adulthood.