Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

I don’t know how she does it, but Elena Ferrante’s work is almost unique in how intensely immersive it is.

On one level, this is just a story of regular folks living regular lives. But once you get into it, you become drawn in so deeply that the line between your mind and that of Elena Greco, the narrator, almost vanishes. At times you feel as if you’re really there, experiencing these things, as if you’ve become Elena temporarily.

It’s an incredibly powerful and satisfying feeling, and as I say, pretty much unique in literature. 

I devoured Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (four novels that trace a lifetime friendship between two women living in a deeply patriarchal mid-twentieth-century Italy) in a single summer a few years back, and when I got to the end of those few thousand pages, I felt as though I wanted to start right over at the beginning again. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is the third novel in the series, and I name it here because it’s the novel in which Elena—the book’s protagonist, and a writer herself—becomes a mother. Elena has a modern marriage compared to her friend Lina’s,… show more.