The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante (2013)

This is the second installment in the four-volume Neapolitan Novels, the first of the series being My Brilliant Friend, which I reviewed last January. It continues the story of two friends, Elena and Lila, from their sixteenth year through their early twenties. In an effort to escape the violence and poverty of their neighborhood in Naples, the two girls take different paths. Elena constantly strives to excel in high school and later at university, trying to impress academically and to change her accent and her mannerisms to conform with those of her more wealthy and sophisticated new friends. Lila, in the meantime, has been forced by her father to discontinue schooling, despite her academic brilliance. She attempts to escape poverty at least by marrying the man who owns the neighborhood grocery store, but that does not bring her the satisfaction she had hoped for. In her attempt to find happiness, she takes a lover, unfortunately a man whom Elena has long wanted for herself.

Elena is the narrator of the story, so the reader shares her thoughts and feelings. The author uses the device of Lila's journals, which she gives to Elena for safekeeping, to enable the reader to know some of Lila's thoughts also. I found it disturbing that as their apparent successes in escaping their upbringing increase, they seem to continue to have feelings of inferiority and self doubt which they relieve to an extent by attempting to one-up each other. True, all relationships are complicated, perhaps female relationships in particular, but the level of jealousy and self-involvement of these two women make them less than sympathetic characters. I would not want them as friends. I found myself being very annoyed with both of them at times, but that very annoyance is also an indication of how well Ferrante has succeeded in creating characters who seem real in every respect. I react to Elena and Lila as if they were real people.

I don't believe that this novel could be appreciated as a stand-alone. It is definitely a continuation of the previous one. We will see what the next two installments bring.