This is the final novel of Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. Ferrante is a master of writing about the details of human relationships. At the heart of these four books is the enduring friendship and competition of two neighborhood girls, Elena and Lila. “I told myself again that she would no longer exercise any authority over me, that that long phase was over.” The quartet began when they were six years old, playing with dolls on the streets of Naples, and finally concludes with the narrator, Elena, as a grandmother living in Turin, but still tied to Naples, both to the city and to her childhood memories there. “A woman without love for her origins is lost.” The breath of this story deals with the mimetic rivalry between the two friends, where the hopes and dreams of the one become entwined with the other, whether in the realm of toys, school grades, the affection of lovers, their sense of purpose in the world, or the love of their families. “She had dragged me into the swelling sea of her desires.” The two women, even with grown children of their own, constantly measure their own lives based on the success of the other. “From childhood I had given her too much importance, and now I felt as if unburdened. Finally it was clear that what I was wasn’t her, and vice versa. Her authority was no longer necessary to me, I had my own.” They compete for the praise of the same teacher. They fight for the charms of the same man. And by the time of this fourth novel, as both have matured into adults, each successful in their own way, they compete for the respect and admiration of their old neighborhood. “I had no doubts about how I would react if I discovered that she really had irrupted into my professional identity, emptying it.” This tight-knit lower class community has followed both of their lives and judged their successes and failures to its own idiosyncratic standards. “I loved my city, but I uprooted from myself any dutiful defense of it.”
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