"Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay" by Elena Ferrante

Itaewon Book Club is back in business! Everyone who enjoys great world literature is welcome!

# In this third Neapolitan novel, Elena and Lila, the two girls whom readers first met in My Brilliant Friend, have become women. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her abusive husband and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which have opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons. Both women have pushed against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance, and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up during the nineteen-seventies. Yet they are still very much bound to each other by a strong, unbreakable bond.

"One of modern fiction's richest portraits of a friendship"
-NPR

"No one has has a voice quite like Ferrante's Her gritty, ruthlessly frank novels roar off the page with a barbed fury, like an attack that is also a defense...Her fictions are fierce, unsentimental glimpses the way a woman is constantly under threat, her identity submerged in marriage, eclipsed by motherhood, mythologised by desire. Imagine if Jane Ausen got and angry and you willhave some idea of how explosie these works are."
-The Australian

"Her charting of the rivalries and sheer inscrutability of female friendship is raw. This is high stakes,subversive lterature."
-The Telegraph

We will discuss the entire novel

special note- . . This book can be ordered and bought at Gyobo Bookstore. If you have problems finding the book, let me know.

If you have any questions or need help trying find the place please give me a call. 010- 7224-7803. Call or text. I will be available. My email is chrisjteacher@gmail.com