I finished my 3-month journey with this series this week and I have to say, these books are incredible - they’re definitely going to end up as one of the great classics of 21st century literature.
Essentially a 1700-page mega-novel published in 4 parts, they follow the lives and friendship between two women from an impoverished Neapolitan neighborhood across seven decades. It’s also the story of their neighborhood and of Italy’s social + political trajectory across the second half of the twentieth century. It’s about everything from female friendship to gender and misogyny to class and poverty. It’s about growing up with violence and the struggle to escape it, as well as the sins of history and how they ring down through the present. It’s the very definition of an intimate epic: huge in emotional and thematic scope while remaining laser-focused on the lives of its two leads in meticulous detail.
It’s hugely ambitious and Ferrante pulls it off beautifully. The leads Elena and Lila are difficult, vividly drawn and imbued with so much complexity, and I found the story difficult to put down despite the length. These are definitely some of the best books I’ve read all year