Reviews tagging 'Suicide'

História do Novo Sobrenome by Elena Ferrante, Maurício Santana Dias

36 reviews

dana_sg's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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jenni28's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I adored this book. 

I received the first of the Neapolitan Quarter as a Christmas gift and devoured it, but the second instalment I loved even more. I read this in almost one sitting! 

This book made me feel a lot of things… 

I went through a bit of a rollercoaster with almost every single character, on one page feeling compassion and empathy for their struggles, by the next feeling utterly enraged by their pettiness and self-centred attitudes.
With Lina, for example, you can’t help but feeling a heartfelt sense of pity given how quickly her young marriage descends into a prison of abuse and unhappiness. At the same time, there were parts of this book where her treatment of Elena really disgusted me, and I wanted to scream at Elena to stop letting her friend walk all over her. But in this novel, as in life, nothing is simple - and that really comes through in the realism of Ferrantes writing.


Every character is so well-written, so believable and so enraging at times that you can’t help but be absorbed by their lives, by a story where not very much happens in terms of plot, but where I was totally glued to the page.  

This book often gets sold as a book about female friendship, and I suppose that is true at the most basic level. But the parts that I found most compelling dealt with 1960s Italy, especially through the prism of class. Without being didactic, I think it was a beautiful exploration of how culture, family, friendships, social relations, communities and art are all affected by our class and our upbringing. 

Despite her great success by going to University and writing a novel, Elena is almost constantly frozen by what I can only describe as “imposter” syndrome. She had a constant feeling of self doubt, never feeling good enough, that always seems to harken back to her competitive relationship with Lina or her embarrassment and shame about her own background. Lina, on the other hand, despite gaining wealth and success, feels trapped in a loveless and abusive marriage due to her social conditions. She is eventually able to break free, but not without huge consequences that affect her life and that of her whole family and community.


I was totally immersed in this book. Can’t wait to read the third instalment. 
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augie_'s review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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heyheykk's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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risemini's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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verahuerlimann's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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yumaa's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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anahisa's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

disrespectfully, I need nino sarratore to drop dead !

ahhhhh the drama in this installment was crazy. Lila + Lenu make me insane, actually. They’re relationship is so complex. The girls are fighting, battling the shared restrictions of their environment in very different ways, and remain inseparable despite the animosity between them! 

your honor, they love each other, I know it! They’re just so, so bad at expressing it, and men 😐 keep getting in the way!!!
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iuniper's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

It took me two volumes to understand the brilliance of this story, the exquisite craft hidden in the plain words, the gripping power of these characters' lives. They are raw and flawed and powerful. They explode off the page in their complexity, pulling you in into their world, in the Napoli of the 60s. Elena Greco tells the story with the precision of a surgeon. She analyses her feelings and the world surrounding her as if she were in the OR, dissecting every single thought that passes through her mind, trying to understand its origin in an attempt to understand herself better, and the world. But she is not a Mary Sue. Elena Ferrante knows how to expose her protagonist's biases and flaws and flawed judgement through clear, raw writing. Lenu and Lila are two stories that mirror each other, two peas in the same pond. They both lied to become part of a world that was outside their reach. They both were disappointed, heartbroken, angry. They both wanted to become better than the sum of their parts, their history, of their family. They grow apart, and they grow closer because, in the end, they only have each other. I am so excited to read the next books. 

Hands down one of the best books I have read in recent years. 
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kell_xavi's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0

Picking up from the very scene that dramatically closes My Brilliant Friend, this novel charts marriages, businesses, schooling, holidays, love affairs, a good deal of domestic violence, betrayals, sexual beginnings, lies, kindnesses, pregnancies, and changes with Elena (Lenu), Lila, and the neighbourhood in Naples at the centre of an ever-expanding world. Where the first book follows the two girls from ages 7-16, The Story of a New Name tells the story of a similar time span, ages 16-24. 

Lila is hot-headed, distant, abrupt, creative, listless, passionate, quickly moving between big emotions and a sense of dissociation, with a growing anxiety about the framework of her life and the expansiveness of the world around her. She has a difficulty with uncertainty, trying to hold on or shape things until she understands them, at which point she can accept any new development. She is brave around the men who appear to lose body and fall to pieces before her, she is sensitive to pregnancy and to certain locations, she is resolute and sometimes, exhausted, she is easily moved. 

Harder to capture is Lenu, our narrator. There are times when she explains the events of her life aside from Lila’s, at different jobs, with boyfriends, at school and new cities, and once she writes that these experiences are seen again, anew, when she imagines her friend in the same scenes and places. Lenu’s convictions, stubbornness, keen observation, careful responsiveness, are all elements of her character that strengthen as she moves from the familiarity of her poor streets to the intelligence and cultivation of high school, of Nino and his friends, as she grows into the educated, modern, refined classes of Italy. These traits are also ones that allowed her to be friends with Lila, to follow her as children, to take risks, to work hard for herself, to develop the creativity and toughness that underlie her trajectory to adulthood. 

Lila and Lenu are both spirited, smart, and independent. They face so much anguish and pain, but they’re both so often alone with their minds, unable to tell each other the truth. 

Yes, yes, let me be punished for my insufficiency. Let the worst happen, something so devastating that it will prevent me from facing tonight, tomorrow, the hours and days to come, reminding me with always more crushing evidence of my unsuitable constitution. 

Ferrante both cares for these characters and allows them volition, volatility, forays into melodrama and a dignified, or nervous, or demanding womanhood on the other side of experimental choices and their torments.

I considered her happy, with that tempestuous happiness of novels, films, and comic strips. The only kind that, at that time, truly interested me. That is to say, no conjugal happiness, but the happiness of passion, a furious confusion of evil and good that had befallen her, and not me. 

They’re often seen with distance, hostility, or misplaced desire by others, fighting to inhabit similar spaces until they find separate niches and fight to prove their own the greater success and assuredness.

In the past, there had been Lila, a continuous happy detour into surprising lands. Now, everything I was, I wanted to get from myself. I was almost nineteen. I would never again depend on someone, and I would never again miss someone. 

I wasn’t immediately lost within this book, in part because of the immediate ironing out of the shocking kink in the fabric of Lila’s marriage that we conclude the previous book with. Much of the beginning is stage-setting, with a few remarkable moments of friendship and Lila’s artistic endeavour to destroy or disappear herself. The domesticity and high school stories were less captivating than I hoped for, and it didn’t pick up intensity again until the final days of a summer on Ischia. The breakage, often, is an occasion for brightness in Ferrante’s stories. 

Ferrante writes with a depth and realism that washes over everything, making sharp and kinetic the gossip of women; making smooth and dry the blunt scene of a sexual encounter; making warm and heady a follow-through to freedom. There is so much emotion, so much anger and love and shame and fear in these pages. 

She was explaining to me that… in the world, there is nothing to win, that her life was as full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often, to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound in the brain of the other. 
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