A review by teniamonet
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

emotional reflective medium-paced

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

5.0

This was probably the messiest story in the lineup, I wanted to root for Elena but at times I really couldn’t agree with her actions. To follow Elena’s journey through her career as a writer, a wife, a mother and an adulterer with the background of political tensions was addictive. 

I think book three might be my favorite out of all of them because we got to spend more time with Elena without Lila’s influence. On the other side of that though who really is Elena when she’s not trying to fit into a mold of high intelligence or what it is that Franco, Nino, or Pietro like? Elena starts to try to uncover this especially with her feminist writings but I don’t feel like she ever truly got there and was just regurgitating her readings and some of what she observed throughout her life whenever she wrote or spoke in public.

I concluded that first of all I had to understand better what I was. Investigate my nature as a woman. I had been excessive, I had striven to give myself male capacities. I thought I had to know everything, be concerned with everything. What did I care about politics, about struggles. I wanted to make a good impression on men, be at their level. At the level of what, of their reason, most unreasonable. Such persistence in memorizing fashionable jargon, wasted effort. I had been conditioned by my education, which had shaped my mind, my voice. To what secret pacts with myself had I consented, just to excel. And now, after the hard work of learning, what must I unlearn. Also, I had been forced by the powerful presence of Lila to imagine myself as I was not. I was added to her, and I felt mutilated as soon as I removed myself. Not an idea, without Lila. Not a thought I trusted, without the support of her thoughts. Not an image. I had to accept myself outside of her. The gist was that. Accept that I was an average person. What should I do. Try again to write. Maybe I didn’t have the passion, I merely limited myself to carrying out a task. So don’t write anymore. Find some job. Or act the lady, as my mother said. Shut myself up in the family. Or turn everything upside down. House. Children. Husband.

To be angry with Elena and Lila for the things that they do as mothers you have to wonder if you would have the same type of ire towards a man. 

Pietro is an interesting character, to admire Elena’s smarts and be drawn to her because of that. But once she becomes the mother of his children it was as if he just wanted her to settle into the role of the stay at home mother and wife with no other engagements, let alone a career. We see many times how he doesn’t actually take an interest in her writing but when Nino does or when Elena sends her work to Adele without Pietro reading it he would be upset. I think Pietro was a spineless man. 

Certainly I must have seemed to him an intolerable spectacle: he jumped up, and went inside. But I ran after him and continued shouting all manner of things: my love for Nino since I was a child, the new possibilities of life that he revealed to me, the unused energy I felt inside me, and the dreariness in which he, Pietro, had plunged me for years, his responsibility for having kept me from living fully. 

I got lost following Enzo, who could say proudly: Without her I wouldn’t be able to do it. Thus he conveyed to us his love and devotion, and it was clear that he liked to remind himself and others of the extraordinary quality of his woman, whereas my husband never praised me but, rather, reduced me to the mother of his children; even though I had had an education he did not want me to be capable of independent thought, he demeaned me by demeaning what I read, what interested me, what I said, and he appeared willing to love me only provided that I continually demonstrate my nothingness. 

The separation of Elena and Pietro definitely needed to happen but I wish it wasn’t because of Nino/infidelity.

Maybe, I thought, I’ve given too much weight to the cultivated use of reason, to good reading, to well controlled language, to political affiliation; maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.