Elena Ferrante

The often stormy relationship between Lila and Nanu has around it a chorus of voices that give shape to its history and show us the reality of a poor neighborhood, inhabited by humble people who simply abide by the law of the strongest, but the great friend is much more than a work of social realism: what we have here are some characters of flesh and blood, who intrigue the reader and dazzle us by the strength and urgency of his emotions.

She's a beautiful, crazy woman, and her name is Lila. She's the same girl we met in The Great Friend, the first take of this splendid trilogy and now, just after the age of 16, she just married a man she despises. The other, who listens, follows her and unintentionally imitates her, is Nanu, a brilliant student, determined to learn from the books everything Lila learns from life to dry.

Lila married the most wealthy man in the neighborhood very young and soon left him. He now lives in a miserable neighborhood, between four wet walls where he shares how little a worker's salary provides with his son and a friend, but his ingenuity has not diminished; he has only become rabies. It is perhaps this hatred of itself that will lead her to capitalize on the riots in the factory and to refuse to a peaceful and modest coexistence with her partner. Elena, on the other hand, has continued the studies and even written a novel. He now lives between Naples and Pisa, and marries a professor at the University of Florence.

The lost girl puts an end to "Two Women," the story of two friends who were born in the mid-20th century in Naples and from little ones were sharing a complex friendship, with moments of doubt or absence, but always accomplices. Lina and Elena are now adults and have taken different paths: Elena left Naples to marry and become a successful writer in Milan.