The Story of a New Name

The Ischia summer that opens this volume puts Lila, newly married to Stefano, in the company of Nino Sarratore, and Elena watches the affair take shape from a few feet away, invited along specifically so Lila will have a chaperone, and specifically excluded from the thing she wants most. When Nino abandons Lila not long after, pregnant and humiliated, Elena responds not with comfort but with a different, quieter betrayal of her own: alone on the same beach, she sleeps with Nino's father, Donato Sarratore, a joyless, deliberate act less about desire than about claiming some scrap of the Sarratore name for herself, since the son was never going to be available. She frames it privately, even at the time, as revenge she has no honest way of aiming at either Nino or Lila, a theft of experience standing in for a theft of feeling.

Before the summer, Lila hands Elena a box of childhood notebooks for safekeeping, an act of trust from a woman who trusts almost no one; Elena reads every page, absorbs Lila's voice and observations into her own developing style, and then, alone in Pisa, drops the originals into the Arno. It is theft dressed as loyalty: the notebooks make Elena's first novel possible, built partly out of a genius she has just made sure Lila can never prove was ever there, and Ferrante treats the river as the exact point where Elena's writing career and her envy of Lila become impossible to separate. Lila, told what happened, answers with the same flat indifference she shows the rest of the volume, as if losing the only record of her own childhood mind cost her nothing at all, an unreadable calm Elena can never decide is real.

The Cerullo shoes Lila designed with her brother Rino years earlier finally reach the market through a new shop bankrolled by the Solara brothers, and the shop's opening display features an enlarged wedding photograph of Lila, staged and retouched into an advertisement she never agreed to. Lila responds by defacing it, cutting and repainting the image until it no longer resembles a product, a small, furious reclamation of her own image from men who have spent the whole volume treating her body and her talent as assets to be sold on someone else's terms.