Elena Ferrante’s novels, whatever else they’re about, are always describing the distance between two points: working-class Naples and the putatively better neighborhoods and cities and social worlds in which her narrators now move. It’s not simply that Ferrante has written about Naples, but that over the course of her work—now eight novels—she has so often sent her characters back and forth along the route between the impoverished old neighborhood and the new life that we know the landmarks well: the raucous and violent family of birth, the childhood wish for a way out, the scholarships, the flight, the studied assumption of middle-class manners.
Source : Making Order of the Breakdown
