The Story of a New Name

Lila is tall, slender, and beautiful with dark hair, pale skin and dark eyes that “narrowed to cracks” when she is determined or angry (72). According to her elementary school teacher, Maestra Oliviero, Lila was an exceptional student and “‘destined for great things”’ (381). However, because her father didn’t support the progression of her studies, she has terminated her formal education at middle school.

By marrying wealthy grocer Stefano Carracci, Lila hopes to rise above the impoverished circumstances of her birth. Yet, when Stefano betrays her trust, by giving Marcello Solara “the vestige of the child Lila, the evidence of her work on the shoes she had designed,” she considers her partnership with Stefano to be immediately over (18). From then on, Lila goes on a vindictive quest to assert herself against Stefano’s will and to subvert all of his prohibitions. Her opposition to Stefano is such that he imagines, somewhat superstitiously, that she is performing some witchcraft to stop herself from getting pregnant: “With that force she has, she murders the children inside” (85).

Outwardly, Lila makes a good show of thriving despite Stefano’s abuse, stamping her own signature on the Piazza dei Martiri shoe store. Internally, however, she feels the approach of “imminent death: lack of energy, lethargy […] a dulling of the senses” (295). Conversely, her love affair with Nino reignites her intellectual brilliance, sexually awakens her, and brings her back to life. She is ruthless in removing Nino from his girlfriend Nadia and in sabotaging Elena’s own chances with the longstanding object of her affection.

When Lila becomes pregnant, although she cannot be certain of her child’s paternity, she is spurred on by the new life energy Nino has given her and she does not hesitate to relinquish the wealth of her marriage to be with him and inhabit his intellectual milieu. However, when her brilliance and independence of thought outshines “timid,” scholarly Nino, he becomes intimidated by her and leaves (359). While the love affair is temporary, it returns Lila to herself and she continues, both by educating her son and through her friendship with Enzo, to apply herself to intense study and improvement. 

Rino Cerullo, Lila’s older brother and her childhood idol, is a man who dreams of wealth without understanding how to generate it. A cobbler by training, he allows himself to be manipulated by the neighborhood’s powerful men—his brother-in-law Stefano Carracci and Michele Solara. Fickle in his loyalties, Rino forgets his childhood devotion to Lila and his pride in her intelligence (except when it is convenient for him, such as when he asks her to improve his designs for a new line of Cerullo shoes). Rino is also fickle about his passion for Pinuccia Carracci, following her own and her brother’s loss of respect for him.

Rino copes with the news of his brother-in-law’s refusal to help him financially or stop his open affair with Ada (which he believes is “humiliating” to the Cerullo family), “in an unexpected way”: by imitating the most chauvinistic aspects of Stefano’s behavior (395). “Since Stefano beat Lila, he began to beat Pinuccia. Since Stefano had a lover, he found a lover” (395). Arguably, Rino’s inability to stand up to Stefano and define his own destiny, leads him to exert power and doom over his wife, who is Stefano’s sister, but his own dependent. 

Lila’s mother, Nunzia Cerullo, is a passive but important figure in the narrative. Her silence when Lila returns from honeymoon covered in bruises and so battered that “it hurt to sit down,” is an ambiguous reaction that conforms to her society’s silence on domestic violence. Even so, she does nothing to fill the silence or distract from what has happened (44).

Nunzia similarly takes the middle position during the vacation to Ischia, when she reminds Lila that as a married woman, she is responsible to her husband. Even so, she does not forbid her daughter from staying the night away, even if she thinks that Lila’s excuse (that she is going to see an ailing Maestra Oliviero) is not worth telling “lies to a husband” (276).

However, Nunzia, who is full of maternal pride and love for Lila, “nearly shouted” at Stefano when he moves to hit Lila after she is seen with Nino (300). She credits Lila with the success of the Piazza dei Martiri store, saying that “everything, everything” is due to her daughter’s talents (300). 

Although Nunzia thinks that Lila’s disobedience of her husband’s wishes is wrong, she holds onto a better vision of her daughter’s destiny. When the picture of Lila in her wedding dress gains the approval of famous journalists and opera singers, “Nunzia, as long as she lived, went around repeating to everyone that her daughter would have had the opportunity of becoming a singer and actress […] even becoming an Egyptian princess […] if fate had not let her marry, at the age of sixteen, Stefano Carracci” (88). When Lila’s life takes a distinctly unglamorous turn, following her banishment to San Giovanni a Teducci, Nunzia comforts herself with stories of what her daughter’s future could have been. 

Elena’s mother, the corpulent, lame woman Elena fears becoming, is the fierce guardian of Elena’s education. When Elena disappears with Antonio after Lila’s wedding, Elena’s mother is waiting for her to return so that she can give her a thorough beating. She almost breaks her daughter’s glasses while she is trying to beat her back into her senses. Similarly, when Elena goes to university, her mother closely guards her Pisan address, as though she fears that someone from the neighborhood will distract Elena and drag her back to where she comes from.

Elena’s mother is as envious as she is proud of Elena’s educational achievements. When Elena receives brand-new school books from Lila, as opposed to the stained “ill-smelling” volumes Maestra Oliviero has procured for her in previous years, “my mother, who had a word of contempt for anything that happened to me, burst into tears as she watched me unwrap the packages” (132). Elena is surprised by her mother’s reaction, putting it down to her own feeling of “impotence” to provide for Elena, given the family’s poverty (132).

After Elena goes to university, her mother is the only member of the family to not be intimidated by her. When Elena gets the flu, this woman, who has barely left Naples, boards the train to Pisa to visit her and subdue the fever into submission. Both “helpful and aggressive,” Elena’s mother boasts that she is the luckiest mother in the neighborhood and that in the end, though Lila had the wedding of a princess, Elena has turned out far better than her friend (413). Elena’s mother gains personal satisfaction and status in the neighborhood because Elena, unlike many of her peers, is in college, neither stuck in the neighborhood nor wrapped up in a sordid affair. 

Seemingly “so kind, so in love” with Lila, Stefano Carracci is in truth a hardheaded businessman who is increasingly ruled both in business and in life by Michele Solara (18). When he gives Lila’s handmade shoes to Marcello Solara, Michele’s brother and Lila’s one-time suitor, Lila feels that Stefano is a “being […] with whom she could share nothing” (36).

Prior to their marriage, Lila thought of Stefano as a “self-confident, but well-mannered youth.” But on their honeymoon, she is repulsed by his body: “he revealed white jaws, a red tongue in the dark hole of his mouth” as though “something in him and around him had broken” (37).

Stefano loves Lila, lavishes her with gifts, and later seems content to ignore that she has run away with Nino, maybe even bearing Nino’s child. By nature, he prefers to avoid conflict and arguments. However, in order to satisfy “an order that was coming to him from very far away, perhaps even from before he was born,” he feels that he must “subdue” Lila and remind her continuously “that she is the female and you’re the male and therefore she has to obey” (41). Following this patriarchal norm, he beats Lila when she insults and disobeys him and does the same with his mistress, Ada Cappuccio, when she shows up at his house uninvited.

When Lila does not get pregnant for a long time, Stefano endures the neighborhood’s mockery. The neighbors say that he does not know how to be a man. Certainly, with Lila, Stefano’s sexuality is a curious mix of apology and brutal self-entitlement. He begins the wedding night defloration “with an expression almost of dejection” when he points to the erection in his “wine-coloured” pajama bottoms (40). Later, he forcibly subdues a biting, fighting Lila, pinning “his huge bent legs” over her thin arms so that he can penetrate her (41).

The feelings of sexual inadequacy that Lila inspires in Stefano lead him to take a mistress, Ada. With Ada, Stefano is as careless as he has been careful with Lila, inviting her to his house every day that Lila is in Ischia. Stefano would like to keep his affair (and his sexual satisfaction) going with Ada, even as he remains married to Lila in order to maintain his respectability. Stefano is outmaneuvered, however, when Michele Solara insists that he must choose and that he has already found an apartment where he can keep Lila as his own mistress. 

Stefano’s sister, Pinuccia Carracci, mainly functions in the narrative to envy and despise Lila. Unlike delicately-built, girlish Lila, Pinuccia is womanly in her desires and amply built with “large, strong legs” (173). When Lila cannot get pregnant, Pinuccia is baldly proud of her pregnancy out of wedlock because it proves her own worth as a fertile woman. She believes that her fiancé Rino’s virility overshadows that of the brother, who has subjected her to Lila’s torture.

Pregnant Pinuccia’s triumph is short-lived: the summer following her wedding, she falls in love with wealthy Bruno Soccavo. At the same time Lila is falling in love with Nino, Pinuccia reveals her feelings for Bruno through her odd behavior, both generally and towards her husband. Consumed by guilt, she insists on going home with Rino, saying that if he does not allow her to do so, “she preferred to die with the child” (242). Pinuccia’s misery only increases after the baby is born. She finds her baby “ugly,” like Rino, with “a pug nose just like Lina” (311). However, Pinuccia finds her fate curiously twinned with Lila’s when Rino, who sees her as his only connection to Stefano, begins to beat her and cheat on her so that he can match Stefano’s aggressions towards his own sister. 

An auto-mechanic, Antonio comes from a family where there has been tragedy and upheaval. His father’s accidental death has been provoked by his mother Melina’s insanity. Later, Donato Sarratore intruded into the family, becoming Melina’s lover even as he helped the family.

Antonio, who is Elena’s boyfriend at the start of the novel, is deeply hurt that “right before his eyes” Elena spends hours with Donato’s son, Nino, at Lila’s wedding (24). Later, when Elena wants Antonio to have sex with her so that she will no longer be a virgin, Antonio tries to elicit a declaration of love from her. He refuses to have sex with her standing up because he loves her and wants “to do it the way it’s done with a wife” (27). When Elena cannot declare the reciprocation of his love, Antonio’s jealousy develops into raving paranoia and distress, causing him to behave erratically.

In a fit of impassioned feeling, Antonio breaks up with Elena when she solicits help from the Solaras to get him out of military service. He is humiliated that Elena has made him look “like someone who sends his woman to ask a favour” and that she has gone to the hated Solaras, who, in the past, took advantage of his sister, Ada (81). Without Antonio, Elena is miserable for a while, but his absence enables her to recommit to her schooling and her mission of escaping the neighborhood.

After his mental breakdown in the army, Antonio forgets that he loathes the Solaras enough to accept a monthly salary in exchange for being available when they need him. However, his hatred of Nino, the fact that both Lila and Elena “both liked the skinny, ugly bastard” who has some “advantage” that Antonio does not recognize, remains consistent (363). Although the Solaras’ instructions are to merely find Nino, Antonio does not hesitate to beat Nino unconscious. From a narrative perspective, Antonio deals unreliable, selfish Nino, who has walked out on his pregnant lover, the punishment that besotted Lila and Elena feel unable to give. 

Ada, Antonio’s sister and the eldest Cappuccio daughter, is tasked with helping her mother clean the stairs, but receives a promotion when Stefano gives her a job in his grocery. Ada, who fears that her mother’s craziness will subject her to low status for life, jumps at the chance to be employed by the powerful Stefano.

Wearing makeup and dressing for a party under her work smock, Ada soon catches sexually frustrated Stefano’s attention. Idolizing Stefano, she knows how to wrap him in a Venusian “net of true, sticky desire” and elicit favor and promotion from him (419). As his mistress, Ada enjoys privileges such as expensive presents and even holidays. The neighborhood women’s hatred of Lila means that they befriend Ada rather than shunning her for her intrusion into the Carraccis’ marriage. She boldly goes over to Stefano’s while Lila is there, ostensibly to clean, but really to assert her status. When Ada becomes pregnant with Stefano’s child, Michele Solara uses this to blackmail Stefano into choosing Ada over Lila.

Feeling that she is Stefano’s true wife, even though he is legally bound to Lila, Ada is “beautiful and serene” when she inherits Lila’s home and possessions (440). “The real mistress of the two groceries,” Ada is strong and able, boasting to Elena that she was working every single day of her pregnancy (440). Ada retains some respect for Lila, however, and tells Elena to tell Lila that she should trust no one, because the Solaras will stop at nothing to assert their dominance over her.  

The womanizing father of Elena’s crush, Nino, Donato Sarratore molested Elena during her first visit to Ischia in the first novel in the Neopolitan quartet, My Brilliant Friend. Lila and Pinuccia find the elder Sarratore gallant because he calls them by their married names and with “fatuous elaboration” describes how he knew them as children. But Elena is disgusted by his sleazy sentimentality (187). She is also critical of his poetry and journalism, which is overladen with classical epithets.

However, on the holiday to Ischia in The Story of a New Name, when Elena is crushed by Lila and Nino’s affair, she begins to allow Donato’s attentions. Sensing that Elena feels unattractive in comparison to her friends, Donato tells her that with her blonde hair, she is far prettier and needs only to upgrade her glasses and swimsuit to do justice to her beauty. Eager to “put his hands on” Elena, Donato jumps at the chance to take her virginity (290). However, while he wants a repeat of the adventure, he is surprised when Elena, in “calm,” authoritative Italian, tells him that if he even tries to approach her again, she will send the Camorrist Michele Solara after him (292). 

The male idol of Elena and then Lila, Nino Sarratore becomes the romantic embodiment of the girls’ desire to escape the neighborhood and the hand-to-mouth conditions of their birth. When Elena sees Nino in the home movie of Lila’s wedding, she notices “the poverty of his clothes,” “his extreme thinness, which was accentuated by his height,” and most of all, the carelessness with which he brushes past the Solara brothers on his way out (60). Nino’s thinness, which is contrary to the muscular ideal of the macho neighborhood, as well as his dishevel led appearance, reflect an intellectual masculine ideal of a completely different place. Elena considers that “Sarratore’s son—who had grown up in the run-down buildings of the old neighbourhood just like us […] now appeared completely outside the scale of values whose peak stood the Solaras” (60). 

Lila initially and correctly regards the book-learned, smug Nino as “arrogant.” But when she is entrapped in Signora Carracci’s materialistic persona, Nino’s intellectualism ignites her own dormant passion (61). Soon, intellectual passion turns to sexual passion. Nino leaves the daughter of his ex-teacher, Professor Galiani, for Lila and demands a similar sacrifice from her.

The formerly rational Nino’s desire for Lila is such that, after Ischia, when Lila is reunited with her husband and he cannot see her, he quits studying and loiters in the crowded grocery “unshaved and totally drunk” until Lila leads him to the secluded setting of her apartment (338). Nino, who suffers without Lila, initially takes a passive role in their courtship, because Lila is the one who figures out the logistics of how they can be together. He grateful for the furtive hours in the grocery store, but when they live together in shabby surroundings, he begins to complain that she has overshadowed him and that she is distracting him from the serious pursuit of his studies.

Nino, who is intellectually competitive and wants to be the best, does not know what to make of Lila’s free-thinking intellectual boldness, her desire to engage every speaker at the lectures they attend, and her linguistic perfectionism when she corrects his article. Intimidated by her dominance, her talent, and her pregnancy, Nino decides to leave. When he thinks to change his mind, if only to make love to Lila one last time, he is violently apprehended by a disguised Antonio. Nino never finds a way to return to Lila and decides to forge his own path, away from both Lila and Naples.

While Nino disappears for a while, he reappears at the end of the novel to attend Elena’s book reading—a reminder that he still exerts an unfulfilled fascination for Elena. 

In Lila’s words, Michele Solara is “a shit Camorrist who thinks he’s God’s gift” (282). “Tall and muscular” and bedecked in gold jewelry, Michele is ruthlessly ambitious in business and is a member of the most powerful family in the neighborhood (60). It was his brother Marcello who, in My Brilliant Friend, courted Lila and forced her into an engagement with him. In this novel, Marcello fades into the background. It is Michele who pursues Lila.

Impressed by Lila’s beauty, creativity and business acumen, Michele faces the wrath of his fiancée Gigliola Spagnuolo when he replaces her with Lila at the Piazza dei Martiri store. He also flirts with Lila, putting her photograph in the store, praising her artistic talents when she cuts it up, and treating her with a respect that he normally does not apply to women, or indeed, anyone. When Michele speaks of his desire to look and listen to Lila, “without his teasing tone of voice” and looks “slightly anxious” in his delivery, it is an indication that his admiration for Lila is real (390).

Michele wants to keep Lila as his mistress and even after she refuses, he deals with Stefano to get an apartment for her and her son Gennaro in the Piazza dei Artisti. He is outmaneuvered when Enzo helps Lila disappear out of the neighborhood to San Giovanni dei Teducci.

An old woman by the second book of Ferrante’s quartet, Maestra Oliviero nevertheless plays a symbolic role in the narrative. She reports that “in her entire career as a teacher she never had such a good student” as Lila (285). She also, unbeknownst to Lila, admired her childhood novel, The Blue Fairy. When she finds Lila in the public gardens with her son, however, she taunts her, dismissing her achievements as a wife and mother. “Everyone can do that,” leaving Lila with a complex that everyone in her family, whether ancestors or descendants, will be “stupid” (381, 382). 

Elena’s middle class yet Communist-leaning high school teacher, Professor Galiani, encourages her scholastic efforts, lending her books and newspapers and inviting her to a party at her home. Professor Galiani’s son reports how “‘our mother never misses a chance to torment us by reading us your papers”’ (153). This character is the mother of beautiful Nadia, Nino’s girlfriend. Elena sees the whole Galiani family, who live in a house full of books, as superior.

However, when Nino breaks up with Nadia, Professor Galiani grows cold towards Elena. Even when Elena denies that she was the reason that Nino left her daughter, Professor Galiani never again goes out of her way to promote Elena. The suggestion that Elena should try out for the Pisa Normale comes from an external examiner, not from her teacher.

Nino’s university friend and benefactor, Bruno Soccavo, is “very short, with a low forehead, black curly hair, a pleasant face but scarred with what must have been severe acne” (197). He is the wealthy heir to the Soccavo mortadella fortune in San Giovanni a Teduccio. Bruno seems shy and often reluctant to talk to Elena, whom he likes. Yet he seems debonair when he takes the pregnant Pinuccia off to buy coconut, even as Nino insists on speaking about intellectual matters with Elena and Lila.

However, Bruno’s meek exterior conceals a sexual predator. Although his exact attentions to Pinuccia are not elaborated on, they cause her great distress when she falls in love with him. However, he immediately forgets Pinuccia when she leaves and he pounces on Elena, kissing and touching her without her consent. He behaves a similar way with his female employees at the mortadella factory, according to Lila, showing up at work only “to see who of us he can fuck in the ageing room” (463).  

Enzo Scanno, the once fierce son of the fruit and vegetable seller, considers himself “short, ugly, and worthless.” Enzo loves Lila without any hope of that affection being returned (369). He breaks up with his fiancée Carmen for her and rescues her once from the humiliating situation where Nino has left her and a second time, when Lila’s husband has sold her into the care of Michele Solara.

Scrupulous and rational, Enzo manages to deliver Lila and Gennaro out of the Solaras’ clutches and support them as best he can. He respects Lila’s request that he make no sexual advance on her and earns her admiration for his prowess in mathematics and the diligent study he makes of the subject after work. Lila lights up when she talks to Elena about Enzo, saying that “he’s not afraid of anything, he’s extremely smart and he studies at night, he knows so many things” (465). Enzo is thus set up to play a prominent role in Lila’s future.