Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

through my book and this time it seemed to me well put together, written with mastery. My mother said sourly: Did you win the lottery? I left the paper on the kitchen table without saying anything.
    In the late afternoon Signora Spagnuolo reappeared, I was wanted again on the telephone. In response to my embarrassment, my apologies, she said she was very happy to be able to be useful to a girl like me, she was full of compliments. Gigliola had been unlucky, she sighed on the stairs, her father had taken her to work in the Solaras’ pastry shop when she was thirteen, and good thing she was engaged to Michele, otherwise she’d be slaving away her whole life. She opened the door and led me along the hall to the telephone that was attached to the wall. I saw that she had put a chair there so that I would be comfortable: what deference was shown to someone who is educated. Studying was considered a ploy used by the smartest kids to avoid hard work. How can I explain to this woman—I thought—that from the age of six I’ve been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?
    “Did you read it?” Adele asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Are you pleased?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then I’ll give you another piece of good news: the book is starting to sell, if it keeps on like this we’ll reprint it.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “It means that our friend in the
Corriere
thought he was destroying us and instead he worked for us. Bye, Elena, enjoy your success.”

11.
    The book was selling really well, I realized in the following days. The most conspicuous sign was the increasing number of phone calls from Gina, who reported a notice in such-and-such a newspaper, or announced some invitation from a bookstore or cultural group, without ever forgetting to greet me with the kind words: The book is taking off, Dottoressa Greco, congratulations. Thank you, I said, but I wasn’t happy. The articles in the newspapers seemed superficial, they confined themselves to applying either the enthusiastic matrix of
l’Unità
or the ruinous one of the
Corriere
. And although Gina repeated on every occasion that even negative reviews were good for sales, those reviews nevertheless wounded me and I would wait anxiously for a handful of favorable comments to offset the unfavorable ones and feel better. In any case, I stopped hiding the malicious reviews from my mother; I handed them all over, good and bad. She tried to read them, spelling them out with a stern expression, but she never managed to get beyond four or five lines before she either found a point to quarrel with or, out of boredom, took refuge in her mania for collecting. Her aim was to fill the entire album and, afraid of being left with empty pages, she complained when I had nothing to give her.
    The review that at the time wounded me most deeply appeared in
Roma
. Paragraph by paragraph, it retraced the one in the
Corriere
, but in a florid style that at the end fanatically hammered at a single concept: women are losing all restraint, one has only to read Elena Greco’s indecent novel to understand it, a novel that is a cheap version of the already vulgar
Bonjour Tristesse
. What hurt me, though, was not the content but the byline. The article was by Nino’s father, Donato Sarratore. I thought of how impressed I had been as a girl by the fact that that man was the author of a book of poems; I thought of the glorious halo I had enveloped him in when I discovered that he wrote for the newspapers. Why that review? Did he wish to get revenge because he recognized himself in the obscene family man who seduces the protagonist? I was tempted to call him and insult him atrociously in dialect. I gave it up only because I thought of Nino, and made what seemed an important discovery: his experience and mine were similar. We had both refused to model ourselves on