The Beach at Night

Accidentally left at the beach by a five-year-old girl named Mati, a doll endures a disturbing night by the sea in pseudonymous novelist Ferrante’s (nominal) first children’s book. Narrating in first person, the doll doesn’t mince words, whether about the cat that she fears has displaced her (“I hope he has diarrhea, and vomits, and stinks so much that Mati is grossed out and gets rid of him”) or about the Mean Beach Attendant who shows up, rakes the doll and other discarded objects into a pile, and sets them on fire, all while singing an obscene song (“Open your maw/ I’ve shit for your craw/ Drink up the pee/ Drink it for me”). Readers only learn the doll’s name, Celina, when the beach attendant pulls a hook from his mouth, “hanging on a disgusting thread of saliva,” to steal it from her. Cerri’s eerie scenes of the glassy-eyed doll are well-suited to the ominous nature of Ferrante’s story, but although Celina and Mati are eventually reunited, it’s the disconcerting combination of the doll’s intensely human emotions and complete lack of agency that leaves the strongest impression. Ages 6–10. (Nov.)

Peek Inside Elena Ferrante’s Chilling Children’s Book

Illustrator Mara Cerri talks about her illustrations, and the author’s playful balance of dark and light.

Maddie Crum

EUROPA

The story – although written for children – handles some of the same cerebral themes Ferrante confronts in her adult novels.

MARA CERRI

The Beach at Night – The complete review’s Review:

The Beach at Night is a book for children — short (21 pages of text, along with many full-page illustrations (by Mara Cerri)), printed in large typeface, and narrated by a five-year-old girl’s doll. It is a simple but also dark tale: the girl, Mati, and the doll, Celina, have a good relationship, but in the excitement of the father bringing Mati a cat, Minù, Celina is forgotten at the beach at the end of the day and spends an unpleasant night. There is a happy ending — a very happy one, as pretty much everything gets sorted out as dawn breaks the next morning — but Celina certainly had some heavy experiences up to that point.
Ferrante sets the scene effectively, from Mati’s brother dumping sand on her as he digs a hole — helping ensure she’s overlooked when they leave the beach — to Celina’s dislike of the cat that has, in an instant, usurped her role and gets all the attention. She still believes in Celina, however — “Maybe it’s just a game she invented to scare me”, she rationalizes.
Celina doesn’t just have to deal with the elements, but also the Mean Beach Attendant and the Big Rake, who rake her up, along with all the rest of the end-of-day detritus left on the beach. Looking over their haul when they’ve raked everything together they’re disappointed by the ugly doll — but still see some possibility of cashing-in, suspecting she “still has words in her”. Celina does, but suppresses them:

     I quickly collect all Mati’s words and hide them in my chest. Only the Name she gave me stays behind.

That’s not enough to impress the Mean Beach Attendant and his colleague, and Celina’s fate looks to be sealed in very unpleasant fashion. She struggles to hold onto her words and identity, but the forces working against her — human and natural — are near-overwhelming. Respite, of sorts, comes underwater in the ocean — where: “The words that Mati taught me are quiet. They float inside my chest, inside my stomach” — but the Mean Beach Attendant hasn’t given up on fishing her (and them) out.
It all works out, however: an unlikely savior comes and brings Celina back into the family fold, where Mati has been crying all night over her lost doll.
While everything works out, Celina’s trials are very menacing, and elemental as they are — literally too (fire and water), as well as the no less discomfiting attentions of the big males (promising, for example: “The tongue I slice / Right off, in a trice”) — may be too close for comfort for the kids. Ferrante’s focus on language (over anything physical) as the essential part of Celina helps make the physical discomforts slightly easier to take — but the concern about what happens when Celina loses her name and words, the fate she imagines, then is almost no less terrifying:

I won’t remember anything. I won’t know how to say anything, not even the dear name of Mati.

Unable to act — she’s a doll and she can’t move by herself — she’s at the mercy of those (and of nature) around her. All she has is her words — sufficient, when she’s with Mati, but overnight also putting her in more danger, because the Mean Beach Attendant wants them.
It’s hard not to see The Beach at Night as nightmare-inducing: between coming close to being burnt alive (well, doll-alive) and being submerged in the ocean, Ferrante’s descriptions can be almost too vivid. Then there’s the disagreeable figure of the Mean Beach Attendant, a constantly threatening presence. The affection, confidence, and trust Celina has in the mini-mother-figure that is Mati counters some of this, but one has to wonder whether it is sufficient.
Or, of course, one can consider that it’s okay to terrify the kids for a bit: after all, Ferrante does set everything calmly, nicely right again, in a very reassuring manner. But, yes, she only does so after all — and that all is quite a difficult journey to go through, for doll and reader alike.

Early American reactions — reviews in The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review — also express concerns about kids being able to handle this sort of stuff. Or parents: a first objection is the use of the word ‘shit’ — so outrageous, apparently, that both reviews don’t even use the word (though leaving no doubt about it). Apparently, the United States remains so puritanical that one can’t print it in a family newspaper — much less a kid’s book. (A preview-piece in the Wall Street Journal also noted the presence of: “a four-letter expletive” and asked the editor in chief of publisher Europa Editions whether it would be changed for publication; even he said: “I should think so” at the time, though ultimately they decided against it.)
The expletive debate seems silly, but Nora Krug does have a point in her Washington Post review, that this instance of it also seems unnecessary, as there are alternatives which would not only be adequate but more fitting; indeed, here (“Open your maw / I’ve shit for your craw”) and elsewhere Ann Goldstein’s translation can have an overly harsh quality to it; given the darkness of the story, a bit of softening would not have hurt.
The early American reviews also express concern about the story’s ‘sexual overtones’, though this seems more like something American adults are more likely to read into the text (and every text …) and would go essentially unnoticed — certainly as sexual — by the kids. But you can see how some American adults might get hysterical about the first illustration, which shows Mati walking away from the half-buried doll on the still fairly crowded beach, her new cat resting on her shoulder — and the five-year-old doesn’t have a bathing suit on, her very tan-lined pale bottom fully exposed. (Presumably the public libraries that do purchase the book will be forced to put a sticker over that, and the *expletive* ?)

In these very sensitive times parents presumably want to be forewarned about this sort of content, and it’s probably a good idea for them to read the story before reading or giving it to the kids. The dark cover, and the fact that Ferrante wrote this, should be warning enough that this isn’t a light, comic read — but, everything else aside, one hopes at least that parents have enough faith in what their kids can handle to not be scared off of sharing it with them by the mention of the word ‘shit’.
Still: some caution is certainly advised: kids that are too young, very impressionable, or over-protected might not be able to handle this (not the ‘shit’, but the rest).

– M.A.Orthofer, 19 October 2016

The latest Elena Ferrante controversy: Her children’s book, ‘The Beach at Night’

If there’s one thing we do know about the author who writes under the name Elena Ferrante, it’s that she can’t seem to find a break from controversy. Last week the author was at the center of a firestorm over privacy when an Italian journalist claimed to have identified Ferrante as the translator Anita Raja. Now Ferrante has started a debate over whether a children’s book she’s about to publish in the United States is appropriate for children.

“The Beach at Night,” by Elena Ferrante and Mara Cerri (Europa Editions)

The book, “The Beach at Night,” was originally published in Italy in 2007 as a children’s title. Europa Editions, which is publishing the book in the U.S. on Nov. 1, recommends the book for 8-to-10-year-olds.

But the U.S. audio publisher, Blackstone, has deemed the book too dark and mature for young audiences. Its version, which is read by Natalie Portman and will also be released Nov. 1, includes an expletive, which also appears in the print edition.

Blackstone said it made its decision after reviewing the text, which contains not just the word “s–t” but also includes a scene about boys trying to see girls’ underwear and urinate on their feet.

Europa says it is marketing “The Beach at Night” to “Ferrante fans” — the main character, a doll named Celina, is related to “The Story of the Lost Child,” the concluding volume of Ferrante’s phenomenally best-selling Neapolitan series. The publisher said it did not consider changing any parts of the book for a young audience.

Listen to an audio clip of “The Beach at Night

The actor Natalie Portman reads from “The Beach at Night,” by Elena Ferrante

Courtesy of Blackstone Audio

Even without the expletive, “The Beach at Night” is rattling. Narrated by Celina, the story deals with an array of difficult issues: abandonment, jealousy, death by drowning and fire. Celina has been left on a beach at night, seemingly forgotten by her owner, Mati, whose father has just bought the girl a cat named Minù. “I’m very sad, and angry, too,” Celine says. “I don’t like this cat Minù, in fact I hate him. Even his name is ugly. I hope he has diarrhea, and vomits, and stinks so much that Mati is grossed out and gets rid of him.”

[The violation of Elena Ferrante]

In the audio version, which runs nearly 30 minutes, Portman’s haunting narration is told amid the sound of violins, crashing waves and the crackling of a fire. “I’m afraid,” Celine says, as a character called the Mean Beach Attendant of Sunset dumps her in a pile with a plastic pony, a bottle cap, a pen and a beetle on its back, wiggling its legs. Celina, too, soon finds herself struggling to survive amid mounting threats.

Ferrante fans may well find “The Beach at Night” intriguing, and it is certainly beautifully written. Translated from the Italian by the New Yorker editor Ann Goldstein, the book is full of evocative phrasings: The sea is “an elegant lady, with a white fringe of foam” that churns in a storm, its waves “running after one another and fighting to see which is the tallest.” Celina’s tale is powerfully told and complex. She must not only save herself from the beach attendant’s rake, a fire, a storm and the roiling sea that fills her mouth, she must also salvage her voice, the words that her 5-year-old owner has taught her. It is this sense of self that is the most valuable piece of Celina, and the one thing that the beach attendant wants most, so he can sell it.

[Why we should celebrate the Elena Ferrante firestorm]

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Natalie Portman (Frederic Auerbach )

Though compelling and vivid, the book is also deeply chilling, and its vaguely sexual undertones are troubling. To steal Celina’s words, the beach attendant “extends his gnarled, dirty hands, picks me up, tries to open my mouth, shakes me,” Celina says. Then “the Big Rake appears to agree and sticks his teeth out even farther, as if to open up my chest.” Holding Celina, the attendant “clicks his tongue and from between his lips a small Hook emerges, like a raindrop. The Hook, hanging on a disgusting thread of saliva, drops down until it enters my mouth. I quickly collect all Mati’s words and hide them in my chest.”

Children’s literature is full of frightening characters — the Big Bad Wolf, Captain Hook, Cruella de Vil — but the Mean Beach Attendant of Sunset feels more sinister. He’s the stuff of real nightmares, the kind of character you might find in a news story about a lost or abused child, not a fable. In one particularly scary moment, he is shown crunching on the doll’s written name, the end of it hanging over a black mustache that looks like “lizard tails.”

“Mati, mommy, where are you?” Celine cries. “I’m your doll, don’t abandon me. You know what, Mati, if you don’t come and save me right away, if you let me burn, I’ll cry.” Not even Natalie Portman’s mellifluous voice can soften that blow.

It would be too terrible if Celina were to perish in her tormentor’s mouth or by any other means, and thankfully — spoiler alert — she does not. Instead, she gets a very hard lesson in getting past jealousy, in realizing that she is, in fact, wanted.

But young readers may be too far under the covers to hear that.

Nora Krug is a writer and editor for Book World.

Elena Ferrante’s Picture Book Embraces the Dark Side

Elena Ferrante’s wondrous, newly translated picture book, “The Beach at Night,” is going to shock many Americans, especially those who might want to read it to young children. In Europe, darker picture books are common. Presumably just as the children of Europe willingly eat escargots and tripe stew at dinnertime, they fall asleep to picture books with titles like “My First Nightmare” and “A Visit From Death.” So Ferrante’s story of a lost doll’s utterly terrifying night at the beach, illustrated by Mara Cerri with a velvety spookiness, didn’t cause a stir when it was published in Italy in 2007. But it will very likely be a different story here. The audio publisher has classified the book, read by Natalie Portman, as for adults.

First of all, there is an expletive in the book. That will not go over well with libraries and schools, not to mention with most American parents of younger children. It’s unfortunate because the word Ferrante uses in the Italian edition of the book, “La Spiaggia di Notte,” is “cacca” — an innocuous word used by every Italian child and parent, just the way Americans use “poo.” I can’t figure out why Ann Goldstein, the American translator of Ferrante’s novels, would turn “cacca” into a much cruder Anglo-Saxon word for “excrement.”

In any case, the passage in which the word appears is disturbing. The lost doll, Celina, is tormented by a mean beach attendant. He taunts her with a cruel song, which Goldstein translates as:

Open your maw
I’ve [expletive] for your craw
Drink up the pee
Drink it for me
Shhh! Not a word.

The original Italian is much simpler and more childlike. Clearly Goldstein was trying to make it rhyme in English, but the antiquated phrasing is not true to the sing-songy spirit of the original, which translates literally as: “Open your mouth / Eat the poo / Drink the pee,” and so on. Still, poor Celina!

Her horror intensifies. It’s a fairy-tale kind of horror, of course, but something about Ferrante’s abandoned doll, who cannot even move on her own, seems especially vulnerable and helpless before the malevolent universe. A sharp rake approaches ferociously, pushing her into a pile of trash. The beach attendant calls her ugly, and she yells back at him, which makes him emit a saliva-soaked hook from his mouth and stick it into hers to pull out her words. Finding none, he flings her back to the trash pile and sets it on fire. The doll watches as fellow toys start melting. “Mati, Mommy, where are you?” she calls to her owner. “I’m your doll, don’t abandon me.”

She recalls how Mati used to defend her, even when “boys wanted to hit us, kiss us, see our underpants,” and urinate on their feet. In the Italian edition Ferrante uses a babyish word for penises (“pisilletti,” or little peas) that, once again, is not particularly charged in Italian but that Goldstein renders into English with a coarse word American parents don’t use with children. The whiff of sexual predation will also be striking to American readers of picture books. It must be said that while plenty of children have these kinds of upsetting experiences, this is language and behavior that does not appear in American picture books.

Just as Celina’s dress starts burning with a “nasty smell,” a wave washes her out to sea. She sinks and feels herself fill with water, falling into a kind of trance — a death-trance, perhaps? All seems lost for Celina, though she is now in a nice, dreamy state. “How much time has passed?” she asks. “I’m as mute as a fish, a crab, a starfish. … How peaceful.”

The final plot turn makes it clear Ferrante means to conjure not a cruel death but its opposite: birth. The hook comes back to yank the doll out of the water, back to the beach. “I’ve barely got time to clamp my mouth around the last remaining word: Mamma,” Celina says. In Mara Cerri’s beautiful, evocative illustration, dawn is just breaking in the dark sky, and the long hook is electric pink and curled like an umbilical cord. A Dark Animal picks up the doll and runs off. It’s the new pet cat that distracted her owner, Mati, when she left Celina at the beach. The girl has been crying all night, missing Celina, and they have a sweet reunion. The doll asks Mati if she knows that she was almost killed. Mati, “who always knows everything, like a perfect mamma,” responds: “I know.” It is a weird and magnificent sequence that distills many ideas and motifs in Ferrante’s novels, her vision of motherhood as life-giving, comforting, terrifying and deathly, all at once.

From the book’s first pages, in fact, grown-up Ferrante readers will feel a jolt of recognition: In Ferrante novels like “My Brilliant Friend” and “The Lost Daughter,” lost dolls conjure the intimate, sometimes treacherous bonds between mothers and daughters and friends. At the beginning of “My Brilliant Friend,” a doll is dropped down into a scary cellar. And a doll lost at the beach sets in motion the narrator’s psychological unraveling in “The Lost Daughter,” when the narrator realizes that she herself has taken it. At her rented beach apartment she finds herself dressing and undressing the doll, then playing with it as a child does. She discovers a vile dark liquid inside it, and then a worm, which the doll’s small owner, she guesses, put there to simulate a pregnancy.

“The Beach at Night” exists within this same rich symbol system. But is its escalating terror, with its sexual and scatological overtones, too extreme for children? I think that’s a question of cultural expectations about childhood, and about picture books. Europeans see picture books as an art form like any other and don’t worry much about whether a book is “for children” or “for adults”; they figure that will sort itself out once the book gets into the world. I don’t know if American children will be shaken by the book itself — I agree with Europeans and others who think we are often ridiculous and misguided in our attempts to “protect” children from literary material that reflects the harshness of real life — but they will surely be surprised if their elders choose to read it to them.

For Ferrante’s grown-up readers, though, this book will be a small delight, another lovely and brutal glimpse of female subtext, of the complicated bonds between mothers and daughters in a cruel and indifferent world.

100 Books to Read for the Rest of 2016

The Beach at Night by Elena Ferrante, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein, & with illustrations by Mara Cerri (Europa)

Weird, spooky, and apparently for kids, the latest-in-English work from the justly celebrated Ferrante is told from the point of view of a doll abandoned on a beach overnight.

“Clearly, this is not your typical children’s book—and the 12 chilling illustrations by Mara Cerri only add to the feeling of uneasiness. But as Celina faces a series of nocturnal perils, the sense of dread and abandonment so pervasive in Ferrante’s mature works comes to seem just as fitting in the world of children.”

ON THE SHELF

Beware the Mean Beach Attendant, and Other News

March 21, 2016 | by Dan Piepenbring

• Today in parenting, Ferrante style: next year you can lull your sons and daughters to sleep with The Beach at Night, Ferrante’s new book, aimed at readers six to ten. It’s a sunny, feel-good story, suffused with light and hope: “The Beach at Night is a spinoff of The Lost Daughter, one of the author’s lesser-known early novels, in which a teacher goes on vacation in a coastal town and steals a doll from a child. InThe Beach at Night, the doll isn’t stolen. Instead, she is abandoned by her young owner to face nighttime terrors such as the Mean Beach Attendant of Sunset and his friend, the Big Rake … ‘A Beach Attendant arrives, I don’t like his eyes,’ the doll says, according to a sample translation … ‘He folds up the big beach umbrellas, the chaises. I see the hairs of his mustache moving over his lips like lizards’ tails.’ ”

Rejoice, Ferrante Fans! A New (Children’s) Novel Is On Its Way

BY SARAH SELTZER

Few grown-up (and very dark) novels have been feted with the kind of midnight release parties that awaited The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth novel in Elena Ferrante’s obsessed-over Neapolitan novel series.

Since that concluding chapter, those of us with “Ferrante Fever” have awaited new Ferrante writing, while the media has obsessively tried to figure out who the elusive author is, to little avail.

Now her U.S. publisher Europa has announced on Twitter that a children’s book spinning off her earlier novel The Lost Daughter (separate and not to be confused with The Story of the Lost Child). Narrated by the doll from The Lost Daughter, the children’s book will be called The Beach At Night. 

Elena Ferrante wrote a children’s book so that kids can learn life’s brutal realities

Thu-Huong Ha

Fans of the secretive, bestselling Italian author Elena Ferrante will soon be able to share her fiction with the next generation.

Best known for her compulsively readable Neapolitan series, Ferrante also published a children’s book in Italy in 2007: La Spiaggia di Notte. It will finally be released in English on Dec. 6 this year, according to a representative from her publisher, Europa Editions.

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