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Hillary Clinton loves reading Elena Ferrante

‘It’s just hypnotic,’ she says

BY ALLISON SADLIER

(BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

Posted September 8 2016 — 11:18 AM EDT

There’s nothing like becoming obsessed with a good book, a sensation Hillary Clinton knows very well according to the third episode of her podcast With Her, co-hosted by Max Linsky.

The Democratic presidential nominee chatted about what she does during her limited downtime on the campaign trail and said, “I need the time to collect myself, to catch up on my reading, my sleeping, my exercising all of which get pushed to the bottom of the pile if I don’t make time.”

The nominee notes she reads “the serious stuff I’m supposed to read,” but that “homework” hasn’t stopped her from finding scants of time to read for enjoyment. Clinton counts novels, spy thrillers, mysteries, and biographies among her favorite genres, but admits she’s currently “engulfed” in one series in particular.

“You know what I have started reading and it’s just hypnotic is the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante,” she tells Linsky, commenting on Ferrante’s intoxicating novels about female relationships in Naples, Italy that have an intense cult following. “I had to stop myself so I read the first one. I could not stop reading it or thinking about it.”

Now in an attempt to savor the series, Clinton explains that she’s “rationing” out the second novel to make the four-part series last a little longer – and not keep her from the campaign.

Listen to the full With Her podcast here.

BBC Radio 4

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Episode 1 | Drama,Reading Europe – Italy: My Brilliant Friend

From one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is the first in a quartet of books entitled The Neapolitan Novels. They are a forensic exploration of friendship between Lila and the story’s narrator, Lena. This is no normal friendship, it’s a friendship that loves, hurts, supports and destroys – and yet it is one that lasts a lifetime.

It begins in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets two girls, Elena and Lila, learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone – or anything – else as their friendship, beautifully and meticulously rendered, becomes a not always perfect shelter from hardship.

It is the story of a nation, of a neighbourhood, a city and a country undergoing momentous change.

This first book centres on their childhood and adolescence.

From the book by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein.
Dramatised by Timberlake Wertenbaker
Directed by Celia de Wolff

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

McSweeney’s

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I AM ELENA FERRANTE.

BY 

I have a confession to make: I am Elena Ferrante.

When, in My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante brutally exposed the class divisions in Neapolitan society, that was me. When she documented a tempestuous female friendship in Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, that was me as well. When she declined interview requests from the world’s leading literary publications — also me. They were all me because they were all Elena Ferrante and I am Elena Ferrante.

Much of the speculation around my identity has started from the assumptions that I am female, middle-aged, Italian, from Naples, have lived in Pisa, and am a professor in some humanities-related field. Very few literary detectives have figured out that I am a male, 26-year-old American whose experience with Pisa is limited to viewing a picture of a friend holding up the Leaning Tower through a hilariously original manipulation of perspective, and whose work experience is limited to data entry, SAT tutoring, and multiple unpaid internships.

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The Pool

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How Elena Ferrante made the neglected Naples a must-visit destination

It’s grittier than Rome or Venice, but suddenly tourists, inspired by Ferrante’s tales of Lila and Lenu, are flocking to to Naples. Let Katherine Wilson be your guide

By Katherine Wilson

Ever since I moved to Naples 20 years ago and fell in love with the city, I’ve had a conversation that has repeated itself endless times with Anglo-American friends. It starts with an enthusiastic “We’re coming to Italy!” and ends with me sounding like I’m being paid by the Neapolitan tourist commission. My friends tell me that they’re going to Rome, Florence, Venice. Not Naples. They may travel through it to get the boat for Capri or the Amalfi Coast… but stay there? No, thanks. We’ve heard that it’s dirty and dangerous. Gritty, rough, corrupt.

What about the Caravaggios? The medieval castles in the centre of the city? The magnificent opera house that Mozart longed to play in, and food that is arguably the best in the world? Not to mention the people – big-hearted, hilariously charismatic Southerners who can entertain your pants off just by answering a simple question about directions!

Better not. There are so many other places to see in Italy.

I gave up. You don’t want to experience it? Your loss. Statevene a casa, they would say in Neapolitan dialect. Stay at home.

And then a woman – or a man, somebody! – calling themselves Elena Ferrante wrote four novels set in the poorest, most corrupt part of Naples at the poorest, most corrupt time in the city’s history. Now all my friends want to visit Naples. The human psyche is a mysterious thing.

I loved Ferrante’s novels, don’t get me wrong. I’m embarrassed to say that I screamed an ugly swear word at my children at one point when they interrupted me toward the end of book four. The writer not only portrays female relationships with depth and nuance, but captures the contradictions that are at the heart of Naples and Neapolitan culture. She/he/it recreates the gritty, the dangerous, and the lurid and sets it against the sensory paradise that is Napoli. A bright beam of Mediterranean light exposing the dark recesses of the human heart. ‘O sole mio, indeed.

“We’re coming to Naples!” women friends have begun to tell me. They’ve read Ferrante and they can’t get enough. They want to take the risk, to live it. They want to follow one of the Ferrante tours that are now cropping up in the centro, and the Rione Luzzatti. They also want to drink in the beauty of the volcano, the sea, the islands of Capri, Ischia and Procida. And eat a pizza that will take them to new levels of transcendence.

Naples has been a tourist destination for three thousand years. Wealthy Roman families came to summer along the coastline of Posillipo, now the posh residential area of the city, and in the 1700s Naples was the place to be: Jean-Jacques Rousseau commented that “if you want to know if you have a spark within you, run – no fly! – to Naples…” Stendhal said, “Naples and Paris, the two only capitals.” But perhaps the last person who was as successful as Ferrante in getting women interested in visiting Naples was Lady Emma Hamilton, wife of the British consul to Naples Lord Hamilton and lover of Lord Nelson. Lady Emma gradually abandoned all social conventions when she settled at the magnificent Villa Emma on the shoreline of Naples, eating and dancing her way to pure Neapolitan bliss. Artists depicted her in her stunning milieu, and the paintings were hotter than Vesuvian lava.

Ferrante not only portrays female relationships with depth and nuance, but captures the contradictions that are at the heart of Naples and Neapolitan culture

Come to Naples, I can imagine her urging her girlfriends in the UK, and I’ll show you a good time.

Recently, I met up with a group of friends who, spurred on by Ferrante, came to Naples and did a tour of the centro. I took them for lunch to Antonio e Antonio, a delectable restaurant and pizzeria that looks out over the medieval Castel dell’Ovo on the waterfront.  After eating an aubergine parmesan that made one of my girlfriends throw a napkin over her face and head and say SILENCE! I CANNOT RECEIVE ANY OTHER STIMULI WHILE I AM EXPERIENCING THIS, they asked where they should go in the afternoon.

I toyed with the idea of some of the magnificent Bourbon palaces, the ruins of the Roman city of Pozzuoli. But those suggestions, beautiful as they are, are not seductive. And as Lady Emma and Elena Ferrante have showed us, Naples does not impress, it seduces.

“Let’s go see Villa Emma.”

My friends, after their day of seeing the many colours and emotions of this city (and hitting back numerous shots of the sweet syrupy nectar that is Neapolitan coffee) agreed unanimously that they want to come back. Naples may be outside their comfort zone, but guess what? It’s worth it.

The top Elena Ferrante destinations:

  1. The stradone of Elena and Lila’s childhood is based on Via Taddeo da Sessa, which cuts through the Rione Luzzatti: a poor area flanked by the Napoli train station and the prison of Poggioreale (one of the most crowded and dangerous in all of Italy).
  2. Piazza dei Martiri, the site of Lila’s elegant shoe store, is one of the most beautiful piazzas in the middle of the chic Chiaia shopping district.
  3. The rettifilo, where the characters in Ferrante’s novels take Sunday strolls, is the bustling Corso Umberto, where you can find inexpensive shops and street food.
  4. The Bagno Elena beach club (Via Posillipo 14) is next to the lido where Elena brought the children of the stationer to swim. You can rent deck chairs or enjoy the view from the beach bar.
  5. The Parco Virgiliano is at the breathtaking summit of the Posillipo promontory, where Michele Solara buys an extravagant apartment as a status symbol.

Only in Naples: Lessons in Food and Famiglia from My Italian Mother-in-Law by Katherine Wilson is published by Fleet

@kwilsonwriter

The Millions

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Spurn the Translator at Your Own Peril

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A few years ago I was invited to speak at a New York bookstore with Elena Ferrante’s translator,Ann Goldstein. At the time, Ferrante was not yet the literary sensation she is today; she had a few slim volumes out with Europa Editions, for which Ann and I have done an extensive amount of translating — at that point, our combined efforts apparently accounted for over a quarter of their catalog. The event was modestly attended, as such events generally are, even in New York. But for a moment,Ann and I were on stage, visible, recognized for what we do.

Now we have “Ferrante Fever.” For for me as a translator, the phenomenon is doubly fascinating because of the author’s deliberate invisibility. Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym; we suspect she lives in Naples, but other than that she is a mystery. It is Ann Goldstein who has become the “face” of Ferrante — who is interviewed, invited to festivals or events that authors regularly attend. This reversal of the usual relationship between author and translator is an opportunity for the reader to remember — or realize — that not only is literature in translation something to enjoy and cherish, but that it is a collaborative effort. The translator, like the interpreter of a piece of classical music, is an artist in her own right, not merely a backstage employee of the publishing company whose name is all to often left out of reviews or other publicity. (Imagine advertising a concert at Carnegie Hall without crediting the soloist.)

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Literary Hub

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MICHAEL REYNOLDS ON FERRANTE’S CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS (AND ROME VS. NYC)

IN CONVERSATION WITH THE EDITOR OF EUROPA EDITIONS

May 10, 2016  By Francesca Pellas

This interview first appeared in Italian in America 24.

What is “the groundskeeper of the biggest maze in the southern hemisphere” doing in New York working at an Italian-owned publishing house? Very simply, as he has done in the past, he guards secrets.

Michael Reynolds is the editor in chief of Europa Editions, the American younger sister of the Italian press Edizioni E/O. Here, in brief, is the story: in 2005 the husband and wife and the founders of E/O, Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola Ferri, decided to invest in an American publishing house specializing in European literature.

After years spent doing the most fascinating and diverse jobs on three continents (and becoming in the process a human box of stories) Reynolds was an Australian in love, living in Rome. There was an immediate affinity between the Ferris and Reynolds, and he started working for the fledgling Europa Editions, whose main offices at the time were still in the Roman headquarters of E/O. The idea of publishing European authors in a country like the United States, where readers read only (or mostly) books originally written in English, was an ambitious one. “You’re crazy; it’s not going to work,” they were told by many.

Eleven years, two children, several books, and a literary phenomenon later, I pay a visit to Reynolds in Europa Editions’ headquarters in New York. He welcomes me in his office: a room full of light and books, nothing like a maze. He prepares tea while I prepare to collect his stories, stories that run the gamut from his relationship with Italy to the number of copies sold by Elena Ferrante in the United States so far (one million!), from the challenges posed by the profession, to finding and selecting books from abroad that can fare well on this side of the pond.

Francesca Pellas: You’ve had many different jobs in your life: you were a gold miner, a maze groundskeeper, a barman, a windsurfing instructor, a “guinea pig” for sleep deprivation experiments, a poetry teacher, an English teacher, a gardener, a builder, and a translator. You have directed a writer’s festival, a literary magazine, and written three books. Where did you have the most fun?

Michael Reynolds: This is the greatest job that I’ve ever had!

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The Guardian

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Translated fiction sells better in the UK than English fiction, research finds

Survey commissioned by the Man Booker International prize finds authors including Elena Ferrante and Haruki Murakami are driving a boom in UK sales of translated literary fiction

Haruki Murakami

Translated literary fiction is selling better on average in the UK than literary fiction originally written in English, according to new research, with authors including Elena Ferrante, Haruki Murakami and Karl Ove Knausgaard driving a boom in sales.

Though fiction in translation accounts for just 3.5% of literary fiction titles published, it accounted for 7% of sales in 2015, according to a survey commissioned by the Man Booker International prize.

The research, conducted by Nielsen Book, looked at physical book sales in the UK between January 2001 and April 2016. It found that translated fiction sales almost doubled over the last 15 years, from 1.3m to 2.5m copies, while the market for fiction as a whole fell from 51.6m in 2001 to 49.7m in 2015.

Although the proportion of translated fiction is still “extremely low”, at 1.5% overall, the sector still “punches well above its weight”, said the book sales monitor, with that 1.5% accounting for 5% of total fiction sales in 2015.

“On average, translated fiction books sell better than books originally written in English, particularly in literary fiction,” said Nielsen. Looking specifically at translated literary fiction, sales rose from 1m copies in 2001 to 1.5m in 2015, with translated literary fiction accounting for just 3.5% of literary fiction titles published, but 7% of the volume of sales in 2015.

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The Bookseller

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Translated fiction ‘5% of UK fiction sales last year’

Sales of Italian literary fiction rose from 37,000 in 2001 to 237,000 in 2015, due in “no small part” to the Ferrante “phenomenon”.

UK sales of translated fiction represented 5% of all print fiction sales in 2015, a 96% rise in volume from the translated market’s 2001 sales figures, according to statistics from Nielsen Book. A report into the translated fiction market was commissioned by the Man Booker International Prize, with Nielsen Book examining and coding data on physical book sales between 2001 and April 2016.

The report says that the proportion of translated fiction published remains “extremely low” at 1.5% overall and 3.5% of literary fiction. However, in terms of sales, translated fiction “punches well above its weight”, providing 5% of total fiction sales in 2015 and translated literary fiction making up 7% of literary fiction sales in 2015.

According to the report, the translated fiction market is rising against a “stagnating” general fiction market. In 2001, 51.6m physical fiction books were sold, falling to 49.7m in 2015. However, translated fiction rose from 1.3m copies sold a year to 2.5m. In the literary fiction market, the rise was from 1m copies to 1.5m.

However, 2015’s sales were some way off the UK translated fiction market’s peak in 2010, when Stieg Larsson’s Quercus-published Millennium trilogy alone generated £26.7m on sales of five million print units through Nielsen BookScan.

During the period of study, literary fiction books were translated from 91 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish. The most popular source language was French, with 200,000 books selling in 2001, rising to over 400,000 in 2015.  Sales of Italian literary fiction rose from 37,000 in 2001 to 237,000 in 2015, due in “no small part” to the Ferrante “phenomenon”. Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (Europa) was the best selling translated literary fiction title of 2015, selling 108,969 copies. Meanwhile Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name and Those Who Leave and Those Who Staywere the eighth and ninth bestselling translated literary fiction titles, selling 35,229 copies each.

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New York Times Magazine

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Editors’ Picks: Mother’s Day Gift Ideas

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante (boxed set, Kindle Edition)
This may seem terribly basic, but a year ago I bought my mom the first two novels in the Neapolitan series by Elena Ferrante and I couldn’t be more surprised to learn that Ferrante is Mom-approved. She would text me details from the lives of Lila and Elena as if they were people we knew, and I would occasionally have to stop to make sure they weren’t. Maybe it’s a mother-daughter thing, or maybe it’s because my great-grandparents are from Naples, but the Neapolitan novels ended up being a verified hit with my mom. She didn’t wait for me to get her the final two books in the series, but thanks to a box set that came out last October, you can deliver them to your mama all in one go.
$40 at Amazon

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante (on Kindle)
My mom has a master’s in English and reads more than any person I’ve ever met. We are in a book club for two that doesn’t meet formally. I love a book, I tell her to read it. She loves a book, she tells me to read it. We discuss. For months I haven’t been able to shut up about these epic novels about life in postwar Naples and the friendship between two women. I would have given her my hard copies but she’s been practicing the KonMari method since before I was born and would never want a stack of books, so she reads the Kindle editions.
$10 each at Amazon 

Los Angeles Times

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Yuri Herrera and Angélica Freitas win Best Translated Book Awards

Mxican novelist Yuri Herrera, Brazilian poet Angélica Freitas and their translators are the winners of the 2016 Best Translated Book Awards, it was announced Wednesday at a ceremony in New York City.

Herrera and translator Lisa Dillman took home the fiction award for “Signs Preceding the End of the World,” about a young woman who travels from Mexico to the United States in search of her missing brother.

The novel, pubilshed in the U.S by small press And Other Stories, beat out several high-profile books shortlisted for the prize, including Elena Ferrante’s “The Story of the Lost Child,” Clarice Lispector’s “The Complete Stories” and Valeria Luiselli’s “The Story of My Teeth.”

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The Guardian

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Ferrante fever in full swing at the PEN World Voices Festival

Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator, sat in conversation with Judith Thurman, Roxana Robinson and Rebecca Carroll to discuss the author’s work

Naples, setting of Ferrante’s novels, with Versuvius in the background.

Ann Goldstein has two coping mechanisms for translating especially difficult passages of Elena Ferrante’s novels, she told an audience at the PEN World Voices Festival on Thursday.

First, she gets up and walks around the house. Second, “I sit there thinking, ‘Don’t do that, don’t do that!’” said Goldstein. Goldstein is also head of the copy department at the New Yorker. Her translations of the Italian author’s books have garnered much acclaim. Passages about politics and history in the Neapolitan quartet were technically complicated, but the most emotionally wrenching section was the death of a beloved pet in Days of Abandonment.

“I almost had to stop translating, or rather, stop revising it, because I couldn’t bear to read it another time,” Goldstein said.

It is this visceral, “heightened intensity” that makes Ferrante’s novels so compelling, says novelist Roxana Robinson. The Neapolitan quartet, which chronicles the lives of two friends named Elena (also called Lenu) and Lila, from childhood into old age, has become an unexpected success in the US, making the pseudonymous author the subject of much debate. The last novel in the quartet, The Story of the Lost Child, was also recently shortlisted for the Booker prize.

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The Bookseller

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Ferrante makes Time Magazine’s ‘most influential’

Reclusive Italian author Elena Ferrante has been named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, alongside US author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Ferrante, published in English translation by Europa, is the author of most famously of The Neapolitan quartet, which consists of My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child.

The Story of the Lost Child is shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker International Prize, and longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award.

Ferrante’s upcoming children’s book The Beach at Night will be published in November.

Ferrante’s publisher Europa Editions said: “Our deepest, sincerest congratulations to this incredible author.”

Coates is the author of Between the World and Me (Text Publishing Company), which won the National Book Awards’ top prize for non-fiction in 2015, and The Beautiful Struggle (Verso).

Leo Hollis, editor at Verso, said: “We are thrilled to be working with Ta-Nehisi on his memoir The Beautiful Struggle. The recent announcement of his inclusion on the TIMES power 100, alongside his many awards over the last 18 months, is recognition that he is one of the essential voices in the current debate on race in the United States. His writing makes art out of his own life, but also packs a powerful political message. His is a voice that we should all listen to at a time of tension and strife.”

The authors feature alongside the likes of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, US presidential hopeful Donald Trump and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

WNYC

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Finding Your Calling with StoryCorps Founder Dave Isay, Translating the Elusive Elena Ferrante

StoryCorps founder Dave Isay shares stories from people who do what they love in "Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work."

 

StoryCorps founder Dave Isay shares stories from people who do what they love in Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work, and we’ll hear from you! A new film looks at how the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the largest oil spill in U.S. history, has damaged the environment six years later. Ann Goldstein, the translator who brought Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels to English readers, stops by the Leonard Lopate Show Book Club to answer your questions.

Listen

TIME

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Elena Ferrante is one of TIME‘s 100 Most Influential People of the year

time 100 2016 elena ferrante

The bard of Naples

by Lauren Groff

The story we hear most often about the Italian author Elena Ferrante is the story of her absence: her pseudonym and the deliberate choice to disengage from the world as an author. It’s odd, though, to imagine that a photo or biography could tell us more about Ferrante than her astonishing books, translated fluidly into English by the great Ann Goldstein, which together form a topographical map of an extraordinary mind. Her first three novels, Troubling Love, Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter, are knife-sharp, swift and disquieting; her four-novel Neapolitan story is an epic masterpiece, aKünstlerroman of sustained passion and fury. Elena and Lila grow up in macho mid–20th century Naples, fight for education, class and respect, become mothers and wives and lovers, incited by and resisting their own fiery friendship. Ferrante is a subtle subversive; the domestic, in her brilliant books, is a time bomb that ticks too loudly to ignore.

Flavorwire

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Who Wrote the Best Translated Book of 2016?

By |

Three Percent has released the longlist for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award, a prize that comes with a $5,000 payout (for both author and translator) from Amazon, its sponsor. The longlist is appropriately long (25 fiction titles, ten poetry titles) and filled with names famous, familiar, and obscure. Many American readers will be acquainted with the work of Elena Ferrante, Clarice Lispector, Valeria Luiselli, Andrés Neuman, and Ludmilla Ulitskaya; or they may have read last year’s profiles or reviews of Eka Kurniawan, Wolfgang Hilbig, and Yuri Herrera; but they may not be so familiar with the rest of the list. Well, now is the time to get acquainted; many of the books listed here are among the best released in the world in the last year.

There are far too many works of fiction and poetry to give a full account of the longlist, but anyone familiar with contemporary literature in translation will tell you that there are certain frontrunners. Elena Ferrante’s entry is the final volume of her Neapolitan Quartet, which may give the judges cause to award the entire series; it has lost twice in the past, once to László Krasznahorkai’sSeiobo There Below (the greatest novel of recent years), and another time to Can Xue’s worthy The Last Lover. I’d be surprised if Ferrante didn’t win this year, but Ferrante has a worthy, famous competitor in The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector, which, it may sound strange to say, is more assuredly canonical. Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth is excellent, but it strikes me as too project-like to convince the judges (away from Ferrante or Lispector). In poetry? I’d be surprised if Silvina Ocampo didn’t win, but I haven’t read all of the books.

Nor have I read all of the fiction. Still, my personal favorites (along with the abovementioned) are the novels by Yuri Herrera, Wolfgang Hilbig, Fiston Mwanza Mujila — who could be a dark horse here — and Eka Kurniawan, whose simultaneously released Beauty Is a Wound and Man Tiger could both have been longlisted; in short fiction: Andrés Neuman’s The Things We Don’t Do seems to me one of the finest works of that form in recent years. I don’t think it will win, but I’d be thrilled if it did.

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