My Brilliant Friend

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Swirl & Thread

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Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

Take-2-300x199I saw these books for the first time in December 2015 in Waterstones Bookshop. I was immediately attracted to the storyline so (as a result of a very BIG hint!!!) I received the first two as a Christmas gift and purchased Books 3 & 4 in January….I was in love!!!

There are four books in this series, all published by Europa Editions. These books were originally written in Italian but brilliantly translated into English by Ann Goldstein.

  1. Book 1 – My Brilliant Friend (Published 2012)
  2. Book 2 – The Story of a New Name (Published 2013)
  3. Book 3 – Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Behind (Published 2014)
  4. Book 4 – The Story of the Lost Child (Published 2015)

As you can see the books were published in sequence annually, as they were supposed to be read one a year. I went for it & read the whole series, with a small break after Book 2, and completed the series at the end of February 2016.

These amazing books are primarily a story about female friendship set against the backdrop of a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples in the 1950’s and winds its way through the lives of the characters throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s.

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Hindustan Times

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Elena Ferrante’s insistence on anonymity is an absolute necessity

Seema Goswami

Updated: Mar 05, 2016 20:58 IST

 

Who is Elena Ferrante? Nobody really knows. Well, except for her publisher, her literary agent, and possibly, her best friend. For the rest of the world, Elena Ferrante is just a name. Or, to put it more accurately, just a pseudonym. The real woman behind it remains a mystery.

There are some things about Ferrante that we can guess at. She is an Italian. She grew up in Naples. She came of age around the 1960s. She has some experience of growing up poor and unprivileged. And she has struggled to play the traditional roles required of women.

But all that is pure conjecture. We don’t know anything about her for certain. All we can do is extrapolate from her books to imagine what kind of life she must have led, what her life experiences were, and how they shaped her as a woman and a writer. So we imagine that she is a woman who had difficulty coming to terms with what society (and her family) demanded of a wife and mother – or indeed a daughter. We imagine that she struggled with romantic love. We imagine that she broke some hearts and had hers broken in turn.

Despite speculation to the contrary, I for one am quite sure that Elena Ferrante is a woman. Only a woman could have mined her interior life so ruthlessly; only a woman could so perfectly express feminine angst; and only a woman could understand the complicated relationships that exist between women.

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Books & Foods

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Why Elena Ferrante Eschews Interviews

A street in Naples

If you enjoy contemporary fiction, then you’ve no doubt heard of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series.

Four novels, set in Naples from 1950s to present day, trace the friendship and lives of two women, Elena and Lila. The novels — My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child — have received rave reviews in the United States and abroad. They’ve also set off a craze for Ferrante and Naples. The series inspired two articles in the New York Times’ Travel Section gushingly titled “Elena Ferrante’s Naples, Then and Now” and “What to Do in Elena Ferrante’s Naples.” There’s a TV adaptation in the works.

Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Naples, Italy, 1947

Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Naples, Italy, 1947

They are the most fantastic stories I’ve read in a long time.

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Asymptote

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Elena Ferrante in Slovak(ia): In Conversation with Ivana Dobrakovová and Aňa Ostrihoňová

by Julia Sherwood

“Although Slovak authors do give interviews and appear in public, events where the author is represented by their translator are very rare.”

My Brilliant Friend is the 30th book to be published by INAQUE, a small independent publisher in Bratislava, and one of very few in Slovakia to specialise in translated literature. Elena Ferrante’s books appear in INAQUE’s Women’s Fiction series, which features stories by Jamie Quatro and Tessa Hadley, among others.  Titles planned for 2016 include TheStory of a New Name, part two of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan saga,Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin, Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days and Kate Bolick’s Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, life stories of distinguished and unjustly forgotten women who lead a full and fascinating life without the need for fathers, brothers or husbands.

***

Julia Sherwood: Sometimes an encounter with a book or an author is almost a story in its own right. Where did your own stories intersect with those of Elena Ferrante’s novels?

Aňa Ostrihoňová: Sometime in 2006 in Villerupt in France, I went to see Days of Abandonment during a festival of Italian cinema. A friend was keen to see the movie because, like three other movies shown that day, it starred her favourite actor Luca Zingaretti. I was struck by one scene in particular, in which Olga, the protagonist, is talking to the editor of a publishing house who has asked her to translate a novel. The editor tells her that the manuscript she delivered is a great story but it’s not the book she was supposed to translate. Later I realized this was a ploy the scriptwriter used in order to include in the movie the story of La Poverella, which comes back to haunt Olga in hallucinations from her Naples childhood. The scene doesn’t occur in the book.

Gradually I worked my way through everything written by the enigmatic author hiding behind the wonderful pseudonym Elena Ferrante. I was captivated by the honesty of her storytelling, the sharp language and style, and naturally and quite predictably, what got me hooked was the fact that Olga, her protagonist, was a translator. By the time the English translation of My Brilliant Friend, the first part of the Neapolitan saga, appeared and was first noted by James Wood in the New Yorker a few months later, I’d been a publisher for two years.

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Feast on History

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ELENA FERRANTE: OBSCURE DETAILS FROM THE NEAPOLITAN NOVELS

Port of Naples and Castel Nuovo, view from the NH Ambassador Hotel on Via Medina


by Danielle Oteri

I have been waiting for people to be curious about Naples for nearly fifteen years. I first visited the city of my ancestors in 2001 while I was living in Florence, Italy. My Tuscan friends all warned me that the city was dirty and dangerous and not a place to travel alone.

I’m so glad I didn’t take their advice.

Naples was a loud, beautiful, chaotic experience throbbing with real life. It’s not dressed up for tourists like so often happens in Tuscany. Just crossing the street as a family of four zooms by on one motorino seemed at first impossible and then exhilarating.

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Cultural Life Connection

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Fascinating Blue Reads

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

When I think of blue the sea comes to mind which makes my next choice, book one in the Neapolitan novels, My Brilliant Friend: 1 by Elena Ferrante a great choice as it’s set in the bay of Naples. No one seems to know who Elena Ferrante is, it appears at the moment to be a big mystery but whoever they are they know how to write very interesting fiction especially with regards to realistic characterisation. My Brilliant Friend is the first book of four that follows the story of young girls Elena and Lila in Naples as they grow up. The first book is mostly concerned with their childhood and adolescence, you learn that the girls are both very clever but that Elena is luckier than Lila in that she is supported by her family in continuing her education whereas Lila is forced to work in her father’s shoe making firm. The girls experience jealousy over relationships with boys but also experience opportunities, as Elena moves towards a scholarly future, Lila prepares to get married. Ferrante realistically describes moments of discovery, but also threat as the girls are growing up in a highly masculinised society. Violence and the code of honour abound, Lila is oppressed by her father and brother and there is a local figure who is obviously Mafia-related called the Don who they imagine as a monster who steals their toys. I can see the appeal of these books, look forward to reading the rest and may be getting the same level of #ferrantefever as many people have!

The Times Book Club

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March Book Club: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Welcome to The Times online book group. Think of us as an online version of your local book group – discussing one book a month with fellow Times readers and our Books desk. There’s no commitment at all; you can dip in and out as you like.

Elena Ferrante is an unusual literary sensation: she is regarded as one of the best contemporary novelists and yet incredibly little is known about the author behind the Neopolitan Novels, which have been a mainstay of the bestseller charts for the past year.

Read full article on The Times.co.uk

The Telegraph

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How Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante won us over

by Gaby Wood

In other words, something appears to have happened by stealth: British reading habits have changed without anyone noticing. We read translations without thinking of them as translations. We have become more European.

Have Knausgaard and Ferrante finally conquered our fear of European fiction?

Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante have stormed the bestseller lists with their raw, lifelike novels. Gaby Wood asks whether we’re finally over our fear of European fiction

If anthropologists were to visit from Mars and examine the current reading habits of the British people, they would notice sooner or later that we were suffering from a double addiction. The hunger for the latest instalment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-part sequence of autobiographical novels, My Struggle, is matched only by the thirst for Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, of which there are four. The fact that Ferrante is a pseudonym and no one knows who she is has done nothing to reduce her appeal. Knausgaard, meanwhile, is her exact opposite: his entire project is to lay himself bare – and his lack of mystery has not put anyone off either.

Genuine literary phenomena take hold in a few simple stages. The first is obvious: word of mouth. You hear more and more people talking about the same book. The next stage is a bit of backlash: people assert their lack of interest in the book everyone’s talking about, say they couldn’t get on with it, or insist it’s not that good. And then, in a few special cases, a tidal wave rises. Nobody asks you whether you’ve read the book anymore; that would be too exposing. Instead, they ask what you think of it. You’re either for or against, and small-talk has gone out the window.

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True Love Stories

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Book Series Explores the Pain, Passion and Power of Friendship

TS-508094024 Italian woman at bridge

If you’re looking for a series of books you can fall in love with, take a look at Elena Ferrante’s best-selling, four-book series of Neapolitan Novels. We noticed that the last book in the series, The Story of the Lost Child, made a lot of “Best Books of 2015” lists including NPR, the New York Times and O Magazine, so we decided to take a look for ourselves. The books also made our list of favorites. You’re in for a treat!

Here’s a summary of each book for you:


My Brilliant Friend is the first book in the series and it’s a modern masterpiece from one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors. My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship.

The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Italy. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists, the unforgettable Elena and Lila.

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The Independent

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Jeffrey Archer: ‘Elena Ferrante does for Naples what Dickens did for London’

The author discusses Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity, his writing room in Majorca and resembling Toad in Toad of Toad Hall
Jeffery-Archer-Broosk-Saib.jpg

What are you currently reading?

Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. I couldn’t have imagined that a book about two girls growing up in Naples could appeal to me, but it’s magnificent. Ferrante does for Naples what Dickens did for London.

(…)

JorrieSpencer

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My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels Book 1) - Elena FerranteElena Ferrante and her Neapolitan novels kept coming into and out of my awareness this past year. It’s not what I’m necessarily drawn to read, but I find that when a book repeatedly gets paid attention, there is some kind of widespread appeal. That sounds a bit more “common denominator” than I want. But a few writers or writing can rise to a level that pulls in readers outside their genre, pulls in low-volume readers, and simply gets people talking.

 

[The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (started out unknown, hard to think of that now) are other examples of books that (seemingly) came out of nowhere.]

 

My Brilliant Friend’s short prologue has the narrator, Elena, and her friend at sixty-six. The friend, Lila, has gone missing. The body of the story begins when they’re six years old. It takes place in 1950s Naples, an impoverished neighbourhood, post-war. It’s a setting that’s fresh to me, certainly, and not one I would have even thought to read about.

 

I feel no nostalgia for our childhood; it was full of violence.

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Npr

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Translator Behind Elena Ferrante Novels Says Her Job Is To Be An ‘Enabler’

Ann Goldstein is an editor at The New Yorker. She says she tries to stick to the text when she translates. "You're not trying to write your own version of it," she says.Ferrante Fever goes something like this: You pick up one of Elena Ferrante’s books because a friend told you that you had to read it. You read a few pages, and then before you know it, it’s 3:00 o’clock in the morning, you’ve finished the book, and you’re on the hunt for the other three titles in the Neapolitan series.

This cultural phenomenon comes our way via translation — the novels were translated from the Italian by New Yorker editor Ann Goldstein. Ferrante is famously private — she gives no interviews, no one knows who she is — so Goldstein has become an unintentional face of the series.

But just in case anyone was wondering if Goldstein isFerrante, she’d like to clear that up right away: “No, I am not. I can say that without equivocation,” she tells NPR’s Linda Wertheimer. “And I can also say I don’t know who she is.”

Goldstein learned Italian late in life. “I had this sense that I wanted to read Dante in Italian,” she says. So she signed up for an Italian class at The New Yorker.

Goldstein talks with Wertheimer about her recent projects; in addition to translating Ferrante’s latest, The Story of the Lost Child, she’s also translated Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words, and edited Primo Levi’s complete works.

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The Hindu

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Translating Jhumpa Lahiri

Her new book, written originally in Italian, throws up important questions about language, thought and identity

Among the many wild theories that did the rounds about the identity of Elena Ferrante, the popular and critically acclaimed writer of Italian novels that include the Neapolitan quartet, was that “EF” is, in fact, a pseudonym for Ann Goldstein. Goldstein is credited with translating Ferrante’s books into English. Even in the implausibility of the hypothesis is an intriguing thought: how much of a novel that we read in translation derives from the writer’s hand and how much the translator’s?

And taking the theory forward, should Goldstein indeed (and improbably) turn out to the ‘real’ writer of the Ferrante books, what language was her ‘original’ work written in? Was it translated from Italian to English? Or from English to Italian, while releasing the Italian first? Or, even more circuitously, from English to Italian to English again? More importantly, would any of this matter? Would the given book have had a different texture if it had been written in English or Italian first?

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Forward

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Schermata 2016-02-18 alle 10.43.33

Geeking Out on Primo Levi — and Elena Ferrante — With a Master Translator

by Joshua Furst

The great Italian writer Primo Levi is primarily known in this country for memoirs detailing his experiences in Auschwitz, his long journey home after the end of the war and his life as a chemist of Jewish descent in the quiet precincts of Piedmont. These books, published in America as “Survival in Auschwitz,” “The Reawakening” and “The Periodic Table,” give the impression that Levi was primarily a writer of Jewish trauma.

He wasn’t.

Or maybe it would be fair to say that he both was and wasn’t, but to limit him to this role in our literary culture is to belittle and distort the accomplishment of one of the great writers of the postwar years.

In books like “The Wrench,” “Other People’s Trades” and “If Not Now, When?” his intellectual curiosity led him toward a wide range of subjects, some Jewish, some not. He looked at the nature of work and how it engages the mind, the strangeness of our mundane daily lives, the way we construct patterns by which to give ourselves the illusion of safety and comfort. He even dabbled in science fiction. The one constant in his work is a precise, considered reasoning, a kind of scientific method, through which even his most fantastical imaginings are grounded in a clear and logical vision of reality.

Luckily, Liveright Publishing has recently brought out an omnibus, three-volume edition of Levi’s complete works that should serve as a corrective to our misconceptions. It contains the full text of all of his published books, newly translated and restored to the form he intended for them to take, as well as the entirety of his uncollected writings.

The task of commissioning the new translations and editing and molding the final books fell to Ann Goldstein, the renowned translator of Elena Ferrante, among many other writers. I was interested in what insights she’d gained about Levi over the course of the ten years the project took to complete. She graciously accepted my invitation to meet, and we grabbed a coffee and geeked out about translation at a Le Pain Quotidien near the downtown Manhattan offices of The New Yorker, where she has worked for many years.

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