My Brilliant Friend

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Spotify

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Stanford Law School Faculty Winter Reading List

Stanford Law School Web

  1. Michelle Wilde Anderson, Professor of Law, recommends The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante:

 

“I think the expression ‘to leave something in the dust’ comes from screeching tires, but here’s another way to use it: when you pick up a book so good that everything else you’ve been reading (novel, nonfiction, New Yorkers) gathers dust on your nightstand. In 2015, I discovered Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and they left everything else in her dust. She has made high literature into a page turner, somehow creating a set of four books that contains not only the best writing I’ve ever read about poverty and a neighborhood, but also a suspenseful tale of friendship, marriage, and attainment. It’s like a modern George Eliot wrote a bildungsroman set in Naples, a book that arcs from Italian fascism to the rise of European feminism to the present day. One morning I was so lost in a Ferrante book that I had my daughter hide it from me so I would not play hooky from my own writing. What are you waiting for? Jump in her truck. Everything else can wait.

 

The New Yorker

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The Books We Loved in 2015

15-Thurman-Books-2015

This was a year of voyages—and the tempestuous one of reading Elena Ferrante. I bought “My Brilliant Friend” in a New Delhi bookshop and finished it on a barge in Kerala. I read “The Story of a New Name”in a haveli overlooking the Ganges in Varanasi. In Havana, I stayed on the top floor of a spartan convent. I felt I should have been reading “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” under the covers, but it was too hot. It was even hotter in July, in Naples. I bought her first novel, “Troubling Love,” in Italian (“L’Amore Molesto”), in a bookshop on the Via Port’Alba. The protagonist’s mother lived on the corner. “The Days of Abandonment” is a slim volume, so I packed it for a week of sailing on a friend’s boat. It is a novel that you survive, rather than finish. One of my fellow passengers then lent me “The Lost Daughter.” When I came home, I found a copy of “The Story of The Lost Child” in the mountain of mail. Now I am off again, this time to Asia, but, alas, without a Ferrante. I wish I could take “Fragments,” a collection of essays and correspondence, with me, but it hasn’t been published yet. I plan to reread her next year. 

—Judith Thurman

Mirabile Dictu

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Six Series to Lose Yourself in Over the Holidays: Balzac, Durrell, Ferrante, Burgess, Gabaldon, & Le Guin

"Marley's Ghost"

I do not like Christmas books.

One year at a posh friend’s, we listened to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol on public radio. Luv ya, public radio, but the reader’s enunciation was excessive!  Everybody looked glazed and drank a lot of wine. I don’t drink.  And I have never cared for A Christmas Carol.

So what do I do to escape the holiday madness?  I dive into trilogies, quartets, quintets, long series…and come up for air next spring.

Here are Six Series You Can Lose Yourself in over the Holidays.

(…)

3 Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series: My Brilliant Friend,The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child.   These pop literary pageturners are about two difficult women who are friends from childhood to old ag,.  They are entertaining, beautifully-written, and  I swear  as popular as Gone with the Wind.   I have read the first two, and they are very good indeed, though, honestly?   The hype about them is too much.

Public books

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FERRANTE, IN HISTORY

DAVID KURNICK

December 15, 2015 — What happens when the most ambitious rethinking of the politics of realism in recent memory can’t be attached to a face? (Can they give the Nobel Prize to a pseudonym?) Now that the Neapolitan tetralogy is complete, it’s clear that Elena Ferrante’s decision to remain biographically unavailable is her greatest gift to readers, and maybe her boldest creative gesture. Her intransigence has protected these books from the ambient noise that threatens to engulf any truly original cultural artifact: the vaguely bullying blurb delirium (The Story of the Lost Child comes prefaced with seven pages of it); the debate over the cheesy pastel covers; the reports that Knausgaard fans and Ferrante partisans are brawling in Park Slope.1

Who really cares about any of it when the books are so sheerly interesting? Ferrante’s inaccessibility to public consumption feels designed to help her books survive whatever storms of silliness are kicked up by the enthusiasm they have sparked. Her self-erasure is more than a challenge to the celebrity logic of contemporary literary culture. It has meant that readers are forced—are free—to confront these novels in all their unassimilable intensity. To paraphrase the most pitiless sentence in the final installment: we’re going to have to resign ourselves to not seeing her.

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American Bookseller Association

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2015 Indie Bestsellers
Based on sales from January 1, 2015 through November 29, 2015
For an independent bookstore store near you, call 1-888-266-5736,
or visit IndieBound.org.

Trade Paperback Fiction
1. The Martian
Andy Weir, Broadway, $15.00, 9781101903582
2. Euphoria
Lily King, Grove Press, $16.00, 9780802123701
3. The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt, Back Bay, $20.00, 9780316055444
4. The Rosie Project
Graeme Simsion, S&S, $15.99, 9781476729091
5. Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel, Vintage, $15.95, 9780804172448
6. Grey
E.L. James, Vintage, $15.95, 9781101946343
7. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
Gabrielle Zevin, Algonquin, $14.95, 9781616204518
8. My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante, Europa Editions, $17.00, 9781609450786
9. Orphan Train
Christina Baker Kline, Morrow, $14.99, 9780061950728
10. Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Anchor, $15.95, 9780307455925
11. Everything I Never Told You
Celeste Ng, Penguin, $16.00, 9780143127550
12. To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee, Perennial, $14.99, 9780060935467
13. The Husband’s Secret
Liane Moriarty, Berkley, $16.00, 9780425267721
14. The Invention of Wings
Sue Monk Kidd, Penguin, $17.00, 9780143121701
15. Leaving Time
Jodi Picoult, Ballantine, $16.00, 9780345544940

The New York Times’s Sunday Book Review

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What’s the Best Book, New or Old, You Read This Year?

In this special year-end edition of Bookends, our 16 columnists share their favorite reading experience of 2015.

What was the best book you read this year? Share your answers in the comments below. We’ll share some of them on this week’s Inside The New York Times Book Review podcast.

Dana Stevens:

I tore through Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy in a mad rush — and then, as the fourth book drew to a close, slowed the pace to make the experience last. These page-turning novels of ideas took me to that rare place where the demands of the outside world seem like little more than an elaborate conspiracy to keep you away from your book.

Dana Stevens is the film critic at Slate and a cohost of the Slate Culture Gabfest.

The Turnaround Blog

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The Turnaround Christmas Gift Guide

Struggling to come up with presents to blow your dad’s socks off this Christmas? Do your younger siblings’ current interests elude you? Turnaround are here to help, with personalised gift ideas for everybody on your list.

For your life-long best friend:

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante

ferrante-fever-eng-low

Let them know you’re aware they’ve probably hated your guts for some periods of your conjoined lives, but that you’re also totally cool with that, and actually you hated them too, but really it was all part of your unending, uncompromising love for each other.

Daily Mail

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Fall in love this Christmas with a good book: Something for everyone – our critics select the year’s best novels

Some of the Mail's critics reveal their top picks of this year's books , including The Whites by Richard Price, as Harry Brandt, which was called 'the crime novel of the year' by Stephen King

Over the year, the quartet, known as the Neapolitan Novels, by Elena Ferrante took a grip on readers in droves. Rightly so. The author’s anonymity does perhaps augment the novels’ mystique, but nothing can detract from the extraordinary, quietly incendiary quality of the writing.

In this first volume, the fractured, on-off friendship of the young Lila and Lenu is minutely explored within the tight-knit Neapolitan community of the Fifties, and provides the emotional heart of the novel.

Post-war, Naples is exhausted, crowded, combustible, impoverished and dominated by rigid traditional family mores and violent vendettas.

What chance do girls such as Elena (Lenu) and Lila have? Read it for its forensically observed and truthful characterisation, its rich and textured portrayal of a society groping towards modernity, the political and cultural fluctuations and its seemingly effortless prose.

Then treat yourself by becoming absorbed in the next three titles.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-3344877/Fall-love-Christmas-good-book-critics-select-year-s-best-novels.html#ixzz3td2Z0t9P
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

 

The Pool

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The books that made my year

I read a lot of books in 2015 A. Lot. Here are the ones that stayed with me

By Sam Baker

The year Elena Ferrante sprang to attention – well, my attention, anyway – was also the year the Neapolitan quartet came to an end with The Story Of The Lost Child (published in September). What started as an intriguing portrait of female friendship became a compelling saga of the reality of women’s lives set against 60 years of Italian social and political history. Most remarkable of all, though, is the author’s enduring anonymity; a sleight of hand which has seen her championed by high- and low-brow alike, and enabled her to sideswerve even the slightest Goldfinching.

The Economist

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Elena Ferrante and the Brontë sisters

The allure of literary anonymity

by N.M. | NEW YORK

TWENTY years ago, the mysterious Italian author of the acclaimed Neapolitan quartet chose Elena Ferrante for a pen name, an homage to her literary hero Elsa Morante. Perhaps Ms Ferrante, the world’s most famous anonymous writer, is also aware that her pseudonym is an aural echo of another name stamped with genius and a craving for anonymity: Brontë.

Closeted in a remote Yorkshire parsonage on the moor Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë battled tuberculosis, family deaths, financial pressures, an aloof father and an alcoholic brother to write novels of incandescent power. That these women chose to write under false names—Currer Bell, Ellis Bell, and Acton Bell to match their initials—was scarcely singular.

At the time, it would have been considered unseemly for a parson’s spinster daughters to write novels about vengeful love (“Wuthering Heights”), adultery and insanity (“Jane Eyre”), and alcoholism and broken marriages (“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”). And when the reviews arrived, the sisters would have been grateful for their mask. Emily and Anne’s novels were savaged as “vulgar”, “brutalising”, and “pernicious”. “Jane Eyre” was richly praised by publications including The Economist, which said of Currer Bell’s book that

of all the novels we have read for years this is the most striking, and we may add, the most interesting. Its style as well as its characters are unhackneyed, perfectly fresh and lifelike, and the whole is as far removed from the namby pamby stuff of which fashionable novels are made, as from the cold, unnatural, and often disgusting productions of the French press.

We did, however, note a certain “coarseness” to the book—a “venial” flaw, commonly mentioned by other reviewers, who thought it nonetheless “honourable”. They would almost certainly have read it differently knowing that it was written by a Charlotte and not a Currer.

The Brontës’ mask was much more than a ruse to duck ridicule or vainglory. Their anonymity was liberating: it allowed their imaginations to trespass in the darkest crevices of the psyche and return with tormented monsters like Heathcliff, the Ahab of the moors, and dynamos like Miss Eyre. Their pseudonyms strengthened their moral resolve, emboldening them to speak truth to that most tyrannical seat of power: ordinary society.

Ms Ferrante’s incognito has lasted twenty years—a miracle in this day of hi-tech hacking. The Brontës’ secret, initially so airtight that even their father and brother were in the dark, lasted barely two. Their identity was revealed not in one swift stripping of the veil, but in incremental stages. The process started when Emily and Anne’s unscrupulous publisher began to put it about that Acton and Currer Bell were one person, hoping that Acton’s second novel, “Wildfell Hall”, would benefit from the best-selling “Jane Eyre”. When Currer Bell’s publisher, George Smith, wrote asking for an explanation, Currer and Acton were left with no choice but to travel to London to set the record straight.

The Frisky

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Amelia: 10 Things I’m Thankful For This Year

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. If you haven’t read this mysterious Italian novelists epic four-book saga of a lifelong female friendship, stop what you’re doing immediately and get on that. These books are basically my favorite ever. Everything about them stuck with me, from the story as a whole, to specific lines that captured a feeling or described a person so perfectly and succinctly, to the utterly relatable relationship between the narrator Lina and her best friend Lila. They are just the best books ever. When I finished, I came thisclose to starting all over from the beginning.

 

Willamette Week

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Lady Things: Holiday Gift Guide

The Buddha said, “Life is suffering.” Yet, most novels that women are raised on, as well as TV and movies and Facebook status updates, do not portray the reality of this situation and, in fact, fill young-lady heads with false ideas about how life is going to be (romantic, full of meet-cutes and happy endings, well-styled, well-lit).

The mysterious Elena Ferrante has other ideas. Her insanely readable quartet—OK, I’m actually only on the third book, but I read the first two in two days and now, on day three, I am pretty pissed that I have to be at work instead of on my couch binge-reading—tells the story of two friends growing up and becoming adults in the brutal poverty of 1950s and ’60s Naples. Italy, in these novels, isn’t dreamy Venetian gondolas, pasta, wine and stone-paved streets but instead an unescapeable prison for almost all women, where they are considered property, beaten regularly and assaulted in pretty much every way you could imagine.

Sure, our culture is a little bit more subtle than that of midcentury Italy. But still, it isn’t too difficult to see the struggles of our mothers in the lives of the main characters, Elena and Lila. The struggle to be treated as human, to be allowed to attend school and college, to have control over their bodies, not to be beaten to death. Of course, it doesn’t take much imagination to see that those battles aren’t exactly resolved (see: Stylish Bulletproof Vest below). So buy your lady these books—the younger, the better. Maybe it won’t change the world, but at least they might reorder her expectations and save her some future disappointment.

Dawn

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ESSAY: The storyteller: On Elena Ferrante

ZEENAT HISAM — PUBLISHED NOV 29, 2015 06:56AM

“I’M a storyteller. I’ve always been more interested in storytelling than in writing,” the Italian writer with the pen name Elena Ferrante said in one of her rare interviews conducted via written correspondence. No wonder that Ferrante’s writing is a phenomenon that has taken the world of literati and readers alike by storm. Termed as modern classics, her novels have attracted a huge readership. Originally written in Italian, the series has been translated into English by Ann Goldstein. Her much-awaited The Story of the Lost Child, the last book of the Neapolitan series, came out recently.

The Neapolitan saga, told in four autobiographical novels, and spanning six decades, is a story of two childhood friends growing up together in a poor neighbourhood of Naples after WWII. Ferrante chronicles the entwined lives and intensely ambivalent relationship of the two friends — Elena Greco, daughter of a porter, and Raffaella Cerullo, daughter of a shoemaker. Their lives go off at different tangents, but the two hold on firmly to each other, colliding and retreating, loving and hating, idolising and reviling. Strong, intelligent and passionate, both respond to their calling, struggle with their decisions and pay the price. Raffaella, nicknamed Lila, drops out after primary school to help her family establish its shoemaking business, while Elena, or Lenù, strives hard, wins scholarships and studies at university, becoming a successful writer.

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Sorry Television

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Say Hello to My Brilliant Friend

For as many guys as I have been friends with over as many years, I reluctantly maintain that there is something uniquely intimate about a close friendship between women. It is inevitably a companionship against the world, a kinship based on shared experience and perspective and mutual trust as regards an ever-expanding litany of secret thoughts and hopes and fears. Perhaps it is because of this almost inherent intensity that lady BFF relationships are also so often fraught, so frequently burdened by unspoken resentments or unfounded suspicions, by anger or envy. Women know what they’re up against in the world, and sometimes it’s easy to forget who’s on your side.

I haven’t read many novels that truly capture the complexity of these friendships—I’m sure they’re out there, I just haven’t read them—but it’s hard not to feel that in My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante has done it better than most. The story of Elena and Lila, childhood pals who grow up together in 1950s Naples, is the story of so many fast friends, girls who share dolls and schoolbooks but soon find themselves competing for attention, validation and approval. Here, there is the added backdrop of a place and time in which women were held to the highest morale standard and the lowest intellectual expectation. To advance one’s education at all, let alone as a girl, was far from a given.

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