So, what are you watching?

By Alex Beam   OCTOBER 02, 2015

THIS HAS BECOME a predictable moment in my life: My wife and I get together with friends. There is the usual chitchat — Donald Trump bad/Elizabeth Warren good; our children thriving/other people’s not so much — and then, around Minute 45, somebody pops the question: “So, what are you guys watching?”

To repurpose a famous Dorothy Parker line: Constant Weader want to fwow up.

I am so sick of academics, clerics, white collar salary people, and the suburban booboisie — my tribe — discussing “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” as if they were parsing the grand inquisitor scene from “The Brothers Karamazov.’’ The London Daily Telegraph wrote of HBO’s “The Wire” that “it merits comparison with the works of Dickens and Dostoevsky.”

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What We’re Reading This Fall

BY THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 7, 2015

In the past few weeks, I’ve read some astonishing books: Lucia Berlin’s “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” a story collection that’s raw and funny and breathtakingly great; “The Visiting Privilege,” by the bright-bleak grand master of short stories, Joy Williams; and Álvaro Enrigue’s brilliant “Sudden Death,” which will be out in February and is about a tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo, wherein they use a ball made out of Marie Antoinette’s hair. (It’s also about colonialism, utopias, and sex.) And I’ve been so distraught that there are no more Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante to come after the fourth, “The Story of the Lost Child,” that I’ve re-read the entire grand novel project.

—Lauren Groff

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The Wednesday Five: Women Making a Difference

In this week’s Wednesday Five, we pay homage to our own popular series “Women Making a Difference” with stories that are getting lots of traffic around the web about five groundbreaking women of our time—Elena Ferrante, Steffi Graf, Dr. Barbara Ross-Lee, Oprah Winfrey, and Gloria Steinem.

1. Elena Ferrante

We’ve heard and sung the praises of Italian writer Elena Ferrante (a pen name) and her Neapolitan novels. Earlier this year, our Eleanor Foa Dienstag wrote about the author, “Ferrante’s extended narrative is not only a literary triumph, but a feminist one as well. Rarely, in contemporary fiction, do we find a sequence of novels whose main focus is the friendship—from childhood to middle age—of two women.” Now that “The Story of the Lost Child,” the final volume of the writer’s series is out, the praise has transitioned to a sophisticated critical analysis of what Ferrante has done for 21st century literature. Writing for the The New Yorker in the artilce, “Elena Ferrante’s New Book: Art Wins,” Joan Acocella writes, definitively:

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Twelve-Year-Old Sofia Abramsky-Sze Reviews Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

Twelve-year-old Sofia Abramsky-Sze, a friend of a PW staffer who reads more than most adults, recently picked up the first book of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend. She was done with the fourth book in the series, The Story of the Lost Child, only a few weeks later. PW talked to Sofia about Ferrante’s books, and how they compare with other books she’s read recently.

Why did you read Ferrante? How did you first come across the novels?

I started reading Elena Ferrante this past summer. The main reason? I am a very avid reader and I always run out of books, so I was bored. I picked up the first one, My Brilliant Friend, and started to leaf through it. Another reason is that the first book features a bride on the cover. Well, I am a hopeless romantic at heart, often devouring teen tales of love, so I couldn’t resist. Finally, my father told me they were good and he said I should read the Ferrante novels.

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We don’t know Elena Ferrante – and that’s exactly why her success is so wonderful

Deborah Orr

The rise of Elena Ferrante is tremendously pleasing, even from a purely practical point of view. Ferrante is famous for two things: her novels, andfor not existing. Writing under a pen-name, scrupulously guarding her identity, eschewing literary public relations, the Italian writer has managed, in these days of hype, to find a massive global audience without flogging her physical self as an integral aspect of publication at all. Splendid.

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A book in the mail is the cure for Ferrante fever

As a regular book browser, or shelf stalker, and former employee of Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, I’ve recently watched several customers come in asking for recommendations of what to read next after finishing Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s four-volume saga, The Neapolitan Quartet — a masterwork concerning issues of class, status, and the remarkable complexity of female friendship, set on the fringe of an economically depressed Naples. I also had been wondering what I myself would find to read and recommend to friends to quench the Ferrante Fever. As if the book gods heard my call, I nearly simultaneously received a long letter and gift from an old friend in the mail the other day. I’d recommended she read Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. In return she sent along a beautiful recommendation of deceased Hungarian novelist, Magda Szabó’s The Door, a novel that also explores the complex and unsettling nature of friendship between two women who couldn’t be more different:

She was nowhere to be seen, either in the apartment when I awoke, or in the street when I set off for the hospital; but there was evidence of her handiwork in the section of pavement outside the front door swept clean of snow. Obviously, I told myself in the car, she was making her rounds at the other houses. I wasn’t distressed, or heartbroken. I felt that only good news awaited me at the hospital, as indeed it did. I was out until lunchtime. Arriving home, rather hungry, I was sure she’d be sitting there in the apartment, awaiting my return. I was wrong. I was faced with the disconcerting experience of walking into my own home, bearing news of life and death, and no-one to share it with. Our Neanderthal ancestor learned to weep the first time he stood in triumph over the bison he had dragged in and found no-one to tell of his adventures, or show his spoils to, or even his wounds. The apartment stood empty. I went into one room after another, looking for her, even calling out her name. I didn’t want to believe that, on this of all days, when she didn’t even know if my patient was alive or dead, she could be somewhere else. The snow had stopped falling. There could be nothing in the street requiring her attention. And yet she was nowhere to be found.

Suzanne Berne on The Story of the Lost Child

Ferrante and Her Fourth and Final Neapolitan Novel

THE BENEFIT of writing about a critically acclaimed book a month or so after other reviewers have done their acclaiming is that one doesn’t have to “review” the book at all but can instead reflect upon the sensation it’s created. If you have turned to this page, more than likely you have already read several — even a dozen — reviews of Elena Ferrante’s famous quartet of Neapolitan novels, the last of which, The Story of the Lost Child, has recently been published. Probably you have also read about Ferrante’s decision to remain anonymous, turning her into “the global literary sensation nobody knows,” according to the title of one article. Or of the prizes she cannot be awarded, because she won’t show up for them, or of the tiresome speculations that she is “really” a man. (Because no woman could bear to forego so much attention?)

All this commotion threatens to overshadow the novels themselves, which Ferrante has said should be read as one novel, and which are not, actually, sensational, except in their writing. They begin with Elena and Lila, two smart, restless, imaginative little girls growing up in postwar Naples. Elena is our narrator; her obsessive interest in Lila, her best friend, remains central over the next 50 years and for 1,600-plus pages. Which are barely enough to contain her morass of feelings about Lila, a shifting quagmire of rivalry, idolatry, resentment, dependence, sexual and intellectual competition, sympathy, love, loyalty. All undergirded by their connection to the violent, emotionally labyrinthine Neapolitan “neighborhood” where they come of age, which Lila never leaves and to which Elena, after “getting out,” returns.

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Buzzy fall books for every mood

Maybe you feel like a juicy family drama. Maybe you want to be whisked off to Europe. Maybe you just need to know what all the Franzen fuss is about. We get that you have strong tastes and limited time, so tell us what you’re up for, and we’ll tell you what to read next.

I’m feeling…

Like being transported

To Naples

Ferrante wraps up her masterful examination of female friendship — with all its intimacy, dependence, competitiveness and frustrations — in this fourth Neapolitan novel.

Ferrante Fever Hits New York City

By Sarah Galo, September 30, 2015

I discovered Elena Ferrante’s work through the Internet, specifically Twitter. I saw tweets of praise from women writers, who applauded Ferrante’s embodiment of female friendship in the characters of Elena Greco and Raffaella Cerullo—known in the books as Lenu and Lila, respectively. Even with the very public declarations of affection for Ferrante’s books, reading the Neapolitan Novels felt like my own unique discovery; I saw myself in both women, in their wavering friendship, plagued with insecurity and ambition. This year, though friendships like Lenu and Lila’s have been on our minds (Taylor Swift’s squad included), the need to read a visceral and non-performative narrative of feels especially necessary. Which might be part of the reason why it’s been a summer of #FerranteFever.

This week, I made my way up to Symphony Space, on New York City’s Upper West Side, for a discussion of the Neapolitan Novels with a group of esteemed panelists. When I got there, what I saw was all at once an expected surprise: Of course Ferrante fans from all over New York City would be there for the Thalia’s Book Club discussion of her work, of course! Unlike similar panels, though, the author was not present; Ferrante’s purposeful anonymity sometimes overtakes celebration of her work. (One of the wittiest moments of the night was when a panelist referred to Ferrante’s much-discussed absence: “For Halloween, go as what you thinkshe looks like.”) We gathered to celebrate Ferrante anyway, with friends and book club mates. We were there to hear the Neapolitan Novels discussed. We were there to listen. And as the evening began, the buzz of conversation turned to celebratory laughter and applause.
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The mystery that is the writer Elena Ferrante…

About a year ago I read a review of a trilogy of books by an Italian writer called Elena Ferrante and was suitably intrigued to check her out further online. These books (which I read one after the other) were based in Naples, Italy and told of the friendship of two young girls raised in the poorest part of Naples and when I eventually reached the inconclusive end of book three, I quickly Googled only to find that a fourth book was being published later this year ! A little frustrating because the books are so addictive and absorbing any reader would be eager to read the fourth title..I certainly was.

More about the books in a moment but the real life Elena Ferrante is actually unknown and that name is for her books only because since she started her writing career over 20 years ago nobody has identified her… even as she attained real success with her work. Normally one might suggest this to be a bit pretentious or a gimmick, but she made that decision before she was even published and has kept her real name a secret with no real clues other than the fact that she is indeed a woman ! This was established in a rare interview. Intriguing to know if Ferrante is eager to reveal herself now that she is recognised as a writer of real quality and this quartet has certainly sealed her success, but I somehow doubt it. I have yet to read a negative review of the Neapolitan novels as they are being marketed, and the series is quite remarkable in that even after almost 1700 pages I at least was left wanting more.

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Why does this brilliant, bestselling book have such a cheesy cover?

One of the best new books this fall is the toast of the literary elite—but you might well be embarrassed to be seen reading it.

Why every woman – and most men – must read Elena Ferrante’s quartet of novels

The novels bring the choices that women make the centre of the reading experience.

Sayalee Karkare  · Sep 21, 2015

Like many, I came late to the work of Elena Ferrante, an Italian author with a cult following, both in her native Italy, as well as in the Anglophone world. A friend presented me with the first book of her Neapolitan series, and I was immediately hooked.

Set against the backdrop of Naples, the tetralogy – My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015) – traces the lives of two friends, Lila and Elena, following them from childhood into adolescence, and eventually into middle age. The final book of the four-part series has a September 2015 release.

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Doubles in Elena Ferrante’s “The Story of a New Name” & Erica Jong’s “Fear of Dying;” And Books I’ll Never Blog About

I am far, far behind in blogging about books. Will I ever catch up?  Well, no.  I write Mirabile Dictu four to six days a week (whew!), so I sometimes choose only marginally bookish topics.

But today I had a brainstorm: doubling up on two novels about doubles, Elena Ferrante’sThe Story of a New Nameand Erica Jong’s Fear of Dying.

In 2013 I read the first book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy, My Brilliant Friend.  I enjoyed it, but it was a bit like reading  an Italian version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And I didn’t continue with the series, till every publication in the world had praised the tetralogy. I finally read the second novel, The Story of a New Name.

It is easy to see why these books are best-sellers. Ann Goldstein’s translations are elegant, and they are very fast reads.  There is something for the literary reader, and something for the reader of pop fiction.   On the Sept. 20 New York Times Best-Seller list, My Briliant Friend is No. 6 and the latest book, The Story of the Lost Child, is No. 7.

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5 Books To Read If You Miss Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

Well, my reading friends. It’s come and gone: publication day of the final installment of Elena Ferrante’s immensely popular Neapolitan Novels. If you’re anything like me — or, it seems, the rest of the literate world — you’ve already finished The Story of the Lost Child and are shaking your fist at the sky for more. (Unless you’re James Franco. Then you are admittedly late to the party.)

It seems that no author will ever replicate that most urgent, passionate, and compelling of stories of our two favorite friends Elena and Lila with the same addicting intensity. I mean, could there have been a longer summer than the one which preceded the launch of Lost Child? I feel you. That said, there are other immensely talented female writers writing stunning books about being a smart woman in what seems like a man’s world. And I think that you should read them circa now, especially if there is a Ferrante-shaped hole in your heart… whatever that would look like.

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