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The release of the fourth and final book of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, The Story of the Lost Child, has caused an outbreak of#FerranteFever at Brilliant Books!
With the release of this final installment, now is the perfect time to dive into this compelling quartet.
September 15, 2015 By Jane Ciabattari
#FerranteFever continues, with most critics focused on detailing the allure and accomplishments of the beloved Neapolitan novels.
Laurie Muchnick (Kirkus Revews) waited to read all four books in the Neapolitan quartet before making her judgment: “Elena spends years trying to speak up in intellectual discussions among men, until she finally realizes she has something to say that they know nothing about—women’s issues, women’s lives—and discovers her own voice. In this brilliant, angry, honest series, Ferrante has found her voice and made it heard around the world.”
The conclusion of The Story of the Lost Child “masterfully returns to the opening moments of the first novel,” notes Maureen Corrigan (NPR) “’She moves you … , and she ruins you,’ says Elena in this novel about Lila. That’s also not a bad way to describe Ferrante’s power: ‘She moves you … , and she ruins you.’ Brava, Elena Ferrante whoever you are.”
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
With 11 feature films under his belt, including The Saddest Music in the World, Guy Maddin is one of the country’s most prolific filmmakers. Turns out, he’s also an avid reader.
In honour of the TIFF premiere of his film The Forbidden Room, we’ve asked Maddin to choose some of the most important books in his life.
The most exciting writer he’s encountered in decades
Mystery of the author merely adds to a rollercoaster of love and loss in violent Naples, says Jane Shilling
Elena Ferrante is perhaps the most famous and certainly the least known of living Italian novelists. Her stories are read across the world but by remaining anonymous she has contrived to avoid the celebrity status that bedevils successful writers.
The known facts about Ferrante — she grew up in Naples; Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym — are so sparse that critics have speculated that her works are by different hands. Her refusal to interpose herself between her novels and their public lends the experience of reading them a singular, exhilarating purity.
Between 1992 and 2007 Ferrante published four novels and a literary memoir. But it was with the English publication in 2011 of My Brilliant Friend, the first of her Neapolitan tetralogy, that her fame became global. These volumes chronicle the intense and volatile friendship between two women from the Neapolitan ghetto, Lenu and Lila.
The anonymous Italian author is becoming an icon
But that doesn’t begin to describe the world of Elena Ferrante, the author of four previous novels, which comes to us through the lens of her remarkable translator, Ann Goldstein. We are dealing with masterpieces here, old-fashioned classics, filled with passion and pathos. Never bathos. Ferrante is too precise, too aware of the emotional complexities of any given moment for this story to descend into suds. Unfortunately, there is little straight-out humor, or clever banter–Ferrante is too obsessed for diversions–but, happily, there is no cynicism either.
You can hardly have avoided the fuss surrounding Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous Italian author of the Neapolitan novels.
In the three years since the publication in English of the first in the series – My Brilliant Friend – her star has risen to the extent that she is now feted as one of the greats of contemporary literature.
The engimatic Italian novelist brings her acclaimed Neapolitan quartet, following the lives and friendships of two Naples women, to a powerful close
Over the past year, Elena Ferrante’s fame has grown until there are probably few readers who have not read, or intend to read, her Neapolitan quartet. These novels return us to the state of total immersion in a fictional world which we often struggle to rediscover when mature.
LIDIJA HAAS
We hope you enjoy this piece from theTLS, which is available every Thursday in print and via the TLS app. Also in this week’s issue: Oscar Wilde’s ventures in a foreign tongue; enlightenment and withdrawal in the life and work of Agnes Martin; Robert Irwin on Salman Rushdie’s “odd” foray into magical realism; Jeremy Corbyn and his posse of poets – and much more.
At rush hour on public transport, you’d be forgiven for thinking that everyone around you has resorted to the same sort of bland escapism. There’s a flurry of fat paperbacks, each boasting a sentimental family snapshot complete with a seascape, seen through a slight haze of baby blue or green or pink. It’s not only the covers that make Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels (really one vast novel, chopped into four) look approachable: built around a central friendship between two women growing up in post-war Italy, they are seemingly realist tales full of family intrigues and love affairs and rivalries. Yet the whiff of soap hasn’t fooled the critics, who for several years now have been spilling superlatives all over Ferrante. Her name (a pseudonym) is fast becoming a Bolaño-style talisman.
Updated by Andrew Prokop on September 1, 2015, 9:07 a.m. ET @awprokop andrew@vox.com
At the start of My Brilliant Friend — the first of Elena Ferrante’s astonishing Neapolitan novels — 66-year-old Elena Greco receives word that Lila Cerullo, her friend since their shared childhood in Naples, has vanished.
Yet Elena isn’t worried for her friend’s safety — because she knows Lila has long dreamed of disappearing from her life, but not through suicide. Indeed, it quickly becomes clear that Lila has eliminated every trace of herself, down to cutting herself out of photos displayed in her house. So Elena, annoyed that Lila is “overdoing it as usual,” decides to thwart her disappearing act by writing down, in great detail, the full story of their tumultuous friendship — which doubles as the story of their lives.
To the uninitiated, the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante is best described as Balzac meets The Sopranosand rewrites feminist theory. The one-woman literary phenomenon is not a new writer, but her success, thanks to the quartet of Neapolitan novels of which this is the conclusion, is. Writing under a pseudonym and declining to make any personal appearances has led to much speculation about her identity, but she has sagely stated that everything we need to know about her is in the books themselves.
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Elena Ferrante’s novels have become a word of mouth success, despite the Italian literary world’s snobbery, because they capture the complex inner world of female friendships and women’s experiences.
The Neapolitan Novels by Italian writer Elena Ferrante, translated by Anne Goldstein, have been the sleeper hit of the summer. Passed around from girlfriend to girlfriend, sister to sister, mother to daughter, they arrive in your hands along with the call: ‘Read it. You will recognise it.’
In this last instalment, the Neopolitan series mutates into a weightier exploration of the sinister psychology of friendship
Alex Clark | Thursday 3 September 2015 06.30 BST
The Catch-22 that ensures we don’t know why Elena Ferrante chooses to keep her “real” identity a secret because we can’t ask her, or even construct our own theories from extraneous biographical information, isn’t much offset by the explanations she gives in occasional written interviews. Her reasons – she’d prefer to let her work speak for itself, she doesn’t wish to court notoriety, hasn’t she done enough by writing the books in the first place? – are impeccable, impermeable and possibly even true. But, as her quartet of Neapolitan novels translated by Ann Goldstein, now concluded with The Story of the Lost Child, forcefully demonstrates, the truth is often only half the story.