I was blind, she a falcon

Joanna Biggs

Are Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels even books? I began to doubt it when I talked about them with other people – mostly women. We returned to life too quickly as we spoke: who was your Lila, the childhood friend who effortlessly dazzled everyone? Or – a question not happily answered – were you Lila? S. said she had got back in touch with an estranged friend to give her the first volume in the series; K. felt that, impossibly, embarrassingly even, the books captured how she’d gone about finding an intellectual identity for herself. And we couldn’t stop talking about the experience of reading them: S. read under sodium-orange streetlight while smoking a cigarette outside a pub, unable to break off to go in to the friends waiting inside; E. had a week of violent dreams after she finished the first volume; A. had sleepless night after sleepless night to finish them, and walked to work the next morning her head still full of Naples; B. – a man – couldn’t go on reading as he started to feel bad about being a man. I got so confused about what was real and what was not while reading Ferrante on a train that I kept on forgetting that I hadn’t missed my station. The usual distance between fiction and life collapses when you read Ferrante. She knows it too: writing the Neapolitan quartet, she has said, was like ‘having the chance to live my life over again’.

Elena Ferrante pours scorn on speculation she could be a man

The elusive Italian author Elena Ferrante has said that women writers tend to be shut “in a literary gynaeceum” by the books industry, even though “we know how to think, we know how to tell stories, we know how to write them as well as, if not better, than men”.

In a wide-ranging interview conducted by email with Vanity Fair as she publishes the fourth and final novel in her acclaimed Neapolitan series in English, Ferrante, whose true identity is known to only a handful of people, addressed speculation that she could be a man, or even a group of men.

“Have you heard anyone say recently about any book written by a man, ‘It’s really a woman who wrote it, or maybe a group of women?’ Due to its exorbitant might, the male gender can mimic the female gender, incorporating it in the process. The female gender, on the other hand, cannot mimic anything, for it is betrayed immediately by its ‘weakness’; what it produces could not possibly fake male potency,” she wrote to Vanity Fair.

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A Love Letter To Elena Ferrante, Whoever She May Be

Anonymity is a powerful thing in the age of the personal brand.

The best-selling author whose true identity is shrouded in mystery

‘The Story of the Lost Child’: Elena Ferrante Concludes Her Tetralogy on Female Friendship and Feminist Doubles

BY SARAH SELTZER SEPTEMBER 1, 2015 3:36 PM

Doubles — whether twisted sisterhoods or dark mother-daughter duos — are a common feature of feminist fiction. They appear in many iconic works, from Bertha, the infamous madwoman in the attic whose violence symbolizes Jane Eyre’s suppressed rage to saintly-or-evil Rebecca, laughing from beyond death at the mousy second Mrs. DeWinter, to the returned spirit of Beloved torturing her mother, Sethe, the two women growing and shrinking in proportion to each other. Doubles represent different kinds of womanhood: the furious and the complacent; the sexual and the proper; the one who stays and the one who leaves; the radiant and the ordinary; the sacrificed and the survivor. The structures of racism, classism, misogyny, the world of men — these intruders bifurcate the lives of women, who by necessity must take different routes through the hostile maze; they must choose either to combat the forces that push them down or cooperate with the oppressor.

The feminist double narrative can often be interpreted as describing even two sides of one person, the sublimated and the expressed. Because two doubled characters are fundamentally halves of a whole that has been separated by society, the essential longing of each is always for the other, even through the fog of enmity. As Nel realizes at the end of Toni Morrison’s Sula, her grief for the loss of her childhood companion is actually the defining loss of her life: “‘We was girls together,’ she said as though explaining something.”

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Lisa Mullenneaux on The Story of the Lost Child

“Addio” to Naples’s Little Women

September 2nd, 2015

THE FOURTH AND FINAL NOVEL in Elena Ferrante’s popular Neapolitan quartet will no doubt be greeted with mixed emotions by its fans: delight with nearly 500 new pages of engrossing drama and sorrow to say farewell to the childhood friends whose lives we have been following for four years. Italians will have some consolation; they can anticipate a 2016 TV series that will reincarnate Lila Cerullo and Elena Greco, the “brilliant friends,” for another season and, perhaps, for a new, younger audience.

Elena Ferrante is that rare species, a unicorn among authors, who writes under a pen name and has withheld her real identity for 23 years. Her English-language publisher, Europa Editions, plays up that mystery by designing book covers that show headless women in elegant apparel or characters whose faces turn away. Ferrante’s refusal to market herself has been admired, not least by Gomorrah author Roberto Saviano, who nominated her for this year’s La Strega literary prize because, as he put it, “your presence may help this award once again be something vital and genuine, not just an exchange of votes and favors.” She didn’t win.

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Ferrante Fever in Brooklyn

BY ANDREA DENHOED

At exactly—or just about—midnight on Tuesday, a bearded employee of the Community Bookstore, in Park Slope, rushed into the back room of the shop and, waving his hands, proclaimed, “Ferrante fever forever! It’s midnight! The book is now on sale!”

The small but game crowd broke into applause. They had gathered in the store, starting at 10 P.M., for the release of “The Story of the Lost Child,” the fourth and final book in what is known as the Neapolitan series, by the anonymous Italian author who writes under the pen name Elena Ferrante. The books chronicle the lifelong friendship of the hard-working, ambitious Elena and the fiery, brilliant Lila. Stacks of reserved copies of the new volume sat behind the counter, but they would not officially be sold until September 1st. Although, would anyone really make a fuss if a copy or two slipped out with the occasional patron, who, through no lack of commitment or ardor, couldn’t quite make it until midnight?

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Elena Ferrante, Laila Lalami, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Kirsty Lang discusses the elusive literary phenomenon Elena Ferrante, as the fourth and final book in her Neopolitan series is published. Despite huge sales and critical acclaim, Ferrante has managed to remain…

Elena Ferrante’s New Book: Art Wins

BY JOAN ACOCELLA

A few paragraphs into Elena Ferrante’s new novel, “The Story of the Lost Child,” the final volume of the writer’s so-called Neapolitan tetralogy—the first three volumes are “My Brilliant Friend,” “The Story of a New Name,” and “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay”—Lena, the narrator, says that now we’re coming to “the most painful part of the story.” Really? It’s going to get worse? When we last saw Lena, she was walking out on a decent husband and two daughters to run off with a man who we know is going to betray her. The little girls scream and weep and hang onto her skirt, begging her not to go. “I couldn’t bear it,” she writes. “I knelt down, I held them around the waist, I said: All right, I won’t go, you are my children, I’ll stay with you.” This calms them down. Then she goes to her bedroom and packs the suitcase she will take when, a few days later, she drops the girls off with a neighbor, says she’ll be back shortly, and leaves for the train station.

Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, unlike other long historical novels we might compare it with (“Buddenbrooks,” “Remembrance of Things Past”), does not go to a lot of trouble to span generations or social classes. Most of its characters come from a single cluster of working-poor families living in a noisy, hot slum on the outskirts of Naples between 1950 and 2010. Ferrante supplies a dramatis personae at the beginning of the first volume—the shoemaker’s family, the Cerullos, Fernando, Nunzia, Lila, and Rino; the mad widow’s family, the Cappuccios, Melina (the widow), Ada, and Antonio; the grocer’s family, the Carraccis, Don Achille, Maria, Stefano, Pinuccia, and Alfonso; the train conductor’s family, the Sarratores, Donato, Lidia, Nino, Marisa, et al.—and, apart from births and deaths, the cast hasn’t changed much by the fourth volume. All these people are fantastically enmeshed. They practically can’t walk to the corner without running into someone they’ve slept with or beaten up.

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Escaping the Poisonous Womb of Home

The real heart of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels is the economic striving that drives their heroine throughout her life.

Illustration by Drew Weing

Very few people know the true identity of the Italian novelist who writes under the pen name Elena Ferrante, but I’d be willing to bet serious money that if we ever learn the truth, her personal history won’t contain a childhood friend very much like Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo. Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels, the last of which, The Story of the Lost Child, is now being published in its English translation (by Ann Goldstein), have captivated a certain rarified segment of the reading public—mostly women of a literary bent. Fans justly celebrate the addictive properties of these books, a saga that encompasses the entire life of its narrator, a writer named Elena Greco, organizing it around her relationship to Lila, her best friend from their early days growing up in a tough, poor neighborhood in 1950s Naples. Just about everyone assumes the novels are autobiographical, and describes their subject as the ambivalent wonders of “female friendship,” which makes them sound like a tonier version of Sex and the City, only with a lot more fights between the heroines.

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Review: Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child is a richly satisfying conclusion to her Neapolitan novels

ALIX OHLIN

Contributed to The Globe and Mail – Published Friday, Aug. 28, 2015 12:29PM EDT – Last updated Friday, Aug. 28, 2015 12:29PM EDT

Elena Ferrante is an acrobat. Her prose springs and swoops in great arcs, dipping low to the ground to inhabit a crucial scene, then soaring high over a passage of years. The athleticism of her style reaches its pinnacle in The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth and final volume of her Neapolitan novels, which have been translated from Italian and published here over the past few years to rapturous praise. The acclaim is justified and the finale is richly satisfying.

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The Historical Truth Behind Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

Sarah Begley @SCBegley | Aug. 31, 2015

As the fourth and final book comes out in English, a look at what it would have been like to really grow up in Elena’s world

Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone—Getty Images Young mother and her child in their shack-like residence set up in a cellar in Margellina, Naples in 1947.

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
(translated by Ann Goldstein)

The final novel in the Neapolitan series brings an astonishing literary achievement to a close

Theo Tait Published: 30 August 2015

Back in 1991, the Italian writer who goes by the pseudonym Elena Ferrante declared to her publisher: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.” And while Ferrante’s identity remains a secret, her seven novels have indeed found readers — hundreds of thousands of them — in Italy and beyond. The decision was partly self-protective (her novels certainly feel like intimate personal revelations) and partly an austere aesthetic one: she believed that critics and readers should attend to the work itself, not to the “aura of the author”.

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The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein, book review

The fourth volume of Elena Ferrante’s cult saga brings the tale to a compelling end

GRACE MCCLEEN | Thursday 27 August 2015

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan saga, including its final and latest instalment, The Story of the Lost Child, dramatises an extraordinarily complex relationship between Elena, the protagonist, and Lila, her “brilliant friend”.

Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo are born in impoverished 1950s Naples. They are ‘”opposite [yet] united”. Lila is bold, mercurial, by turns deeply malicious and utterly selfless. Elena is a follower, a striver, chronically insecure. The relationship is symbiotic, and destructive to Elena, whose achievements are sooner or later eclipsed by Lila’s. Lila possesses an ‘irresistible force of attraction’ that makes her the focus of the ‘neighborhood’ and Elena herself. The greatest obstacle Elena the motivated student, young woman, gifted academic, ardent feminist, successful novelist, wife, lover, mother and daughter faces in achieving autonomy and fulfilment is not the poverty of her origins, religious and cultural institutions, fellow literati, political opposition, or the men in her life, but her lifelong friend – a friend she would surely die for, yet more than once wishes was dead.

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Italian fiction

Ties that bind

A four-volume feminist novel from Naples has become an unlikely global hit

Aug 29th 2015

The Story of the Lost Child. By Elena Ferrante. Translation by Ann Goldstein. Europa; 464 pages; $18 and £11.99.

NOVELS become literary blockbusters for many reasons. Some are created by mountains of marketing cash, some by media saturation. “Fifty Shades of Grey” and Harper Lee’s long-lost work, “Go Set a Watchman”, both fit this mould. Others are fuelled by something quite different, and their success is impossible to predict. In recent years “The Neapolitan Novels”, four volumes by an anonymous Italian author calling herself Elena Ferrante, have become a fictional juggernaut that not even the author’s English-language publishers, Europa Editions, saw coming.

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