Financial Times

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Admin

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet

Claire Messud

Part social tapestry, part feminist Bildungsroman, this tetralogy shines above all because of its vibrant, unflinching study of friendship

I read My Brilliant Friend, the first in the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante’s trilogy-turned-tetralogy, with the same pleasure I took in books as a kid. Utterly engrossed, I was a little hasty, and felt as if Ferrante had written the story directly for me. I wanted to get back to the novel the way a nine-year-old wants to get back to Harry Potter. As soon as I’d finished, I reached for the second volume (The Story of a New Name); and was frustrated to have to wait for the English translation of the third (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay). Now, with the publication of The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth of Ferrante’s so-called Neapolitan novels, the circle is closed, the story — insofar as it can be — completed.

Translated with verve and suppleness by Ann Goldstein, the books are narrated by Elena Greco, nicknamed Lenù, a working-class girl who, despite her family’s expectations, excels in school and grows up to be a nationally renowned writer and feminist. They are, on the one hand, a social tapestry, the account of 50 years in the evolution of a tight-knit, corruption-ridden community in Naples, from an era of postwar poverty, through the communist and revolutionary upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, and up to the present day. At every stage, the novel plays out Italy’s broader political complications in its intimate local arena, from school-age feuds and alliances to the painful adult ruptures and violence born of blood-ties or ideology. But this politico-historical lens, important though it is to the fiction, is by no means sufficient to describe it.

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The New York Times

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Admin

‘The Story of the Lost Child,’ by Elena Ferrante

By RACHEL CUSKAUG. 26, 2015

Elena Ferrante has written her story twice: once in a group of intense, highly modeled short novels whose action unfolds over a brief time span; and again in the four sprawling, rambunctious, decades-spanning works that compose her Neapolitan saga. That these two modes of storytelling — the compact and the commodious; the modern and the historical; the distilling of life into metaphor and its picaresque, riotous expansion — are so obviously the obverse of each other constitutes yet another narrative, the story of how an individual (more specifically, a woman) arrives, after the vicissitudes of living, at a definition of self. “Do you want the long answer or the short?” is the customary divide between explanations versus outcomes in the retelling of events. Ferrante gives us both the long answerand the short, and in doing so adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience.

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Vanity Fair

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Admin

HOT TYPE

AUGUST 27, 2015 10:24 AM

The Mysterious, Anonymous Author Elena Ferrante on the Conclusion of Her Neapolitan Novels

“I prefer to think of myself as being inside a tangled knot; tangled knots fascinate me.”

by ELISSA SCHAPPELL

The Community Bookstore in Park Slope is not the sort of place you might imagine a West Side Story–style rumble to break out, and yet fans of the wildly successful epic meta-fiction novels of Elena Ferrante, author of the Neapolitan series, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle, have on more than one occasion nearly come to blows. Not surprisingly, fans of Ferrante’s innovative, swiftly moving, ruthlessly true-to-life tale of female friendship are quicker to the punch than fans of Knausgaard’s languorously paced, nostalgic, navel-gazing domestic drama. Allegedly, glasses have been smashed, goatees set ablaze, and fountain pens unsheathed with the promise that, “I will shank you.”

Passions run high when you’re talking about Ferrante and her work, particularly her sensational, highly addictive Neapolitan novels, which paint a portrait of a consuming female friendship against the backdrop of social and political upheaval in Italy from the 1950s to the present day. My Brilliant Friend,The Story of a New Name, and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay have made Ferrante, an enigmatic figure who writes under a pseudonym, and is widely regarded as the best contemporary novelist you’ve never heard of, a worldwide sensation. With the highly anticipated publication of the fourth and final book, The Story of the Lost Child, out this September, Ferrante fans are in a white-hot lather—and they should be.

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BBC

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Admin

Ten books to read in September

From an account of how FDR could have done more during the Holocaust to the latest adventure of Lisbeth Salander, these titles should sit on your shelf, says Jane Ciabattari.

By Jane Ciabattari

27 August 2015

Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

In her celebrated Neapolitan novels, Ferrante creates an enduring portrait of a “splendid and shadowy” female friendship. The fourth and final book in the series begins in 1976, when her narrator, Elena, who has just left her husband, returns to Naples from Florence. She has two daughters, a married lover, and several successful books. She tries to avoid her longtime best friend Lila. “But it wasn’t easy. She almost immediately tried to re-enter my life by force, and I ignored her, tolerated her, endured her.” Complications abound. This concluding volume, translated into English by Ann Goldstein, proves, once again, as Ferrante puts it: “Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps.” (Credit: Europa Editions)

The Guardian

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Admin

Italian author Elena Ferrante stays in shadows despite prize nomination

It’s a Naples whodunnit: novelist hotly tipped to win Italy’s Strega prize has kept her identity a secret for more than 20 years to preserve her ‘flesh and blood’

When Italian journalist Roberto Saviano nominated the writer Elena Ferrante for the prestigious Strega prize, he did so knowing that, even if the acclaimed author won Italy’s highest literary honour in July, she would never come forward to accept the prize.

For Italy’s most important contemporary writer, who has used a pseudonym since her first book was published in 1992 and whose true identity is a closely held secret, losing her anonymity would be too high a price to pay. “If the book is worth something, it should be enough,” Ferrante once said of her decision to avoid publicity.

The desire to write and be heard, and yet remain a phantom, is a decision few could understand better than Saviano, a prolific journalist and commentator who was forced to go into hiding and lives under constant police protection after publishing Gomorrah, his exposé of the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra.

When he nominated Ferrante, he said he did it to restore the honour of the Strega, an award that he says has “lost its charm” and come to resemble a game that is “brazenly rigged” in a publishing world that lacks authentic competition, just as much of Italy does. “I believe that your presence will help this prize to be once again something that is vital and genuine and not just an exchange of votes and favours,” Saviano said.

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The Independent

Posted on June 18, 2015 by Admin

The best summer reads: 90 books chosen by 40 literary luminaries

KIRKUS REVIEW

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Admin

THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD

From the “Neapolitan Novels” series, volume 4

by Elena Ferrante

Inexorable seismic changes—in society and in the lives of two female friends—mark the final volume of Ferrante’s Neapolitan series.

Elena and Lila, the emotionally entwined duo at the center of Ferrante’s (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, 2014, etc.) unsentimental examination of women’s lives and relationships, advance through middle age and early old age (perhaps) in this calamitous denouement to their saga. The more fortunate Elena, an author who struggles to assert herself in the misogynistic world of 1970s and ’80s Italy, is drawn back to Naples and its internecine bloodshed; Lila, who has stayed in the city of their youth, is at odds with its controlling families. Elena’s “escape” and attempts at personal and familial fulfillment, on her own terms, hint at the changing roles of women in that era, but it’s Lila’s daily struggle in a Camorra-controlled neighborhood that illuminates the deep fractures within contemporary Italian society. The paths to self-determination taken by the lifelong friends merge and separate periodically as the demands of child-rearing, work, and community exert their forces. The far-reaching effects of a horrific blow to Lila’s carefully maintained equilibrium resonate through much of the story and echo Ferrante’s trademark themes of betrayal and loss. While avid devotees of the Neapolitan series will be gratified by the return of several characters from earlier installments, the need to cover ground in the final volume results in a telescoped delivery of some plot points. Elena’s narrative, once again, never wavers in tone and confidently carries readers through the course of two lives, but the shadowy circumstances of those lives will invite rereading and reinterpretation.

The enigmatic Ferrante, whose identity remains the subject of international literary gossip, has created a mythic portrait of a female friendship in the chthonian world of postwar Naples.

Publishers Weekly

Posted on May 27, 2015 by Admin

The Story of the Lost Child

In Ferrante’s fourth and final Neapolitan novel, she reunites Elena, the accomplished writer, with Lila, the indomitable spirit, in their Southern Italian city as they confront maturity and old age, death, and the meaning of life. The two friends face the chaos of a corrupt and decaying Naples while the lives of the people closest to them—plagued by abandonment, imprisonment, murder, and betrayal—spiral out of control. “Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?” Lila asks Elena, disparaging her friend’s career choice in the process. Readers will need the accompanying index of characters to keep track as Ferrante resolves the themes and events from earlier titles (My Brilliant Friend; The Story of a New Name; Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay) with a force and ferocity recalling the devastating earthquake of 1980 and Vesuvius’s volcanic eruptions, which themselves provide the unsettling background to the narrative. Ferrante’s precise foreshadowing is such that an early incident of a lost doll in book one mirrors the lost child in book four right down to their shared first name—and “The Blue Fairy,” the story Lila scribbled in a childhood notebook that Elena threw in the Arno, resurfaces in this installment’s final pages. Throughout, there’s the sense of the circle completing: near the end, Elena pens a short novel entitled “A Friendship” (a metafictional nod to Ferrante’s series as a whole), inspired by her half-century relationship with Lila. The novel is Elena’s final work and permanently ties Elena and Lila together, for better and worse. This stunning conclusion further solidifies the Neapolitan novels as Ferrante’s masterpiece and guarantees that this reclusive author will remain far from obscure for years to come. (Sept.)