My mother discovered Elena Ferrante first. A little while before Christmas last year, she pressed on me the first of the Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend, declaring that the story of two girls growing up in Fifties Naples was urgent reading.
I read it greedily, spellbound, and began the second volume the minute I finished the first. On Boxing Day, we reached crisis point: I’d finished book two, on a shuddering cliffhanger, but she was still only halfway through the third. Desperate times, unprecedented measures. We fetched a kitchen knife and, carefully as a neurosurgeon, sliced the book down its spine; with barely a pause, we continued reading.
We’ve had to wait, but the fourth and final instalment in the series – in Ann Goldstein’s excellent translation – is published next month. The author has acquired devoted fans from Zadie Smith to James Wood, and has been shortlisted for Italy’s most prestigious prize, the Strega – yet no one knows who she is. In 1991, before her first novel was published, Ferrante (a pseudonym) wrote to her Italian publishers, outlining the conditions on which she would release her work. Once a text has entered the world, she said, it has no need of its writer; she would never publicise her work, nor personally accept any prizes it might win. “I will”, she ended, with a hint of wry amusement, “‘be the least expensive author of the publishing house. I’ll spare you even my presence.”
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I read it greedily, spellbound, and began the second volume the minute I finished the first. On Boxing Day, we reached crisis point: I’d finished book two, on a shuddering cliffhanger, but she was still only halfway through the third. Desperate times, unprecedented measures. We fetched a kitchen knife and, carefully as a neurosurgeon, sliced the book down its spine; with barely a pause, we continued reading.
We’ve had to wait, but the fourth and final instalment in the series – in Ann Goldstein’s excellent translation – is published next month. The author has acquired devoted fans from Zadie Smith to James Wood, and has been shortlisted for Italy’s most prestigious prize, the Strega – yet no one knows who she is. In 1991, before her first novel was published, Ferrante (a pseudonym) wrote to her Italian publishers, outlining the conditions on which she would release her work. Once a text has entered the world, she said, it has no need of its writer; she would never publicise her work, nor personally accept any prizes it might win. “I will”, she ended, with a hint of wry amusement, “‘be the least expensive author of the publishing house. I’ll spare you even my presence.”
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