Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels

Your name plus a one ("1") at the end

*starts following Elena Ferrante*

Afraid I don't tweet or twitter. Any updates?

Her account seems to be a lot of re-tweets from other people's praise. Her own tweets are in Italian.

That interview was great, lots to say but I already said it. On twitter :-)

finished my brilliant friend the other day. completely adored it and can't wait to read the next. only caveat would be to suggest to ferrante-virgins: read days of abandonment first. they're both probably equally amazing but days just jumps out at you in a way the trilogy doesn't. it's like a fever dream, while the trilogy so far is actually pretty happy

jesus really? i'm nearing the end of MBF right now and the whole thing seems suffused with dread

my brilliant friend still has that hope springing from the upward trajectory of young life: lenu's academic progress, the cerullo shoe factory. also there's a beautiful, complex friendship at the centre of it. whereas days of abandonment is just 'husband left me and dog is shitting blood while i've locked myself out of the house' and the only glimmer of hope or friendliness is a sad, flaccid neighbour.

can't wait!

https://twitter.com/reynoldsmichael/status/601028422865915905

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1609452860/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1609452860&linkCode=as2&tag=conversatio07-20&linkId=5XDCXBIYPMGBKW5Q

the final part - its nearly here.

Saw that the other night

Automatic thread bump. This book is dropping next week.

— System

have received a copy of vol 4 through cunning means, but have not yet read vol 3, so my smugness is misplaced

you a lol blogger?

i have a well-connected and kindly cousin

Looking forward to part 4, should be out in Danish in spring 2016.

#1 remains my favorite and I'd rank them 1 > 2 > 3 but maybe 4 will wrap everything so nicely as to trump them all...

I've only read 1 and started 2. Feel like I should maybe reread 1 before proceeding further.

^ Yeah, same. I've read a couple chapters of the second. I liked the first, but just priority-wise I'm not sure if I want to keep going.

I mean once you get going on 2 & 3 they're real page turners, the writing is good and the whole milieu is great so def recommend them to anyone

long interview -

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/elena-ferrante-interview-the-story-of-the-lost-child
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/elena-ferrante-interview-the-story-of-the-lost-child-part-two

'the storey of the lost child' is probably the best of the four, searing, i think, its really incredible

have any of you read it? dont want to spoil it but have been dying to examine some of the pieces

Its good to know that you (who didn't like it as much as some of us) found this great.

I have seen this in the shops but haven't got it as I want to finish a couple of things first (funnily enough Mandelstam's Hope Abandoned does examine her friendships with Akhmatova and others too).

Please start talking about it. I just won't look at this for a while.

To wait for the Danish translation or buy the English version... that's a tricky question.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/joanna-biggs/i-was-blind-she-a-falcon

LRB almost never publish a review to coincide with publication..

i liked that review a lot although the parts about 'genre fiction' sent it (and me) off the rails. its one of the few that has mentioned what i think is most powerful and disquieting about reading them, their intense physicality, the way ferrante insists on the mind being bound to the body. i have a vague memory of feminist essay i read as a teenager where the author claimed that the astronaut in his spacesuit was the patriarchal ideal. pristine, white, mechanical, armored, divorced from the messy flesh of being. and i think its interesting to contrast the heaviness of ferrante's characters with the weightlessness of knausgård (to cast around for the closest example at hand). i had such trouble with the earlier parts particularly 'the story of the new name' because its wearying. walking up the last flight of tenement stairs after a long day of work. ferrante links the mental - art, friendship, intellect - to occupation of physical space in a way that seems radical, feminist.

idk theres a lot i liked thinking about here particularly the way that art forces coherence on life, that it attempts to coalesce, define boundaries, delineate identities. how false that can feel, how important truth is.

i lost my copy of brilliant friend somewhere :/

I am not sure I am getting where the shorter older stuff is more 'polished'. Both phases of her writing life present bks that are very fast and addictive as a read. To do with the short chapters and I also think she devised a bunch of characters and placed them in a universe that enabled her to write in this feverish mode for hundreds of pages...this comes back to the literary vs. genre opposition which the LRB peddles and I don't really like that.

That aside I liked the review.

Not read the bk or this artcile but love the headline:

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1604540.ece

Just finished (prob re-read some of) The Story of The Lost Child, and I predict another comeback hit for Elena Greco, which I hope she won't come to hate, as she says of her first comeback, A Friendship. Though she as her character/perhaps truest self yet, ends up on the page like she does (won't spoil, but she's somewhat bummed out/dissatisfied, as has often happened of course), hope she regards this as confessional validation, as much as possible, of her own worth, beyond being the well-scrubbed little girl from the ghetto who made good by following the now quaint rules for moderns, in a mediocre, backstabbing world. But of course, the Devil has the best lines.
Some of this Elena-Lenu x Lina-Lila (who seem to be merged in the voice of pre-Neapoliton Novels Ferrante, judging only by excerpts)may come from the back and forth of Anna the publicist, called Anita in the Neapolitan neighborhood recently visited (lost the link), and her novelist husband, or maybe not. But my experience in English makes translator Ann Goldstein seem invaluable, re the rough elegance and sometimes poetic turns of phrase, though the turns of the whole story must come through in the original as well, I assume---anybody read it in Italian??

I think this was at least *mostly* written by a woman, with husband or other editorial pushback/critiques, as every writer needs.

There's also the sense that, as Ferrante's referred to it in interviews, this is not a quartet, but one story (a multi-volume novel, like her childhood 19th Century heroes tended toward). So Elena Greco stops it at a good place, but it doesn't really seem like The End; she may still be writing, whenever there are new developments---but we'll probably (?) be left to speculate, as she does, and leaves spaces for us to do so in these books (so much detail, but she knows when to leave room for our brains, I think---def leaves a lot to be learned about Italy and everywhere else, no matter how much she says).

seems like this is everywhere lately

One of the big questions for up-from-the-bottom literary careerist Elena Greco is and always has been: how do you creatively represent/tap into your origins---semi-familiar to many, in terms of their undeniable churn, their real-life-whatever-that-is melodrama---without breaking faith, without (over-) exploiting the people you still care about? As a product of the 50s-60s-70s (etc.) American Deep South, I def get some of the problems of this Southern Italian, especially when---well, I don't want to be accused of spoilers (not that most of this turned out like I expected).

Greco's doubts about her own degree of artistic achievement, incl. integrity---oh yeah, and basic (?) talent, esp. compared the self-semi-tutored genius and/or charisma of you know who---are presented as plausible and entertaining.

seems like this is everywhere lately

― hot doug stamper (||||||||), Tuesday, September 22, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Good.

Reading book two - immediate punch in the face, every paragraph feels like it's one word away from exploding violently. The first one set this up so beautifully and here it's just one KO after the other.

On my paperback cover a quote by a critic reads "Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you'll have some idea ..." - I don't get it.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/03/this-best-selling-author-is-still-anonymous.html

Reading this at the mo - for literary tourism its pretty good.

Made me laugh:

(Why is Shakira always on the radio in Southern Italy?)

Nice this quotes Shirley Hazzard - whom I am reading (though its not been a great week for reading anything) - Bay of Noon is another Naples book.

On Austen http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/16/sense-and-sensibility-jane-austen-elena-ferrante-anonymity

Great link, thanks. Pasted yr post on What Are You Reading?

my brilliant friend still has that hope springing from the upward trajectory of young life: lenu's academic progress, the cerullo shoe factory. also there's a beautiful, complex friendship at the centre of it. whereas days of abandonment is just 'husband left me and dog is shitting blood while i've locked myself out of the house' and the only glimmer of hope or friendliness is a sad, flaccid neighbour.

― flopson, Tuesday, 9 June 2015 16:42 (5 months ago) Permalink

can't wait!

― goole, Tuesday, 9 June 2015 17:02 (5 months ago) Permalink

yah p much

Finished book 4 saturday, it's been a great ride, kind of feel - and this sounds maybe a bit over the top but I think it could be true - like a slightly better person now

two thirds of the way through part one, will probably get the next three tomorrow

i don't know how much i can say other than pointing at bits and saying, huh, this is great, huh

it's also very--i mean, for a highbrow lit hit it's also kind of soap-opera functional in a way i can see my mother enjoying (in fact i am probably going to get my mother a copy of the first one, we'll see how that goes)

I think a lot can be said abt these books apart from the writing being outstanding

It's interesting to me that a novel with a relatively conservative form can seem so contemporary and alive - in part because the writing's fresh, in part because the themes it deal with resonate with current ideas on privilege, democracy, sexual roles, the body

great post upthread about the heaviness of bodies in ferrante (juxtaposed knausgaard)

for a highbrow lit hit it's also kind of soap-opera functional in a way i can see my mother enjoying

The covers were criticised as basically being low-brow but they actually say something about this quality of the books.

Reckon my mother would at least like bits of it - but idk perhaps she'd struggle with the setting. Hmm..

I'd be happy if this series apart from being fantastic fiction would also help blurr some dated genre distinctions...

must admit I was surprised by the cover of my American ed of vol. 4, like the Danish covers more:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AHSC_QGQxxw/Vcr1RERK9oI/AAAAAAAADX0/n1TJDbeI-XI/s1600/PicMonkey%2BCollage.jpg

'fantastic fiction' -- lol, there are parts that make me think of sci fi -- but that's another thing

i liked the cover a lot more once i started reading--they started to feel like seeing idk kodachrome images in mad men. idk if ever kodachrome was a thing in mad men. mb the one on the slides.

the xpost twitter account recently dropped the posts and started looping images, incl. quite a variety of covers. Check it out, if you don't mind getting stuck inside a mobile.
The soap opera devices might relate to the 19th Century literary inspirations she's mentioned in all the interviews I've seen, which may have helped upstart female authors get past initially unfavorable and frequently ludicrous reviews, infiltrating the new mass audience, to some extent. George Eliot wasn't above killing off a major character at just the right/most convenient moment, and satisfyingly so, because we can expect good stuff coming. Same with Ferrante; we just barely have time to say, "Hey, wait a minute," and ba-boom, another onslaught of development. And of course, dealing with the daily onslaught, with sensory overload at times, is one of the main themes of this saga, maybe *the* theme, when you come right down to it. Which doesn't seem very 19th Century overall, but prob some early examples?

xp lol didn't mean "fantastic" fiction just meant it's great