Arturo’s Island

“This is Elsa Morante’s great book…This book is completely unique. You won’t find anything like this in the whole of literature. The voice is very strange and the story is told from a distance. We don’t know how old the narrator is but he is talking about when he was a little boy growing up in isolation on a little island off Naples called Procida…he’s a little boy constantly inventing the world and desiring to be taken into the world of his father and the world of adults, and the only thing he has got to go on when inventing the world is the library in the house he’s in, which is a library full of literature about classical heroes.” Read more...

The Best Italian Novels

Tim Parks, Novelist