Books by Elena Ferrante
“The novel captures so much of the fraught subtext, the latent violence that often lies behind the more intense relationships. It’s basically the legacy of a family fallout, and how it trickles down the generations. So it’s familiar Ferrante terrain and she does it really well here.” Read more...
The best books on Family History
Thea Lenarduzzi, Journalist
“Ferrante is an enchanting describer of myth. To me, the most incredible parts of Frantumaglia are when she’s telling the story of Ariadne or the story of Dido. She has a fixation with weaving women, and that to me is the most interesting through-line of the book. She claims that her mother was a dressmaker, and there are these unbelievably luminous passages describing what it was like to accompany her mother to the fabric store to buy fabric and watch her fit clothes to other women. There emerges a parallel between making dresses—weaving fabrics together—and making stories—weaving language together.” Read more...
“The Beach At Night is a children’s book—or it’s supposed to be a children’s book. It’s really horrifying. The book is about a doll that gets left on the beach at night by her owner, a little girl who’s gotten a new little kitten and is much more interested in playing with the little kitten now than she is in playing with the doll. Many vicious things happen to the doll on the beach at night. She’s almost burned; part of her body melts off. There’s a man with a thick mustache who puts a golden wire down the doll’s mouth and forces her to speak her name.” Read more...
“Ferrante gets at something profoundly true about parenthood, that it is both a glorious and a torturous bond. One feels a natural resentment about the demands children place on you—a desire to run away from them and live unencumbered by responsibility—yet also a desire never to be separate from them.” Read more...
The Best Metaphysical Thrillers
Greg Jackson, Novelist
“It’s the most suffocating book I can think of—an incredibly claustrophobic novel in that it’s literally about a woman who’s trapped in her apartment with her children and her dying German shepherd … It’s the fictional exercise of being trapped in your home, the self you’ve constituted. It’s the opposite of home invasion; it’s the opposite of how most fiction works. There’s something so interesting about being with this one character in this one space. That image of disintegration—as you get scattered around the house, what happens? She moves around restlessly; there’s something wrong with the locks and she can’t get out.” Read more...
“I read all of them. I know that there’s been a TV adaptation of them, which is apparently brilliant. It’s done by Italians, thank God: they’ve haven’t Americanized it or anything like that. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to watch it, because I know what Lila and Elena are like to me, and I want to retain that.” Read more...
Historical Novels Set in Italy
Tracy Chevalier, Historical Novelist
“It’s the story of a friendship between these two girls, Elena and Lila, growing up in Naples. One of them, Elena, is a dogged student. She’s going to do well. She’s working class, but she’s going to go to university. Lila is more of a prodigy, more naturally bright, but her parents don’t want to pay for her further education, so she ends up dropping out and marrying at 16…Elena Ferrante must have lived through 1950s Naples to be able to evoke it in this way. It’s just incredible…There’s just something about it that draws you in, it’s almost mesmerizing. You keep reading because it’s so easy to read, so smooth, and yet…once you’re in, it feels jagged. There is this seduction, and yet there’s also a lot of darkness in it, a lot of poverty and violence…It’s quite a read. I think it’s probably not for everybody, but it certainly was for me.” Read more...
Historical Novels Set in Italy
Tracy Chevalier, Historical Novelist
Interviews where books by Elena Ferrante were recommended
Historical Novels Set in Italy, recommended by Tracy Chevalier
Historical novels are at their most compelling when they get the details of daily life in the past right, argues bestselling author Tracy Chevalier. She picks five of her favorite historical novels set in Italy, from 16th-century Florence to 1950s Naples, with a couple of stops in Venice, where her own latest novel, The Glassmaker, is set.
The Best Elena Ferrante Books, recommended by Sarah Chihaya and Merve Emre
From her early novellas to the Neapolitan quartet, the elusive Elena Ferrante has achieved deserved superstar status for the compulsively readable, addictive quality of her writing. Two of the authors of The Ferrante Letters, Sarah Chihaya and Merve Emre, introduce us to Ferrante and recommend what to read next after My Brilliant Friend.
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1
The Invention of Morel
by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms -
2
If On A Winter's Night A Traveller
by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver -
3
Chess Story
by Stefan Zweig, translated by Joel Rotenberg -
4
The Intuitionist
by Colson Whitehead -
5
The Lost Daughter
by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein
The Best Metaphysical Thrillers, recommended by Greg Jackson
The Best Metaphysical Thrillers, recommended by Greg Jackson
Metaphysical literature calls into question the very nature of reality, says the acclaimed US novelist Greg Jackson: it dramatises “the liquid mysteries of thought, pattern, and form.” Here, he highlights five ‘metaphysical thrillers’—artfully written novels powered by intrigue, which explore or embody philosophical dilemmas.
The best books on Family History, recommended by Thea Lenarduzzi
The story of a family never ends, says Thea Lenarduzzi—the literary critic and author of the prize-winning family memoir Dandelions: “It’s always evolving, rewriting itself, long after the protagonists are dead.” Here, she recommends five books on family history that illustrate the shapeshifting nature of this hard-to-pin-down subject, in which memories rarely tally with the written record.
