Ian Battaglia in Chicago Review of Books:
Despite the fact nearly no one knows her true identity, Elena Ferrante needs perhaps no introduction. The prolific and reclusive Italian writer has been writing since 1992, but reached international fame with My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan Quartet of novels. It was the skillful hand of translator Ann Goldstein who helped introduce the novels to an English-reading audience. Though she was an integral part of one of the most popular works of fiction in the 21st century, Goldstein tells me she became a translator “accidentally,” after having studied Italian while working in the copy editing department of the New Yorker.
While no one could’ve predicted the extent of the Neopolitan Quartet’s popularity, there is a universality to the novels that clearly resonated with a wide swath of readers. Across the work’s roughly 1,500 pages, we follow the lives of two friends, the narrator Elena and her friend Raffaella (mostly called Lila in the novel) as their lives unfold from 1950s Naples and into the 2010s. Ten years after the release of the fourth and final book, Europa Editions is releasing a new deluxe edition of the work, collected in one volume, perhaps as it was always meant to be.
More here.
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