Troubling Love (1992)
L'amore molesto — a woman investigates her mother's death by drowning off the Naples coast; filmed by Mario Martone
Literature · Novelists
Elena Ferrante
pseudonym; first published 1992 · Italian
Contemporary Italian fiction
Elena Ferrante is the pseudonym of an Italian novelist who has never appeared in public and whose identity remains officially unknown. Her four Neapolitan Novels follow the sixty-year friendship of Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo from a violent Naples suburb in the 1950s, and became a worldwide phenomenon in Ann Goldstein's translations. Ferrante has argued that books should not need their authors, and has given interviews only in writing.
How to spot them
- ▸A pseudonym: no photographs, no public appearances, interviews conducted only by letter or email
- ▸A poor Naples rione in the 1950s; the lifelong friendship and rivalry of two girls
- ▸Ann Goldstein, her English translator, is often named in the same question
- ▸Published in Italy by the small Rome house Edizioni E/O
- ▸"Frantumaglia": her word for the swarming fragmentation her women feel
Key works
The Days of Abandonment (2002)
I giorni dell'abbandono — Olga's disintegration over a Turin summer after her husband leaves
My Brilliant Friend (2011)
L'amica geniale — the first Neapolitan novel, opening with Lila's disappearance in old age and going back to two girls and a lost doll
The Story of a New Name (2012)
The second Neapolitan novel: Lila's marriage to Stefano Carracci and the summer on Ischia
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013)
The third Neapolitan novel, moving into the political violence of the 1960s and 1970s
The Story of the Lost Child (2014)
The fourth Neapolitan novel; it was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016
The Lost Daughter (2006)
La figlia oscura — a holidaying academic takes a child's doll on an Ionian beach; filmed by Maggie Gyllenhaal in 2021
The Lying Life of Adults (2019)
La vita bugiarda degli adulti — Giovanna, told she is growing to resemble her disgraced aunt Vittoria, goes looking for her
Key ideas
- The book should stand without the author: anonymity as an artistic condition, not a marketing trick
- "Frantumaglia", the fragmenting swarm of feeling that overtakes her narrators
- Female friendship as competition, dependence and theft as much as affection
Quick-fire facts
- •Her Italian publisher is the small Rome house Edizioni E/O; the English-language publisher is Europa Editions
- •Ann Goldstein, a former editor at The New Yorker, translates her into English
- •The four Neapolitan Novels appeared in Italy between 2011 and 2014 and are sometimes treated as a single work
- •The Story of the Lost Child was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016
- •In 2016 the journalist Claudio Gatti claimed, from royalty payments, to have identified her as the translator Anita Raja; the claim was widely condemned as an intrusion
- •Frantumaglia (2003, expanded later) collects her letters, essays and written interviews
- •HBO and RAI adapted the Neapolitan Novels as the television series My Brilliant Friend, first broadcast in 2018
- •She wrote a weekly column for The Guardian in 2018
- •Maggie Gyllenhaal's film of The Lost Daughter won the screenplay award at Venice in 2021
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- The Paris Review — Elena Ferrante, Art of Fiction No. 228
- The Booker Prizes — The Story of the Lost Child