“If it seems to me not that I’ve won but that I’ve fought with all my strength, I decide to publish.” “Today, writing, for me, is above all a battle to avoid lying,” she says.

She published her first novel, Troubling Love, in Italy in 1991, and is now one of the country’s most acclaimed-and elusive-novelists. That novel multiplied my ambitions, but it also weighed on me, paralyzing me.” It took many years for Ferrante to outgrow the anxiety of influence, but she never stopped writing in secret. “There I discovered what literature can be. Slim as a “salted anchovy,” with a quicksilver intelligence, Lila ignites the more compliant Elena’s ambitions: “We tore the words from each other’s mouth, creating an excitement that seemed like a storm of electrical charges.”Īt sixteen, Ferrante found herself captivated by Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian and, most influentially, Elsa Morante’s House of Liars. Together, the girls grow up in a corner of Naples Visconti might have filmed, a neighborhood of pastry bakers and fruit-and-vegetable vendors, vendettas, and casual violence. two years ago, they’re ruminatively narrated by a writer named Elena, who looks back upon a defining, lifelong bond with the “terrible, dazzling” Lila, whom she meets in first grade. Beginning with My Brilliant Friend, published in the U.S.

It would be difficult to find a deeper portrait of women’s friendship than the one in Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, which unfold from the fifties to the twenty-first century to tell a single story with the possessive force of an origin myth. “I was interested in recounting how a long friendship between two women could endure and survive in spite of good and bad feelings, dependence and rebellion, mutual support and betrayal.” “Relationships between women don’t have solid rules like those between men,” says the Italian author Elena Ferrante. In a rare interview, Elena Ferrante reveals the personal origins of her Neapolitan novels.

Ferrante neapolitan novels