Halfway through Elena Ferrante’s new novel, “The Lying Life of Adults,” the narrator, a teenage girl named Giovanna, runs into a priest. Don Giacomo has fallen into disfavor at his church. Previously buoyant, his skin has turned sallow, and a mysterious, violet rash is creeping over one of his hands. Giovanna, ever curious, asks Giacomo…
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels became a literary phenomenon. Will a televised adaptation of the books meet similar success? The author, who write under a pseudonym and has kept her identity studiously under wraps even after a reporter, last fall, claimed to have “unmasked her,” told The New York Times she thinks expectations should be kept…
As the Forward reported earlier this month, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, a quartet beginning with “My Brilliant Friend,” are heading to television in a 32-part series. Now, HBO and the Italian state broadcaster Rai have announced that they’ll be shepherding the series to the screen. As previously announced, it will be directed by Saverio Costanzo,…
In the last few years, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, which concluded with 2014’s “The Story of the Lost Child,” have taken the literary world by storm. Now, Italian director Saverio Costanzo will spearhead their adaptation into a 32-episode television series. While the novels’ imminent adaptation for television was first announced in February, Costanzo’s involvement is…
The first and second Neapolitan novels inspired me to write fiction of my own. The third had the opposite effect: If Elena Ferrante can write that well, why bother? It’s hard for me to say whether Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is better than the previous two installments, or whether the issue was…
It’s neat, in a way, that Elena Ferrante’s Jewish. Well, not Ferrante—the author behind the pseudonym. Anita Raja, the Italian translator whom Claudio Gatti has convincingly argued is Elena Ferrante, is, as Gatti recently explained in detail in the New York Review of Books, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Whether we think it’s terrible…
What shocks me is not that someone was able to rip away the veil of privacy from the Italian writer known to the world as Elena Ferrante; nor am I surprised that she was able to maintain that anonymity for as long as she did. What startles me is the spectacle of people reporting this…
This past Sunday, the Italian journalist Claudio Gatti published an investigation into the “true identity” of novelist Elena Ferrante in the New York Review of Books, as well as outlets in France, Italy, and Germany. Based on financial and real estate records, he concluded that Ferrante was actually a Rome-based translator whose Jewish mother survived…
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