The Story of the Lost Child. By Elena Ferrante. Translation by Ann Goldstein. Europa; 464 pages; $18 and £11.99.
NOVELS become literary blockbusters for many reasons. Some are created by mountains of marketing cash, some by media saturation. “Fifty Shades of Grey” and Harper Lee’s long-lost work, “Go Set a Watchman”, both fit this mould. Others are fuelled by something quite different, and their success is impossible to predict. In recent years “The Neapolitan Novels”, four volumes by an anonymous Italian author calling herself Elena Ferrante, have become a fictional juggernaut that not even the author’s English-language publishers, Europa Editions, saw coming.
Starting with “My Brilliant Friend”, which came out in Italy in 2011, the books focus on the lifelong attachment of two women from a tough Neapolitan neighbourhood. In America, where Ms Ferrante had a modest following, not much happened until 2013, when the translation was written up by James Wood, chief critic of the New Yorker. (Ann Goldstein, the translator, is an editor at the magazine.) By the time the...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1EZtekV
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