by MELANIE KEMBREY
The author has never confirmed their identity – but you don’t even need a pseudonym to know when you’re reading an Elena Ferrante novel. There are the sentences that never seem to end; the language charged with carnality; the Naples that is dark yet alluring and the women characters fighting for air in a suffocating city.
The Italian writer’s first novel in five years, The Lying Life of Adults, released this week, is a return to the form which turned Ferrante into a cult figure, publishing phenomenon, household name and shorthand for a genre that resists easy classification.
Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, which started with 2012’s My Brilliant Friend, has been published in 45 languages, adapted into a HBO TV series and sold more than 15 million copies. In Australia, Ferrante’s books have sold more than 220,000 copies. Her manuscripts are kept under lock and key, fans line up at midnight and hold reading vigils for new novels, and students at one Australian university studied her work alongside Homer’s The Odyssey in a course on “great books that changed the world”.
While the writer has maintained anonymity, translator Ann Goldstein has attained a visibility rarely afforded to those in the profession. Ferrante had been publishing novels without major fanfare in Italy since 1992, but found access to a global audience after her publishers founded Europa Editions to bring translated works to readers in the UK and US.
After submitting a sample of her work to Europa, Goldstein, an editor at The New Yorker, was hired to translate Ferrante’sThe Days of Abandonment into English in 2005. She has since translated all of Ferrante’s novels into English and become a stand-in for the writer when it comes to media interviews, writers’ festivals and book events. Despite how their fates and fortunes are intimately connected, Goldstein never communicates directly with Ferrante.
“I just do my thing and then when I have questions, I ask the editors and they ask her. So it is kind of a three-way process,” Goldstein said. While she doesn’t keep up with the theories about Ferrante’s identity, Goldstein thinks most readers have no burning desire to know.
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