by Elena Ferrante
283 pgs. | pb | 9788833571683 | €19,00

Review by Jeanne Bonner

If all had gone as planned—which is to say if a global pandemic hadn’t bulldozed our normal lives—this summer, you might have been reading Ann Goldstein’s English translation of La vita bugiarda degli adulti, the new novel by Elena Ferrante. Instead, we’re still stuck in a viral vortex and the release of the English version, entitled , has been postponed until September.

So while we wait, I’ll give you a review of the Italian original—and as far as plot, pacing and characters are concerned, it really doesn’t make any difference. I’m not employed by Ladbrokes or anything but I would wager there is essentially zero chance that while Ferrante’s Italian original engrossed me, Goldstein’s English version won’t. Goldstein has built a sterling reputation by translating not only all of Ferrante’s works into English but also by overseeing the release of Primo Levi’s Complete Works in English. Primo Levi, folks.

Indeed, Goldstein is positioned well because I see the new novel—about a young girl living in Naples at the dawn of her teenage years who uncovers details about her family history—as a compromise between the sweeping four-book Neapolitan series that began with My Brilliant Friend and Ferrante’s earlier novels. A compromise in terms of length—Bugiarda runs 300 pages—and one in terms of scope and ambition, too.

It’s a distinction worth noting because I consider the earlier novels—The Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter, in particular—small literary earthquakes that unleashed something powerful and at times disturbing. (As James Wood said in his famous New Yorker review about Ferrante’s work, “It assails bourgeois niceties and domestic proprieties; it rips the skin off the habitual.”)

In fact, when I recommend Ferrante to readers, I always tell them to read those two early novels. And as far as the depiction of female characters in fiction goes, I think I have good reason. The Days of Abandonment is, after all, where the main character, Olga, who has been cuckolded not only by her husband but by the family’s underage babysitter, viciously attacks the pair on the street in broad daylight, noting as she strides toward them that she “felt no desire to cry or scream or ask for explanations, only a black mania for destruction.” (Translation care of, who else? Ann Goldstein). A black mania for destruction. Like a ferocious Angela Bassett setting fire to the car in that scene from the movie “Waiting to Exhale”!

Ferrante’s female characters are fully-dimensional, nuanced, flawed individuals, like centuries’ worth of male characters. Reading the two earlier novels, I’ve fantasized about a re-boot of The Odyssey, with Penelope as Odysseus—the one who wanders, sometimes recklessly. Perhaps it’s because as Meghan O’Rourke once noted in the Guardian, Ferrante writes about “women’s experience without trying to find anything redemptive in it, and in doing so peels away superficial assumption��.” In other words, we women are crappy, too. And this is especially obvious in spare, concentrated works like The Days of Abandonment.

It’s not that I, too, didn’t ravenously read all four of the books in the Neapolitan series—I did. And certainly, Ferrante continues in the series with the themes from the earlier novels, but I don’t think they had the same literary quality as the shorter works. I think, as some Italian critics pointed out, the writing (in the original Italian) was sloppy in places. There were sections where the prose could have been tighter, improved.

But not the storytelling. Never the storytelling.

All the works—including this new book—showcase Ferrante’s sterling storytelling abilities. In fact, it almost doesn’t make any sense to parse too much or question narrative decisions when, at the end of the day, the new novel is suspenseful—a page-turner.

Ferrante uses a sophisticated form of bait and switch in this new work by training our eyes immediately on one set of ruptures—between Giovanna, the young protagonist, and her parents, and between her parents and her father’s sister—while setting us up to swoon when another, equally devastating schism emerges.

I won’t say any more about that because to do so would require a spoiler alert. But with both of these plot points, she reaches into her novelistic toolbox and pulls out the implements she wields most authoritatively: moments of discomfort, predatory relationships, awkward scenes between loved ones, infidelity, power, not to mention something as fundamental as the nature of evil (and how it manifests itself in our everyday relationships). At one point in the new novel, the narrator reflects on something Ferrante terms ‘un’impressione di malvagità.” Malvagità—there’s a Ferrantian flourish. The word refers to a state of wickedness, of cruelty.

Like in all of her works, she has crafted characters whose desperate longing and insidious desires are—in the language of web analytics—sticky. This is after all the woman who describes in Frantumaglia her tried and true approach to writing as putting her fingers inside wounds of hers that have not completely healed, that are in fact still “infected.”

Such an approach makes us want to know more—to read more. Here, when we see the young narrator’s attraction for the aunt with whom her parents have broken off relations, we get it, even as we can also instantly see the aunt as a predator who won’t be content to simply get to know her estranged niece (single, flashy and childless, Zia Vittoria drives fast, curses and talks about romantic relationships in non-Hallmark Channel tones). Much of the early part of the book depends on building suspense as Giovanna is drawn into her aunt’s confidence and her world. What will happen when Giovanna sees her next?

Ferrante’s writing about friendships, particularly between women, and about relationships between mothers and daughters has been widely covered in previous reviews of the earlier works. Here in the new novel we have a few other relationships to which she turns her unforgiving laser focus: the father-daughter dynamic; the dynamic between a child and her parents’ friends; and as mentioned above, the familial ties between a niece and her aunt, or really any estranged relative.

Ferrante always goes where the emotional fires are raging, whatever their cause or attributes. One fire, in general, is the evolution from our childhood views of our parents in their adult world, and our more mature perspectives. That pivot—which here is buttressed by a short treatise on class relations in Naples—is at the heart of the novel. Early on in the book, Giovanna observes, “Imparai sempre �辱ù a mentire ai miei genitori.” She finds herself lying more and more to her parents—and as the book goes on, she learns just how much her parents have been lying. To her. To each other—and to themselves.

Here to exploit this shift is the aunt. Indeed, Ferrante shines when it comes to fictional villains. In one scene between Giovanna and Zia Vittoria, the young girl seeks comfort by proposing to confide a family secret, evidence of which she has recently witnessed. But the aunt isn’t playing along; when asked that she not tell anyone Giovanna’s secret, she replies acidly that she doesn’t make those kinds of promises, adding, “Fottiti.” Literally: Fuck yourself. Screw you. (I’m holding my breath to see how Ann translates this). The aunt, who never made it out of the old, rough-and-tumble neighborhood and sprinkles her conversation with saucy bits of dialect, goes on to say that the bad thoughts you keep inside become ferocious dogs that bite your head off while you sleep. Oh wait, there’s more! Giovanna is so desperate for some communion, desperate to unload this awful thing she has witnessed that she finally reveals what she knows, begging her aunt not to tell her father. To which Zia Vittoria replies, “You think your father gives a damn about that?”

Boom.

Remember that moment when you realized your parents weren’t saints? That your relatives were maybe all drunks? The time you tried to tell a loved one your deepest fears? Or your closest cousin said the guy you loved was a loser? You’ll be reliving all those salient moments of your maturation while taking in this new Ferrante book.

In this one quick comment from her aunt, the young, fragile narrator is not only deprived of the succor typically afforded by an important adult relationship in her life, but she is told that her father—whom she thinks of as a sensitive intellectual—is so callous as not to care about this particular secret, which will ultimately devastate Giovanna’s household.

It’s a salient, unflinching Ferrantian moment. But one that’s unfortunately dimmed by the nature of the book’s main character, which is to say Giovanna. I don’t find Giovanna quite as sympathetic as Olga, say, or even Elena in the Neapolitan series, though all three are bookish female characters who clash one way or another with men or the world men created. She’s also less sympathetic than another young teenage protagonist in recent Italian fiction: the narrator of Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s A Girl Returned (also translated by Goldstein and also published by Ferrante’s publishing house). This dampened the appeal of the book somewhat for me.

Some of the plot also strains credulity. At the outset, the girl is embarking on her early teenage years and by book’s end, she’s hardly much older. Yet she comes and goes from home as she sees fit, traveling twice from Naples to Milan without her parents and without, say, a school chaperone or trusted relative. I suppose part of this freedom can be chalked up to the turmoil stemming from the book’s second schism.

There’s also a promising but underexploited subplot involving a charismatic man who’s deeply religious. Giovanna swoons over him, and Ferrante effectively conveys a dynamic that isn’t simply that of a young girl meeting an older, alluring man but rather of the frisson new acquaintances can stimulate. Yet I was maybe expecting a bit more from this.

Similarly, the book’s conclusion feels vaguely unsatisfying, perhaps because Ferrante is such a good storyteller and she drills down on themes that are, again, sticky, all of which lead me to expect more. It’s almost as if a final chapter were lopped off during the editing process. The last scene certainly signals Giovanna is growing up, entering the woefully mendacious world of adults. But the conclusion neither ties up narrative strands nor deliberately leaves things unresolved to reflect the sense of flux that permeates adult life.

I say all this full-well knowing that Anglophone Ferrante fans will seek out the new book, come September (and I am recommending as much myself). In fact, I’ll be cheered by any reader who picks up this work of translated Italian fiction. Besides, it’s always entertaining to see what Ferrante will produce when she mixes women, men, love, discomfort and growing pains together.

More people watched Duke lose to Kansas (prompting some of my favorite tweets of the year, mostly about how Grayson Allen looks like he has a future in sweater vests and cubicles: “Grayson Allen had three good opportunities” “And yet not a single person bought insurance from him. #NotACloser” or “Don’t be sad, Grayson Allen. Nationwide is on your siiiide —And hiring! #NCAA #ncaataunts”) than will read a book in the next month.¹

That said, I feel like I owe it to myself to keep logging these weekly posts about 2018 translations, especially since I took the time to read Domenico Starnone’s Trick this week under what I thought were enough interesting conditions to prompt a fairly decent post. In the end, I’m not sure that’s true, but I’ll give it my best for three-four bits and then go watch the pilot episode of Krypton because it’s Sunday and there’s no baseball on.

by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions)

Last weekend, when I was working on that frigging post, I alluded to writing about the newest Lispector and Will Self this week. Well. So. That Lispector book? DENSE AS FUCK. I’m still planning on writing something about it, but it’s ten thousand times smarter than I am and I don’t know if I actually like it. So I want to save that for next week, when I’ll write about it and “what we want out of a review of a translation” while watching Opening Day baseball all day.²

When I realized that I had no chance of finishing The Chandelier in time to work on this, I scrambled for for another March translation to read. Michael Orthofer—the most well-read dude in America?—mentioned Starnone in an email this week, so I quickly went on Europa Editions’s site and downloaded the first book of his I saw—Ties.

See, my idea was to read a book with as little background expectations as possible. I knew nothing about Starnone or his books, didn’t read the jacket copy, only glanced at the cover (out of necessity), and skipped the intro. I wanted to replicate the experience of listening to a new album from a band I know nothing about, or watching a new TV show with some innocuous name, like “Animal Kingdom” or “Search Party,” where there aren’t any expectations brought to bear. What is it like to just read a book? Instead of “reading a book” with a critical, ‘I’m gonna write about this’ sort of opening?

Halfway through Ties I realized that this book came out in March 2017. But! Starnone has a new book out this month as well! Trick! Which sounds like Ties and is also translated by Jhumpa Lahiri. (Whom I’ve never read, although I should?³)

So I quickly gave up on Ties (which was fine, 100% a narrative with characters and plot), and downloaded Trick. And read it over two days so that I could keep up my 2018 resolution.

I’m probably a little full of shit, but here are all the prejudices I had before reading this book:

1) Thanks to Lori Feathers’s post on this very site, I became aware that Starnone⁴ is married to Elena Ferrante.

2) Europa Editions is the publisher, and, for me, their books fall into three categories: decent Latin American works (Gamboa), crime novels I would probably like, and book club books.

3) Jhumpa Lahiri translated this after learning Italian and writing her last book in Italian. No judgements associated with that, but it was a fact that was hard to miss when buying this book.

I had no idea what to expect when I started this book—would it be a romance? a thriller?—and just took it all as it came. Which was relieving. It’s gotten to the point in my life where I can barely read a book for enjoyment anymore. Everything’s for class (read to teach), for publication (should we do this?), for these articles (how can I seem smart?), or for the general optics (I need to be seen on social media reading this). It’s so stressful! Books are like pages to get through sometimes and that’s not for the best.

Instead of any of that self-imposed bullshit, I had a really good time reading Trick. I wouldn’t recommend it to my friends because my friends are filled with cynicism and indifference, but it’s the sort of book my mom would read if she read books and wasn’t exactly my mom. It’s a book that makes you feel your age, but in a way that’s not depressing or existential, and I appreciated that. I also appreciated not ever thinking about translation issues while reading it. I just read it, and mostly enjoyed the bits where the grandfather was a dick to his grandson because kids can be annoying and when I’m old I’m not going to want to put up with that shit either and here’s a really bad role model who I can relate to.

This is the sort of book for people who relate to characters in books. This is a neutral statement.

Before I look at the jacket copy for real (I seriously haven’t read it yet), here’s my description:

A famous illustrator is hired to draw some plates for a “deluxe edition” of Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner.”⁵ He does a couple, they suck, he’s old, tired. Such is baseball, such is life. His daughter convinces/forces him come watch his grandson for a few days while she goes to a math conference⁶ with her husband, who is “scrawneebly” and jealous and kind of a penis. Grandfather finds grandson a bit spoiled and annoying—because duh and or obviously, four year olds are—and doesn’t come off looking so good to the maid/neighbors who see him. The climax takes place when his grandson “tricks” him by locking him on the balcony behind a defective door that won’t open. In the rain. At seventy. While he should be working on his plates for the James story about a man who returns home and sees what his life could’ve been . . .

An emotional rollercoaster for anyone who loves Erma Bombeck.⁷

This is not what anyone wants from a review.⁸

Here’s the official copy:

Sharp, succinct storytelling and breathtaking prose combine in this new novel by the author of the New York Times editor’s pick, Ties.

Imagine a duel between an elderly man and a mere boy. The same blood runs through their veins. One, Daniele Mallarico, is a successful illustrator whose reputation is slowly fading. The other, Mario, is his four-year-old grandson. The older combatant has lived for years in solitude, focusing obsessively on his work. The younger one has been left by his querulous parents with his grandfather for a 72-hour stay. Shut inside an apartment in Naples that is filled with the ghosts of Mallarico’s own childhood, grandfather and grandson match wits, while outside lurks Naples, a wily, violent, and passionate city whose influence is not easily shaken.

Trick is a gripping, wry, brilliantly devised drama, “an extremely playful literary composition,” as Jhumpa Lahiri describes it in her introduction, about aging, family, art, and reconciling with one’s past.

Far be it from me to shit on anyone’s copy, but I’m glad I didn’t read that first. Hey, literary hipsters—this book is fine. Sure, it’s no Kobo Abe, but fuck, man, sometimes it’s fun to shut off and read a book that’s just about being alive and knowing that you’re going to be replaced by little shitheads you’re not sure you like.

Three observations, then the fun stuff:

1) The best part of this book is that the story ends, and then there’s an illustrator’s afterword/epilogue (I bought the book and fuck you if you think I’m going to actually play with my Kindle to figure out the real name of this section) in which the grandfather expresses—in first person diary—his creative struggles with the James commission and his thoughts on life, alone, physically removed from his daughter and family. There are actual artworks in this bit. It is not what you’d expect to find in a B&N best-seller.

2) The best part of this book is the idea that Lahiri expresses in which the text swings back and forth from one sort of book to another. The grandfather’s reactions to his grandson are loving one second, then aggressive, then resigned. The book feels like one thing (a story of a domestic falling apart), then another (death is right there and will happen through an accident you won’t be prepared for) line by line. I don’t think I would’ve gotten into this had I picked up this book knowing anything about.

3) The best part of this book is that the main event—the grandfather locked on the balcony—wasn’t treated in expected ways. It could’ve been a joke, a bit of sketch comedy to drive home the overall idea of the book. It could’ve been more heavy handed. It could’ve been dumb. But if you’re a “identify with the character” sort of reader, it was probably just scary. Dying through accident is scary.

Hey look, ambassadors from a bunch of countries They each recommended a book to read before visiting their country and, well, these descriptions don’t make me believe in the future . . .

Ģ����ý Nordic Ways:

“It came out last fall and is representative of all five Nordic countries. It describes life in the North from different perspectives.“—H.E. Björn Lyrvall

If a politician isn’t good at tautologies they’re not much of a politcIan. YOU HAVE MY VOTE, LYRVALL!

Ģ����ý TransAtlantic by Colum McCann, the pick for Ireland. Repeat: Ireland:

H.E. Anne Anderson recommends Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic, which tells the intertwined stories of the first non-stop transatlantic fliers in 1919; the visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland in 1845/46; and the story of the 1998 Irish peace process.

Uh. Yeah. Like. Wait. So. Wait. I know Colum. We’ve shared Guinness. I love Colum. He’s talented! Incredibly so. But. Ireland. There are options. And if you want to choose this book, then blurb it. (“Chad W. Post, president of nothing, recommends The Crying of Lot 49, a book about mail.”) LAME. NO VOTE FOR YOU, ANDERSON.

Just gonna let this stand on its own:

“The Man Who Spoke Snakish is an exploration of alternative history by a well-loved contemporary author.” —H.E. Eerik Marmei

“Book is book about book and people book love book.” What is this, a promotion for Patterson’s “BookShots”? ALL THE THINGS THAT ARE NOPE. NO VOTE.⁹

One more, one more!

Malta

H.E. Pierre Clive Agius recommends Immanuel Mifsud’s In the Name of the Father (And of the Son), which won the 2011 European Union Prize for Literature and tells the story of a man reading a diary his father kept during his days as a soldier in World War II, which subsequently pushes him to re-examine the personal relationship he had with his father.

BORING. NO VOTE.

This made me so excited! I felt like there might be a date in the future where I would spend more time with my newborn than with printed words. But alas, all Self (a fantastic writer) had to say was this:

You’re not awfully optimistic about the future of the novel, are you?

I think the novel is absolutely doomed to become a marginal cultural form, along with easel painting and the classical symphony. And that’s already happened. I’ve been publishing since 1990, so I’ve seen it happen in my writing lifetime. It’s impossible to think of a novel that’s been a water-cooler moment in England, or in Britain, since Trainspotting, probably.

It’s frequently said that that’s partly because narrative has migrated to box sets. Is there any truth in that?

The relationship between the novel and film in the 20th century was like the relationship between Rome and Greece. Film depended upon the novel, at least in its infancy and youth. The problem is that now that film itself is being Balkanised – carved up, streamed, loaded on to DVDs, watched on people’s phones – it no longer needs its Greece, it no longer needs the novel lying behind it. It’s a disaster for the novel, actually – I think the novel is in freefall.

How many of you have read Will Self? Probably not any of the people who were quoted in this random “it’s not ‘Cat Person,’ but it’s almost a meme”

Self’s comments drew some criticism on Twitter from the literary community. Irish writer [Ian? No, sorry, Colin] Barrett, currently based in the US, tweeted: “As a writer, I’d be embarrassed to ever say there’s been no good contemporary writing/no good books in X number of years etc, because more than anything it just reveals the poverty of your own appetite for engagement.”

[Roxane] Gay, a writer and commentator also based in America, said: “White men love to declare an end to things when they no longer succeed in that arena. The novel is fine.”

The Essex Serpent author Sarah Perry asked: “Also: who cares if the novel is doomed, anyway? Storytelling is as old as time and the novel is revising for its GSCE��.”

My first question is “what are GSCEES?” and my second is “did they read the interview or just the headline?”

Well, CSCEES are a typo but GSCEs are “General Certificates of Secondary Education,” which must be some British in joke. (I just finished reading Troubles today and am not British-sympathetic. At all.)

But did they read the whole statement?

Everyone jumps on me for making fun of Buzzfeed (again, more next week, and you will love it) and clickbait headlines for being “dangerou��.” THIS IS EXACTLY HOW THEY ARE DANGEROUS. Without “The Novel is Absolutely Doomed” this article goes unnoticed. With it? THE WORLD IS ENDING AND WE MUST TAKE DOWN WILL SELF FOR HIS LIES!

Did Self merit this response? According to one friend, “he said dumb shit in the past,” which, fine?, sure?, but doesn’t dumb shit make the world go round? Where would Twitter be without people saying dumb shit and flipping out all the time?

“I think the novel is absolutely doomed to become a marginal cultural form” is, to me, something about culture, not about the novel as a form. “It’s impossible to think of a novel that’s been a water-cooler moment in England, or in Britain, since Trainspotting, probably” because NO ONE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT NOVELS. How is this not a rallying cry? Why are you attacking Will Self for pointing out that 100X more people talk about Game of Titties Thrones than they do about a narrative in a book. (Yes, I know it was a book first, but what do you think the ratio between viewers and readers is? Does 500:1 sound plausible?)

That second statement is hard to puzzle out . . . in some ways. Here’s my attempt at unpacking this: For basically ever, novels were the source for narrative ideas and structures. The medium allows creators so much flexibility, and their exploration—of character-building, of plotting, of narrative structures—served as the building blocks for so many movies, TV shows, etc. Creators in the visual realm looked to novels for ideas of what to explore and how.

But things have advanced. Sure, there are still movies being made that are based on books, but I think Self is getting at something much more fundamental than simply talking about intellectual properties. Entertainment has become so fragmented over the past few years, with kids growing up in an environment in which they rarely—if ever—watch complete TV shows, and instead only want YouTubers and clips. The narrative structure that appeals to a lot of—most?—people today isn’t one based in Victorian principles of the novel, but on ideas that have developed from within the visual medium itself. In this sense, the TV shows/films that everyone talks about aren’t really pinned to the novel per se, but to larger ideas in culture and the art of filmmaking.

Again, I may be misreading this and giving Self more credit than he deserves, but I think this idea is really interesting and posits a sort of challenge to all of us in the book industry—is there a way for novels to regain a central space in the general conversation? If so, then how? If not, does it matter?

I also want to admit that I rarely talk about books I’ve read to people who aren’t already in this world. Like, say, my hairdresser. I’m a million times more likely to talk to her about a podcast or movie or TV show, but never a book. In part because we read very different things (but have both seen Black Panther), but also because the other art forms dominate pop culture. The closest thing books has to a pop culture phenomenon is Elena Ferrante.

¹ Not scientifically valid. But it

Ģ����ý a quarter of American adults (24%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form.

² More people watch baseball on Opening Day than . . . never mind.

³ I really wonder what professional Italian translators think of her suddenly getting a lot of work. I know that I’m an envious man with a lot of shortcomings and self-esteem problems, so maybe none of them actually care. But, if I were betting, I would put some cash on “probably have mixed feeling��.”

⁴ I always want to type “Starcherone” when writing his last name. In honor of pronounced “starch-yer-own,” one of the wittier small presse out there. And I still can’t remember Ferrante’s “real” last name. Then again, who gives fucks. She’s a really good writer and we can leave it at that.

⁵ This is a real story that I wish wasn’t real. The book is way more interesting if you’re trying to puzzle out the fuck this imaginary ghost story about opportunities pissed away might be.

⁶ Can I have a book of the math conference?

⁷ You have no idea how many misspellings it took to get to that joke.

⁸ See next week’s post.

⁹ This book is AWFUL. Top ten of terrible. Sorry not sorry.

by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Italy, Europa Editions)

Frankly, any one of the novels in the Neapolitan Quartet should take the prize in almost any conceivable matchup (except cover design—but trust the famous aphorism). Each maintains an impossible tension through a pretty significant number of pages, all of which seem entirely necessary. Each of them contains a breadth and depth of character to a degree that’s both uncommon and uncommonly well executed. Each adds a layer to the rich relationship established in My Brilliant Friend while mapping the cracks in its foundation, but it’s not until The Story of the Lost Child, the stinging coda, that a reader can truly understand that Ferrante isn’t just putting a life between these covers but life itself.

Birth. Death. Marriage. Divorce. Bigamy. That’s just a start. Classism. The labor movement. Feminism. Autochthony. That’s still not the half. While all of these subjects appear in the Neapolitan novels, they’re also questioned. Do they matter? Maybe. How do we know what matters? Who knows. Who knows anything?

Starting with the first novel, Ferrante’s style mimics thought and conversational speech, and while much of it is grammatically incorrect, it’s not ignorance on her part or Goldstein’s error but a deliberate choice. When Ferrante questions language, learning, and communication itself, it becomes clear that the wandering sentences and meandering paragraphs are no accident. The Story of the Lost Child establishes that this is for a purpose and to an end—while some readers will look past these structural elements and focus on the drama, the fourth book gets incredibly meta. That we read it in translation makes it even more so. At one point, it describes a translated review of a translated book in a conversation that is being spoken in a second language. Ferrante highlights language and thrusts it to the fore repeatedly. The opposition between the Neapolitan dialect and formal Italian is just one example. It’s tied to other oppositions—emotion and reason; formulation of identity and its destruction; authenticity and pretense; knowledge and ignorance; the two main characters—and the characters call them into question about as often as they can without it becoming a schtick or interfering with the action.

To take so many disparate elements and connect them not only to a solid narrative arc with a phalanx of arresting characters but to language itself is a nearly impossible feat. To question communication both on the linguistic level and as a concept while so perfectly communicating both the minute details that make life concrete and the immense range of emotion present in human existence is more difficult still. I can’t think of another book whose form so spectacularly follows its function, undermining itself as it builds itself down to the sentence level, which in turn mirrors the novel’s events. That it does this while addressing enough weighty ideas for a hundred philosophy courses and covering the pulpy, lurid parts of life that “respectable” literature often omits or marginalizes? That’s certainly a prize-winning feat. If there’s an award for novels that induce dizzying mental tug-of-war, one for books that undermine themselves while proving their own points, or books that make you care deeply about the characters and then damn you for caring. The Story of the Lost Child should win those first. Then, it should win the BTBA.

To kick this off, I thought I’d start with the list of the six books in translation that were the most talked about this year. I did some really heady numerical analysis to determine this—searching Facebook mentions, retweets, aggregating all the other year-end lists out there, tallying GoodReads reviews and images of bookstore displays—and came up with the works of fiction from 2015 that you should read if you want to be part of the general literary conversation. These are the “water cooler” books, the titles that, if you mention them randomly at a bar, someone might vaguely have heard of them. Conversely, mentioning them around anyone involved in the world of international literature will feel almost redundant.

I wouldn’t be surprised if all six of these made the shortlist for the next BTBA. And if you haven’t read them, you might want to. They’re not all on my personal list of 2015 favorites, but no one will scoff at you for spending a week with any of these.

by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions)

I read volume one of Ferrante’s quartet last year, and am currently listening to volume three, Those Who Stay and Those Who Leave. To me, personally, all of the books are fine. There’s nothing wrong with them, but they don’t get me all that excited either. I guess in my opinion, the prose isn’t doing anything new, and this is a time in my life where I’m waiting for something new and different to blow me away. That said, soap operas have an addictive quality to them, and reading/listening to the life-long interactions of a group of people from the neighborhood plays to that directly.

If you want a slightly different opinion, check out I literally got an email from a publicist about this as I was putting together this post. Quick scan of the piece: He likes Ferrante!

In Ferrante, by contrast [to Franzen and DeLillo], we see what grand novelistic ambition looks like devoid of writerly vanity. When her novels point to the largest political and ethical scales, as they do, the gesture is fascinatingly equivocal, as if to thread a question about our access to those scales into the emotional texture of the writing.

by Anne Garreta, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan (Deep Vellum)

There are two very notable things about this novel (at least on the surface): 1) it’s the first work by a female member of the Oulipo to make it into English, and 2) there are no pronouns in this love story about A**.

Tom Roberge liked this book more than I did (in part, maybe, because I was distracted by the pronoun thing, which is interesting, but I’ve seen that before, and pulling that off is more mind-blowingly difficult in French than English), and spent a lot more time getting into the real meat of this book.

Garréta’s unnamed narrator, a seminary student turned DJ, also becomes infatuated with someone, a dancer known as A***, early on in the course of the story. And yet to compare what then unfolds (and how, in terms of story-telling) in Sphinx to that in Queer is indeed an odious comparison. Like all of Burroughs’s writing, Queer is gritty and disheveled, the beauty found in the mess itself, in the enjambment of disparate and unflinching insights into the human condition. Sphinx, on the other hand, is more poetically beautiful, a breathtaking portrait of obsession and pursuit described with such pervasive lucidity, such self-awareness, such lyrical resonance, that the story often feels like a spectral presence. [. . .]

Both are novels of pure, unadulterated, all-consuming obsession. A form of psychological addiction that infects the mind like a drug. A desire—a need—so unbounded and palpable that life before the object of desire is rendered meaningless, or at least preliminary, a trial run for the real thing. Inhabiting these narrators’ mind space is intoxicating, pure and simple. And I can’t think of a better reason to read, which is perhaps why, now, when recommending Sphinx to customers, I say, merely: “Trust me; it’s amazing.”

None of this praise is as valuable as the fact that one of the people from has been pushing it to all of their fans. One of the many reasons that Deep Vellum’s first year has been so wildly successful.

by Yuri Herrera, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman (And Other Stories)

I’m pretty sure this was the only literary translation to be a finalist for this year’s GoodReads Reading Good People’s Choice Golden Book Awards. (Or whatever they’re called.) That’s pretty impressive, given that almost all of the other books were either insanely popular and trendy, or just bad. (Note: To Kill a Watchman won for fiction, so, yeah . . . )

I read this book immediately after I finished grading all the exams for my spring course, and while on the way to BEA in NY. Whenever I get done with my “required” reading, I tend to devour a bunch of stuff immediately, only some of which sticks in my mind. Which is why I probably need to reread this. I remember liking it, liking the way it plays with language, liking the general conceit and the issues it brings up, but also feeling like it was a bit slight. (I did apparently give it four-stars on GoodReads though.)

As time has gone on and more and more people have told me about how this is one of the greatest books of the year, I feel like maybe I read it too quickly and passively, that maybe I should go back and revisit it, so that it can “get under my skin” the way it did for BTBA judge Heather Cleary:

It’s not just that it’s impossible to put down—in both Herrera’s Spanish and Lisa Dillman’s English, its language is a fever dream of mixed registers and literary allusions pulled perfectly taut across the story. This would probably be reason enough to add my voice to the chorus of praise for the novel, but it seems even more timely to talk about Signs now, less than a week after Donald Trump, the poster child for backward thinking about borders and the people who cross them, had another moment in the spotlight on Saturday Night Live. Less so because the novel tells the story of an fierce, unflappable young woman who makes the journey from what is recognizably (though not explicitly) Mexico into what is recognizably (though not explicitly) the USA in search of her missing brother—though it is indeed a compelling story—than because the novel offers a powerful, nuanced take on the negotiation of those contact zones in which not only nations, but also languages, traditions, and identities meet, complicate, and enrich one another.

It’s worth noting that And Other Stories is bringing out a new Herrera book—The Transmigration of Bodies—in May 2016.

by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Archipelago Books)

Similar to the Ferrante, I’m trying to catch up with the cool kids and am only on volume three of this seemingly endless series. I’ve talked on the podcast about what I like about Knausgaard—the glacial structural movements of each volume, the fugue-like time-shifts of the narrator’s memories, the mundanity of it as an antidote to the overblown nature of a lot of contemporary books—and I’m not sure I have much more to add about that here.

I do want to complain about the weird nature of the media love fest for Knausgaard—it’s like most of these reviewers just discovered that there’s literature being written in other languages, and probably can’t name five other living Scandinavian authors, much less speak intelligently about any of their books—but why bother. We all know that there’s very little appreciation of divergent opinions in mainstream review coverage, and once an author has been “chosen” every magazine and paper and blog and listicle generator imaginable will have to voice their opinion, oftentimes to the detriment of covering better books from the same country. This is how Murakami Haruki becomes the one Japanese author everyone has to write about, despite the fact that there are several others equally worthy of this sort of media fawning. (Although most aren’t published by Knopf, which does, for better or worse, make a difference.)

There’s nothing to be done about this—people in the media act like sheep and all want to have their voice heard about the big books everyone is talking about—and it’s not like Knausgaard is completely undeserving, it’s just frustrating to people who actually read a significant amount of international literature and actually know a lot about works from a particular country or region. Instead, there’s basically no point in publishing anything from Norway for the next few years, because it will be such an uphill battle getting attention for it, and any reviews you do get will just compare it to Knausgaard.

But whatever—that’s the sad lament of an every-struggling publisher. You should read these books since most everyone else has. (Or has taken an unwavering stance against him.) Or, better yet,

by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson (New Directions)

Talk about getting all the love! This book is on every single year-end list I’ve seen, and a few others highlighting the best covers of the year.

The rebirth of Lispector—whose books have been available in one translation or another for decades—really started with Ben Moser’s new translation of The Hour of the Star back in 2011. That was followed by the release of four of her novels (three in new translations, one translated for the first time ever) in 2012, which generated a lot of attention for Lispector (in part because of Ben Moser’s unflagging enthusiasm). It all reached a crescendo with this massive volume though, which brings together all of her stories into one chunky, attractive volume.

I’ve yet to dive into this, although I have read a couple of the included volumes in their past translations. What I hope will happen a result of #LispectorFever is that New Directions retranslated The Apple in the Dark. I generally like Gregory Rabassa’s translations, but I feel like a new translation is well-deserved and would help find a much larger audience for one of her most ambitious novels.

by Valeria Luiselli, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Coffee House Press)

Luiselli’s rise has been meteoric! In 2014 when I entered her novel Faces in the Crowd into the first ever World Cup of Literature (a contest she damn near won), it seemed like only a handful of people had read her. Now, with the publication of her third book and second novel, she’s being featured in the New York Times, New Yorker, Lit Hub, NPR, Slate, Huffington Post, Dissent Magazine, you name a media outlet and I’m sure they’ve run something about this book.

Which is all really wonderful. I’m actually using this book in my spring class, in part because I really like Valeria and her writing, in part because the story of how this came to be—and how it was edited in translation—opens up so many great topics for my students to think about and debate.

In short: Luiselli wrote this for the Jumex Foundation as a sort of serial novel for the workers at the Jumex juice factory. In the vein of the professional readers at the Cuban cigar rolling factories, she sent the workers one chapter at a time, which was distributed as a sort of chapbook to everyone at the factory. Some of these workers formed a reading group, and all of their comments about that particular section were sent back to Valeria, who listened to them, then wrote her next installment.

For the editing process, Chris Fishbach of Coffee House treated this like a book originally written in English, editing it more like an original text than a work in translation. (By contrast, most editors of translation focus on syntax, grammar, word choice, register, tone, etc. It’s still complicated and intensive, but slightly different.) The whole project became more collaborative with Christina MacSweeney adding a “Chronology” to the book that doesn’t exist in the original Spanish edition, and with Coffee House publishing a “Fact Check” booklet created by their proofreader. This is more than a simple novel—it is an artistic enterprise that is very layered and fascinating. And it features one of the most distinctive, enjoyable fictional voices in recent memory.

It’s worth noting that all six of these books—which truly are among the most talked about translations of 2015, all statistical jokes aside—are from independent and nonprofit presses, and that four of the six are by women writers.

Tomorrow, I’ll be back with a list that’s a bit more loopy.

While many people assume that booksellers base their recommendations on “theme” or “setting” or other similarities of content, I think that the real trick is understanding which need or compulsion has been sated with a certain book, and then handing that book to others who have a similar desire they’d like to fulfill (be it hope, confusion, a desire to be disturbed or to be challenged, to feel set in a place—any place, not just the same country they just read about and loved—or to be drawn along by a story where they just can’t stop turning the page).

Sometimes I realize I’ve been playing a bookseller game with popular literary novels, in which (a) I don’t read a single line of the novel, and (b) I immediately forget both the jacket copy and any review I’ve ever read of it. Then I proceed to recommend the book to surprisingly correct people, knowing exactly why they’ll love it. This is possible thanks to the generosity of people who shop in bookstores, because they LOVE to talk about books.

Recently, or I guess for the past three years, I’ve been playing this game with Elena Ferrante. After finding so many satisfied readers of the Neapolitan Quartet,¹ listening to which needs these books have fulfilled, and passing along the recommendation to others, I wanted to go deeper into this phenomenon and figure out not only why readers found them so gripping, but also what allowed so many readers to discover them in the first place (as my recommendations have been merely a drop in the bestselling bucket).

During the past two months, I’ve started asking everyone who buys one of the latter novels: How did you happen to pick up My Brilliant Friend in the first place?

Almost everyone I have talked to either received it from a friend, or bought it because (a) that one friend they really trust recommended it, or (b) multiple friends recommended it in a short period of time. So my new question was, Who are these friends? Who are our patient zeros and why did they buy it?

I remember that when the first of my coworkers picked it up, it was just after the From there, another coworker read it, and we’ve been recommending ever since. So we can conclude: Mr. Wood started one strain.

Another strain that led to our door came from a different bookseller. Buying the fourth novel at my shop, a customer said that she got My Brilliant Friend because she was at Terrace Books in Brooklyn looking for a copy of The Goldfinch, which wouldn’t be out in paperback for a couple more weeks. They told her to read the Ferrante in the meantime, she did, and is now a huge fan. Such perfect bookselling. Good work, Terrace.

Not to ignore Ferrante’s other novels (the short ones), a different introduction happened when I apparently recommended The Days of Abandonment (I don’t even remember!) and after reading that, a guy has read everything else of hers.

One regular customer at 192 Books bought a copy recently and blew through all four in a matter of weeks. I couldn’t remember whether we’d specifically recommended it, but apparently she was just in browsing and couldn’t figure out what she wanted, but had seen My Brilliant Friend on display at the shop for years on end, so she figured she would finally pick it up. This brings us to another issue: The reason she had avoided it for so long was . . . the cover. She has extremely good taste in fiction and couldn’t believe that this would be a great novel. (Decided afterwards that it certainly was.)

Rather than complain about the covers, I’ll just present a few responses. A huge number of people complain as they come up to the register, saying that it’s such a shame—and these are mostly the people who love the books. It’s only the wild force of critical and personal acclaim that caused them to read My Brilliant Friend despite the way it looked, and they would have picked it up sooner with a different jacket.

This does make it a bit difficult when recommending, as there’s often a level of disbelief. Someone was at the register, just about to purchase it, with a hesitation we didn’t understand, and she finally asked: “Is it like a really good cheesy Lifetime movie?” Noooo, ignore the covers! And she looked relieved.

A customer was buying the fourth book and said that her best friend’s husband gave My Brilliant Friend to his wife, and several of her friends. She loves them, and when I said I haven’t read them yet but am looking forward to it, she said, “Ignore the covers! It’s really not all melodrama like it looks!”

(Disclaimer: there was one customer who told me that she picked it up at Spoonbill & Sugartown because she liked the look of them, the packaging. And a few people did mention that it was the quotation, “Imagine if Jane Austen got angry . . .” on The Story of a New Name that first interested them.)

Another funny hesitation (among those who keep up with the book world) is the following: “I don’t know, I mean I tried to read the Knausgaard books and couldn’t get into them . . .” “. . . ????”, I say. Such a weird but understandable conflation. Besides the game of some people think of them as similar, just because four books in a series came out during the same years, and the same people were talking about them.

But back to the idea of melodrama: my non-scientific survey concludes that this is precisely how many Italian readers view The Neapolitan Quartet. Comments include:

“It’s like chick lit.”

“She’s not a real writer.” (Not like Alberto Moravia, for example, whom this customer doesn’t particularly like, but thinks is a Real Writer.) She believes that the reason Americans like her so much is that there’s all this stuff in the New Yorker and New York Times saying she’s so great, so everyone believes them.

Regardless of the question of Objective Quality, there’s certainly something to be said for these American responses I often hear:

• A lot of my friends were reading the quartet and “they just had ‘that gleam’ when they talked about them.”

• My mother read them and “she didn’t come up for air.”

• They’re amazing, and although everyone talks about them as having great plot, the point isn’t just the story of the friendship, that’s just the device that let’s her get into deeper issues of politics and feminism and all sorts of serious topics.

• Elena Ferrante is “the master of the run-on sentence” and although a lot of people say she’s all about the plot it’s really “her language.”

So, in conclusion, the main point I’d make is that The Neapolitan Quartet is thriving because they are loved, they are forced upon friends based on that love, and the critics may have started something but they certainly didn’t create it. A love that makes books featuring covers that most people don’t understand turn into bestsellers at many independent bookstores is a beautiful affront to tenets of publicity and marketing, as all the tricks of the trade will make for great initial sales, but won’t turn into a long-lasting flood like this.

Of course I don’t know which side I’ll take, now that I’m finally going to read them. Either way, I love people who love Elena Ferrante. And I will continue to recommend the Quartet to many people who “just want a really good book.”

¹ Quickly wanted to mention that all of the books in the Neapolitan Quartet are translated by

As mentioned elsewhere, the two winning books will be announced at

Following that, we will be gathering at 5pm at on 92 West Houston St. Anyone interested in celebrating the BTBA and all the authors and translators who published books last year should definitely come out for this. Great way to kick off your BEA party times . . .

On with the announcement! Here are the ten fiction finalists for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award:

by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (China, Yale University Press)

by Éric Chevillard, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (France, Dalkey Archive Press)

by Julio Cortázar, translated from the Spanish by David Kurnick (Argentina, Semiotext(e))

by Sergei Dovlatov, translated from the Russian by Katherine Dovlatov (Russia, Counterpoint Press)

by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Italy, Europa Editions)

by Medardo Fraile, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (Spain, Pushkin Press)

by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Stacey Knecht (Czech Republic, Archipelago Books)

by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella (Finland, NYRB)

by Valeria Luiselli, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Mexico, Coffee House Press)

by Juan José Saer, translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph (Argentina, Open Letter Books)

– Elena Ferrante, Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Italy
Europa Editions