'Unsurpassable' Elena Ferrante
'Timeless' John Banville
Once considered the greatest writer of Italy's postwar generation - and admired by authors as varied as John Banville and Rivka Galchen - Elsa Morante is experiencing a literary renaissance, marked not least by Ann Goldstein's translation of Arturo's Island, the novel that brought Morante international fame.
Imbued with a spectral grace, as if told through an enchanted looking glass, the novel follows the adolescent Arturo through his days on the isolated Neapolitan island of Procida, where - his mother long deceased, his father often absent, and a dog as his sole companion - he roams the countryside and the beaches or reads in his family's lonely, dilapidated mansion. This quiet, meandering existence is upended when his father brings home a beautiful 16-year-old bride, Nunziatella.
A novel of longing and thwarted desires, filled with Morante's "brutal directness and familial torment" (James Wood), Arturo's Island reemerges in this splendid translation to take its rightful place in the world literary canon.
Elsa Morante (1912-1985) was an Italian novelist, short-story writer and poet. Born and raised in Rome, she started writing at a young age, initially publishing short stories in children's journals. Married to the writer Alberto Moravia, she spent much of the Second World War in hiding with him, both having much to fear from the Fascists due to their Jewish heritage and the social and sexual themes explored in their writing. Her first novel, House of Liars, was published in 1948 and won the Viareggio Prize. Arturo's Island, published in 1957, made her the first woman to win the Strega Prize, and in 1974 her novel History became a record-breaking bestseller and confirmed her reputation as one of the most important writers of twentieth-century Italy. Ann Goldstein is a former New Yorker editor and has won prizes and accolades for her translations of Primo Levi and Elena Ferrante.
