The Neapolitan Novels by Italian writer Elena Ferrante, translated by Anne Goldstein, have been the sleeper hit of the summer. Passed around from girlfriend to girlfriend, sister to sister, mother to daughter, they arrive in your hands along with the call: ‘Read it. You will recognise it.’
Ferrante has written the defining novels of female friendship. Through the lives of the two protagonists Lenu and Lila, readers recognize something of their own experience of being a girl who is friends with another girl, a woman who is friends with another woman.
With such a dearth elsewhere, a series of books that understand the complexities of female friendship would have been exciting enough. But the scope of Ferrante’s novels is much bigger and broader than that – exploring themes of male violence, female sexuality, family discord, class, poverty, education, and the ideological battles between communism and fascism that exploded into bloody scenes in late 1960s/early 1970s Italy.
