The New York Times Book Review - Roxana Robinson
Elena Ferrante is one of the great novelists of our time. Her voice is passionate, her view sweeping and her gaze basilisk. Her subject is the domestic world, and part of her genius lies in her capacity to turn this sphere into an infernal region, full of rage and violence, unlimited in its intellectual and emotional reach. Ferrante's view of family life is anything but sentimental, anything but comforting. In fact, her writing is remarkable for its velocity and ruthlessness. Reading her is like getting into a fast car with Tony Soprano: At once you are caught up and silenced, rendered breathless, respectful…In these bold, gorgeous, relentless novels, Ferrante traces the deep connections between the political and the domestic. This is a new version of the way we live now—one we need, one told brilliantly, by a woman.
From the Publisher
Praise for Elena Ferrante and the Neapolitan Novels
“A large, captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman.”—James Wood, The New Yorker
“One of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship.”—John Powers, NPR’s Fresh Air
“Elena Ferrante is one of the great novelists of our time.”—Roxana Robinson, The New York Times Book Review
“Compelling, visceral and immediate…The Neapolitan novels are a tour de force.”—Jennifer Gilmore, The Los Angeles Times
“It took my breath away…so honest and right and opens up heart to so much.”—Elizabeth Strout, writer
“The Neapolitan novel cycle is an unconditional masterpiece.”—Jhumpa Lahiri, writer
“Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it.”—Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe
“Ferrante’s own writing has no limits, is willing to take every thought forward to its most radical conclusion and backwards to its most radical birthing.”—The New Yorker
“One of the more nuanced portraits of feminine friendship in recent memory.”—Megan O’Grady, Vogue
“It’s just hypnotic. I could not stop reading it or thinking about it.”—Hillary Clinton
“Ferrante tackles girlhood and friendship with amazing force.”—Gwyneth Paltrow, actor
“Ferrante’s writing seems to say something that hasn’t been said before in a way so compelling its readers forget where they are, abandon friends and disdain sleep.”—Joanna Biggs, The London Review of Books
“Ferrante has written about female identity with a heft and sharpness unmatched by anyone since Doris Lessing.”—Elizabeth Lowry, The Wall Street Journal
“No one has a voice quite like Ferrante’s. Her gritty, ruthlessly frank novels roar off the page with a barbed fury, like an attack that is also a defense...Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you’ll have some idea of how explosive these works are.”—John Freeman, writer
"When I read the Neapolitan novels I find that I never want to stop.”—Molly Fischer, The New Yorker
“Dazzling...stunning...an extraordinary epic.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Spectacular.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
“What words do you save? Here’s your chance to bring them out, like the silver for the wedding of the first-born: genius, tour de force, masterpiece. They apply to the work of Elena Ferrante…her magnificent Neapolitan quartet seems to me to be the greatest achievement in fiction of the post-war era.”—Charles Finch, The Chicago Tribune
“We are dealing with masterpieces here, old-fashioned classics, filled with passion and pathos…The sheer power of her books is a challenge to the chilly, dour craftsmanship of too many 21st century literary novels.”—Joe Klein, TIME Magazine
“The saga is both comfortingly traditional and radically fresh, it gives readers not just what they want, but something more than they didn't know they craved...through this fusion of high and low art, Ms. Ferrante emerges as a 21st-century Dickens.”—The Economist
“Ferrante’s accomplishment in these novels is to extract an enduring masterpiece from dissolving margins, from the commingling of self and other, creator and created, new and old, real and whatever the opposite of real may be…Ferrante’s voice is very much her own, but its force is communal.”—Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic
“Ferrante adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience.”—Rachel Cusk, The New York Times Book Review
