Elena Ferrante / Italy’s Great, Mysterious Storyteller

Naples, 1964; photograph by Bruno Barbey

Italy’s Great, Mysterious Storyteller

by Rachel Donadio

DECEMBER 18, 2014 ISSUE

My Brilliant Friend

by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

Europa, 331 pp., $17.00 (paper)

The Story of a New Name

by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

Europa, 471 pp., $18.00 (paper)

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

Europa, 418 pp., $18.00 (paper)

The Lost Daughter

by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

Europa, 140 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Troubling Love

by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

Europa, 139 pp., $15.00 (paper)

The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

Europa, 188 pp., $14.95 (paper)

There is a devastating exchange in The Story of a New Name, the second of three—soon to be four—books in Elena Ferrante’s masterful Naples novels, in which Lila, one of the two main characters, runs into her former schoolteacher, Maestra Oliviero, on the street. To the teacher’s dismay, Lila, now in her late teens, did not continue her education after elementary school, in spite of her fierce intellectual promise, and is now married and has a small son. The maestra ignores the child, Rino, and looks only at the book Lila is carrying. Lila is nervous. “The title is Ulysses,” she says. “Is it about the Odyssey?” the teacher asks.

Michel Houellebecq / Casually Provocative

Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq, 

Casually Provocative

By RACHEL DONADIO

OCT. 12, 2015

PARIS — Michel Houellebecq was seated with his legs crossed in a chair in his publishers’ office here, chain-smoking and flicking away criticism that his latest novel, “Submission,” is Islamophobic, or at least critical of Islam. “I really couldn’t care less, to be honest,” said Mr. Houellebecq, France’s best-known world-weary bad-boy novelist, letting out a little laugh that interrupted his usual deadpan delivery.

Islam itself doesn’t interest him, he continued during a recent interview before the novel’s release in the United States next Tuesday by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “What interests me is the fear that it creates, not the contents,” he said.

“Submission,” which is set in 2022 and imagines France under its first Muslim president, was published in France on Jan. 7, the day jihadists killed 12 people at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, whose cover that week featured Mr. Houellebecq (pronounced WELL-beck) in a magician’s hat, as if predicting the future.