Three instructors discuss why Italian author Elena Ferrante’s work is so captivating worldwide, including at Berkeley.
My Brilliant Friend, by the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, is the New York Times’ No. 1 book of the century. This recognition, and the recent adaptation of Ferrante’s four-novel Neopolitan Quartet into an HBO series, underscores this writer’s profound influence.
Ferrante’s popular novels, translated into English by Ann Goldstein, are an intimate exploration of friendship, motherhood, identity and societal structures in mid-20th century, postwar Naples. They’ve also inspired research and courses at UC Berkeley by Annamaria Bellezza, a distinguished senior lecturer in Italian studies; Mario Telò, professor of ancient Greek and Roman studies, rhetoric and comparative literature; and Rhiannon Welch, the Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cechetti Chair of Italian Literature.
The Neapolitan Quartet — My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014) and The Story of the Lost Daughter (2015) — is a fiction series that traces the intertwined lives of Elena (Lenù) Greco and Raffaella (Lila) Cerullo, born in 1944 in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. The novels span 60 years of their lives and explores their enduring, yet often tumultuous friendship as they navigate their violent, patriarchal and stifling social environment.
For Berkeley News, Sarah Fullerton recently interviewed these instructors to learn more about Ferrante’s work through the lenses of language, theory and film.
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