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Elena Ferrante: Italian author’s next novel to be published in English next year

Fans of the enigmatic author can get their hands on her latest book in November 2019 - but only in Italian.

Published: 29 October 2019 18:03 CET
Elena Ferrante: Italian author's next novel to be published in English next year
Will Elena Ferrante's new novel match the success of My Brilliant Friend? Photo: Gabriel Bouys/AFP

English-speaking fans of Italian author Elena Ferrante must wait until next June to read her latest novel, to be published in Italian in November.

So far publishers have released only an intriguing title and provocative opening lines to whet their literary appetites.

“La Vita Bugiarda Degli Adulti” hits Italian bookstores on November 7, but its English version, translated as “The Lying Life of Adults” only comes out on June 9, 2020.

Few details about the new novel are known — fitting for the best-selling author writing under a pseudonym whose real identity still remains shrouded in mystery.

Ferrante's four-volume series “Neopolitan Novels,” of which the first, “My Brilliant Friend” appeared in 2012 in English, sold over 10 million copies around the world and was translated into more than 40 languages, thrusting the writer into the spotlight.

On Monday, the new book's Italian publishers Edizioni posted on Twitter the novel's cover photograph in black and white depicting two outstretched hands.

In the new novel, Ferrante returns to Naples, the atmospheric backdrop to her famous series, but the work no longer centres on that saga's two gifted heroines, friends but also rivals in the post-war southern Italian city.

The opening lines of “The Lying Life of Adults” were released a few weeks ago by the publishers: “Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.”

In 2016 an Italian journalist claimed, after conducting an investigation into financial records, that the true identity of Ferrante was that of Rome-based translator Anita Raja.

Ferrante's publishers have neither confirmed nor denied that theory.

“My Brilliant Friend” was also adapted for a television series co-produced by Italy's national broadcaster Rai and US cable television network HBO.

READ ALSO: Five must-read novels that will transport you to Italy

 

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HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

Published: 4 May 2022 11:42 CEST
'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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