An Excerpt from Elena Ferrante’s New Novel Just Dropped on Twitter
Just when you thought it was safe to admit you never quite finished the Neapolitan novels (they’re very long, okay?), Ferrante Fever has spiked again. Europa Editions, the English-language publisher of famously reclusive Italian author Elena Ferrante, tweeted the first paragraph of her latest novel on Monday, and it is—I can’t emphasize this enough—absolute peak Ferrante. Read it for yourself:
“Two years before leaving home my said to my mother that I was very ugly. The sentence was uttered under his breath, in the apartment that my parents, newly married, had bought in Rione Alto, on top of San Giacomo dei Capri. Everything—the spaces of Naples, the blue light of a very cold February, those words—remained fixed. But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story yet in fact are nothing, nothing of mine, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even she who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.”
Let’s just go down a brief Ferrante checklist, shall we?
Readily apparent daddy issues: ✔️
Neapolitan architectural namecheck: ✔️
Sparse yet emotionally resonant prose: ✔️
Weary Euro-nihilism: ✔️
HBO adaptation potential: ✔️✔️✔️
No word yet on the novel’s title or when it will be released in the U.S. (it's coming out in Italy on November 7), so all we can do is hope that Europa Editions will really go off and tweet the whole thing out, one paragraph at a time.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
