Blood. In general it came from wounds only after horrible curses and disgusting obscenities had been exchanged. That was the standard procedure. My father, though he seemed to me a good man, hurled continuous insults and threats if someone didn't deserve, as he said, to be on the face of the earth. He especially had it in for Don Achille. He always had something to accuse him of, and sometimes I put my hands over my ears in order not to be too disturbed by his brutal words. When he spoke of him to my mother he called him "your cousin" but my mother denied that blood tie (there was a very distant relationship) and added to the insults. Their anger frightened me, I was frightened above all by the thought that Don Achille might have ears so sensitive that he could hear insults even from far away. I was afraid that he might come and murder them.
Ferrante, Elena. My Brilliant Friend. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions, 2012, 35.
That's a paragraph from the first book of Elena Ferrante's much lauded Neapolitan Novels.
Believe the hype.
So far I'm only about fifty pages deep into the novel and already I love it. This passage comes from a section of the book about childhood and Goldstein's translation expertly captures the evocative melancholy naturally associated with reminiscence on that subject. You can see it here with the narrator's attachment of supernatural qualities to a mysterious neighbor. This kind of piquant mixing of memory and magic is sprinkled throughout this opening section, though not so much as to shift the novel into boring melodrama. I assume that as the narrator grows older she'll begin to make more sense of the world and therefore adopt a more natural narrative style but I hope, through the sepia-toned, soft-focused filter of recollection, at least some hint of this kind of prose remains.
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