compared it to having sex with someone after you realise you’re in love with them: it almost can’t not be bad. The publication of the fourth and final volume is a terrible moment. It would be enough to have books in which we recognise the truth of women’s lives in all its darkness, but the Neapolitan quartet also has an almost deranging narrative pleasure, delivered in a style that’s more of an admission that the author cares too much about the truth to bother with style. She knows it too: writing the Neapolitan quartet, she has said, was like ‘having the chance to live my life over again’.įerrante’s writing seems to say something that hasn’t been said before – it isn’t easy to specify what this is – in a way so compelling its readers forget where they are, abandon friends and disdain sleep. The usual distance between fiction and life collapses when you read Ferrante. I got so confused about what was real and what was not while reading Ferrante on a train that I kept on forgetting that I hadn’t missed my station. – a man – couldn’t go on reading as he started to feel bad about being a man. had sleepless night after sleepless night to finish them, and walked to work the next morning her head still full of Naples B. had a week of violent dreams after she finished the first volume A. read under sodium-orange streetlight while smoking a cigarette outside a pub, unable to break off to go in to the friends waiting inside E. And we couldn’t stop talking about the experience of reading them: S.

felt that, impossibly, embarrassingly even, the books captured how she’d gone about finding an intellectual identity for herself. said she had got back in touch with an estranged friend to give her the first volume in the series K.

We returned to life too quickly as we spoke: who was your Lila, the childhood friend who effortlessly dazzled everyone? Or – a question not happily answered – were you Lila? S. A re Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels even books? I began to doubt it when I talked about them with other people – mostly women.