Elena Ferrante’s stories are all the same and yet she impresses with each telling
It could be the air around Naples which breeds legends. Ancient myths crawl out of the Mediterranean and fill its crevices with hungry stories. The war-torn Naples as brought to life by the Italian writer, Alberto Moravia, is a city of betrayals from Christianity, from fascism, from communism, but, more precisely, from itself. History has rarely been kind to Naples.
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Ferocious desires
It’s in this cauldron of unfulfilled desires that Elena Ferrante has set her stories, rising almost like a female version of Moravia. Ferrante locates the four Neapolitan novels in the 1950s. Women are just beginning to shed their traditional role as home-makers; artists and writers debate about where they belong. Communism is the golden apple, while at every street corner there is a poster for the capita