My wife Caroline Sinclair and I got hooked on Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend quartet when they were first published in English in 2012, with a translation by Ann Goldstein. Caroline began reading the first book and urged me to investigate it.
I admit I was put off at first by the "Chick Lit/Romance" type covers they slapped on these books... but diving in, I quickly became addicted to Ferrante's prose and her fascinating insights into growing up female and feminist in impoverished Naples, from mid-century to (more or less) the present day.
Thus, we were delighted when this RAI TV television series first appeared in 2018 under the imprimatur of Italian director/producer Paolo Sorrentino (whom I met and hung out with at Emir Kusturica's Kustendorf Festival in Serbia a few years ago—a very nice guy who told me he originally wanted to be a professional guitarist but gave it up because "it was too hard").
The series is co-written by Ferrante herself, a famously reclusive author who writes under a pseudonym and has never once consented to a live interview. This is probably because the Italian press outed her in an A.J. Weberman-type garbage trawl as the translator Anita Raja, who purportedly writes the books with her husband. Never mind.
We're now nearly at the end of the TV series's fourth and final season—and it's as compelling as ever (especially as readers of the quartet know what is about to go down). Some may prefer the youthful incarnations of best frenemies Lila and Lena as portrayed in the first two seasons—but the current actresses, to me, are more than capable of delivering the heartbreaking denouement.
Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend was recently selected as the #1 book of this century in a NY Times poll, which, not having read most of the other books, I cannot knowledgeably comment on. But she sure has hit a popular chord worldwide—the books have struck a resonance, deservedly sold in the millions, and been translated into pretty much every language under the sun.
And after finishing the quartet (Caroline and I got His-and-Hers copies of Vol. 4 when it came out so as not to fight over who got first dibs on it), I duly read every other book of Ferrante's oeuvre available in English.
And they did not disappoint.