Elena Ferrante’s Key Words

I greatly admire the work of Tiziana de Rogatis. She is a reader of deep refinement. Often I think that she knows my books better than I. So, I read her with admiration and remain silent. -Elena Ferrante, in the magazine, San Lian Sheng HuoZhou Kan

Ferrante’s four-volume novel cycle known in English as the Neapolitan quartet has become a global success, with over ten million readers in close to fifty countries. Her readers recount feeling addicted to the novels; they describe a pleasure in reading that is as rare as it is irresistible, a compulsion that leads them either to devour the books or to ration them so as to prolong the pleasure.

De Rogatis here addresses that same transnational, diverse, transversal audience. Keywords is conceived as a lighted path made of luminous key words that synthesise the multiform aspects of Ferrante’s writing and guide us through the labyrinth of her global success.