Genius girlfriend
E-book, Czech
Genius girlfriend
The novel The Brilliant Girlfriend is the first part of a tetralogy of the same name, which has already captivated readers almost all over the world and attracted well-deserved attention from literary critics (the last part was among others. nominated for the Italian Strega Prize and shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize).
Genius Girlfriend - the first part of the tetralogy of the same name, which has already captivated readers almost all over the world
The world literary sensation Genius Girlfriend comes to the Czech marketthe first part of the tetralogy of the same name, which attracted well-deserved attention from literary critics (the last part was, among others, the first part of the nominated for the Italian Strega Prize and shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize) and whose mysterious author was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by the American Time magazine.
The Neapolitan peripheral district of Luzzatti (the name never appears in the text), 1950s. It is there and then that the story of one woman's friendship begins. Its narrator is Elena, who as an old woman recalls her life, which, as far back as she can remember, has always been influenced by the strong personality of the genius Lily. She herself is the key figure in Lila's destiny, in her eyes she is the genius friend. The cornerstone of their complicated relationship is their struggle to survive in a man's world whose conventional boundaries are as binding as those of their hypocritical and violent neighbourhood.
In the novel, the reader is introduced not only to the two protagonists, but also to the whole microcosm of a Neapolitan neighbourhood connected by a thick veil of conventions and passions, whose roots go back to the time of fascism, to the years of the Second World War, to the world "before Elena and Lila".
The narrator uses a sample of one neighbourhood to guide us through the development of Italian society from post-war poverty to the economic miracle of the 1960s, ...he'll fill us in on the ideological and ground-level disputes between communists and camorrists, but the central theme of the novel and the series remains the friendship of the disparate heroines, portrayed with ruthless frankness as a system of "connected vessels", like a painful mirroring, as a lifelong rivalry, like a strong bond, that often strangle.
"The Brilliant Girlfriend is a bestseller exceptional in that even the discerning reader understands why it became one. Ferrante has managed to combine a few things that don't come up that often in one place. The world of the novel is pleasantly concrete, sensual, a world of events rather than ideas, and yet it is not primarily action: is full of impressions, plans, exploring life. "
- ihned.cz"It's been a long time since I've read a book that I've wanted to tell so many people around me about. Ferrante is an incredibly good storyteller, the story she wrote captivated the men and women in my neighborhood. "
- reviews on databazeknih.cz
About the author:
The literary community has been interested in Elena Ferrante's real identity since the early 1990s, when the first novel L'amore molesto (1992, Tough Love) was published by the person(s) publishing under this name. The international success of the tetralogy Genius Girlfriend, formed by the novels L'amica geniale (2011, Genius Girlfriend), Storia del nuovo cognome (2012, The Story of a New Name), Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (2013, The story of those who are leaving, and those, who will remain ), Storia della bambina perduta (2014, The Story of the Lost Girl), prompted an intensified search for her identity.
University professor Marco Santagata is convinced, based on a literary study of her works, that the historian Marcella Marmo is behind Elena Ferrante's name; journalist Claudio Gatti, who was following the flow of money, came up with the revelation that it was translator Anita Raja, wife of writer Domenico Starnone. There are also theories that Starnone himself is the author of the books, while others speculate about the teamwork of a married couple or other people from the Edizioni E/O publishing house, which publishes Elena Ferrante's books.
Whoever Elena Ferrante is, she is currently ranked by critics as one of Italy's greatest living authors, and in 2016 Time magazine listed her among the 100 most influential people in the world. Czech readers have already encountered her narrative mastery, which is not based on narrative experiments, but on the riveting power of her testimony about the most basic human emotional bonds, in her novel Days of Abandonment (2011).
Her novels Tough Love and Days of Abandonment were made into films (1995, r. Mario Martone and 2005, r. Roberto Faenza), and now a television series based on the tetralogy Genius Girlfriend is in the works, produced by Fandango and Wildside, called The Neapolitan Novels.
Samples to download:
Prostor s.r.o., Nad Spádem 649/10, Praha 4 - Podolí 14700, Česká republika, +420 222 220 680
