I am telling Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator, how interesting I found Frantumaglia — a “jumble of fragments” — the collection of the Italian writer’s correspondence and interviews that will be published in English for the first time next month.
“Really?” asks Goldstein, elegant in olive cashmere V-neck, black trousers and a necklace of colourful beads. “I just read this Michiko Kakutani review in The [New York] Times. She lambasted it!”
Ferrante is the Italian author of Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment and the four books known in Britain as the Neapolitan Quartet. Goldstein has translated them all, as well as Frantumaglia — a word Ferrante says she learnt from her mother. The writer has chosen to remain anonymous from
