Prose and cons

Seeking solace in books, as the pandemic goes on and on…

 

As regular readers of this column will already know, the one thing that has kept me going through the Covid 19 pandemic has been reading. I have sought refuge in old favourites, books that are so familiar that sinking into them again feels akin to getting a warm hug from an old friend. I have expanded my horizons by trying out new authors, who came recommended by fellow book lovers, with somewhat mixed results. I have tried to lose myself in the alternate universes of fictional works in an attempt to escape from a reality that is hard to live with. I have attempted to improve myself by reading worthy non-fiction tomes, using the vast stretches of me-time now available to me.

 

But whatever the genre, whoever the author, however good or bad the book, it is reading that has sustained me through this difficult time. In case that works for you as well, here is a short list of recommendations based on what I have been reading these past few months.

 

The Margot Affair by Sanae Lemoine

 

The protagonist of this novel is 17-year-old Margot Louve, the love child of an unconventional actress and the French culture minister. Her father has a wife and other children and has never publicly acknowledged Margot, though he comes by to visit her often. Frustrated by this lack of public recognition, Margot confides the secret of her parentage to a sympathetic journalist. And that small ripple in the pond of her life sets off ramifications that Margot could never have imagined, creating a storm that nearly destroys everything in its path.

 

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

 

This isn’t in the league of the Neapolitan Quartet with which Ferrante found international fame, though it is set in roughly the same world. The story is told from the perspective of the adolescent Giovanna, whose whole world comes crashing down when she overhears her father tell her mother that he is afraid his daughter is turning into his sister, Vittoria, whose vulgarity her father has long hated. This pushes Giovanna into making contact with the aunt she has never met, to figure out what they have in common, a decision that changes both her life and that of her parents.

 

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

 

This is very much an English murder mystery in the style of Agatha Christie. But instead of being set in a bucolic English village or a stately home, it is set in a retirement community of those 65 and above. The Thursday Murder Club has four members who meet once a week to discuss old cases that the police have failed to solve. But then murder comes calling within their own circle, and they have a brand new case to focus on, if only they can inveigle their way into the official investigation – which, of course, they do. 

 

Win by Harlan Coben 

 

Fans of Coben will know Win – or, to use his full name, Windsor Horne Lockwood III – from the Myron Bolitar series. But here, the sidekick – if Win could ever be described as that – is the main protagonist. No, not so much the hero, as the anti-hero, whose flaws make him a more compelling character than a regular leading man could ever be. The book begins with the discovery of a body in a slightly creepy apartment in New York; a body that we soon discover has links with Win’s past. How far do those links go? Well, you will have to read to find out; I am posting no spoilers here.

 

One Two Three Four; The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown

 

Is there anything left to say about the Beatles? You would think not but Craig Brown, the celebrated British writer and humorist, manages to find new angles and tell parts of the story in anecdotes that may surprise even dedicated Beatles watchers. What was it like to be Ringo? Was Paul as shrewd as they say? Was George really so money minded? Was John an insensitive jerk? What about Jimmy Nicol, the short-lived Fifth Beatle, who temporarily replaced Ringo, only to see his life fall apart? It’s a fun read mixing the familiar with the surprising. 

 

Facts about fiction

Many may try, but only some writers can actually bring a world alive in their books

 

What can I say? I am a sucker for a good, old-fashioned Regency Romance, all tightly-laced corsets, heaving bosoms, swooning/sassy heroines, and a swashbuckling rakish hero who is eventually reformed by his love of a good woman. So far, so clichéd. But what brings these somewhat hackneyed plots alive is the skill of a great writer, who can create an entire universe in which you are only too willing to suspend your disbelief, let alone your cynicism.

 

You can imagine my excitement then, when I heard that a new series called Bridgerton was being released on Netflix. Set in Regency London and populated with a multicultural cast, this was based on a series of novels by Julia Quinn, recreating what will always be – to me, at least – the world of Georgette Heyer. 

 

So, I cleared my evening and settled down for some binge-watching. But half-way through the first episode I began to experience the first stirrings of dissatisfaction. And that only grew as I ploughed through the rest of the episodes. This was nothing like the Regency romps I had loved for most of my life.

 

Never mind, I told myself. This incarnation of Bridgerton owed more to Shonda Rhimes than it did to Julia Quinn. Maybe I should go to the original and get my fix of Regency-era drama. So, I downloaded The Duke and I, the novel on which the show is based, and settled down to read it in one greedy gulp.

 

At least, that was the intention. But to be honest with you, I found it heavy going. The plot was predictable, the dialogue was clunky, and the characters lacked a certain three-dimensional depth. It had all the tropes of Heyer’s Regency Romances but none of the sparkle and wit that makes Georgette’s books both effervescent and evergreen in their appeal. 

 

Just to confirm my initial impression, I went back to re-read my well-thumbed copies of Heyer’s best work. I started off with The Devil’s Cub, and within minutes I was entranced once again by the exploits of the Marquis of Vidal and his reluctant love interest, Mary Challoner, whose courtship has the most unpropitious of beginnings (she shoots him in the arm with his own pistol!).

 

Once I had started, there was no stopping me! I seamlessly went on to re-read The Grand Sophy and Venetia. I couldn’t find my copy of Regency Buck so I downloaded it on my Kindle and read it again, chuckling anew at the exploits of Judith Taverner and the Earl of Worth. And I am now immersed in The Infamous Army, a book that Heyer set around the battle of Waterloo, and which features Lord and Lady Worth, now a staid married couple, witnessing the star-crossed romance of their brother, Charles Audley with the audacious society beauty, Lady Barbara Childe. 

 

As I slipped effortlessly back into the universe of Georgette Heyer, it occurred to me that when it comes to genres of fiction, the world is divided into Masters of Their Game and The Rest of the Field. And no matter how hard The Rest may try, they can never measure up against The Masters. 

 

In spy fiction, for instance, there is the original Master, John le Carre, who made the Cold War his own, spinning fabulous tales revolving around the twin characters of George Smiley and the sinister Soviet spy, Karla. Since then, there have been many writers who have tried to recreate that universe, but no matter how good the books, they just don’t have the same appeal as Le Carre’s oeuvre. 

 

When it comes to murder mysteries, there is no bettering P.D. James. There is no better exemplar of British humour that P.G. Wodehouse. Nobody examines and elucidates the inner life of women better than Elena Ferrante. And nobody can write a cheery bonkbuster better than Jilly Cooper.

 

Part of their mastery lies in the fact that they make it all look so easy. It’s only when you see lesser writers trying to recreate their magic that you realize just how difficult it actually is. And that makes you appreciate their genius even more.

Screen time

There’s nothing quite as fun as seeing a beloved book series make the transition to television

For the longest time ever, I have wondered why Daniel Silva’s creation, the Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon, does not get the James Bond (or even the Jason Bourne) treatment. For those who have not read Silva’s series of spy novels, Allon is a marvelous creation, art restorer by day and assassin by night (and sometimes the other way around), with a personal tragedy in his past life that haunts him to this day, even though a second marriage to a gorgeous Italian woman and a new family has eased his pain somewhat.

Allon always seemed like a character made for the movies to me. But, it turns out that he is destined to make his mark on the small screen, with MGM Television having acquired the rights to the collection of Silva’s Allon novels. So, Gabriel Allon will be arriving on a TV screen somewhere near you nearly 18 years after he first came to life in The Kill Artist (published in 2000) and I, for one, can’t wait.

As if this news wasn’t enough to send me into ecstasies, it turns out that another of my favourite novelists is having her works turned into a television show as well. Production on Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend – the first book of her Neapolitan quarter – is underway in Caserta, Italy. The book will be turned into an eight-episode TV series set in Naples, telling the story of Lenu (Elena Greco) and Lila (Raffaella Cerullo), the two girls who find each other in childhood and go on to have a life-long friendship with its share of ups and downs. (And the best part is that the series – produced by HBO in collaboration with Rai Fiction – will have the characters speaking Italian, which will give it a certain verisimilitude that wouldn’t have been possible with an Italian cast spewing heavily-accented English.)

But no sooner had I finished celebrating all this good news than my inner Greedy Gretel got going. And now, I can’t stop fantasizing about some of my other much-loved book series being adapted for television, allowing me a glimpse of my favourite characters on the small screen.

Here’s just a small sampling of some of my fantasy TV series.

Donna Leon’s murder mysteries

Set in Venice, this series revolves around the career and life of one of the most engaging private detectives of modern fiction. Commissario Guido Brunetti is not your average tortured detective, smoking and drinking too much as he tries to cope with challenging cases and a dysfunctional family. No, that kind of clichéd writing is not for Leon. Her detective is a family man who walks home to lunch everyday to feast on the three-course meals served up by his intelligent and feisty wife, Paola, so that he can enjoy the company of his two children, Raffi and Chiara.

The crimes themselves are interesting enough but the real star of the series is the city of the Venice itself. You can almost smell the dank scents rising from the canali and calli of the city, see the winding streets that lead to the waters of the Grand Canal and the laguna, and marvel at the architecture of the beautiful buildings that keep Brunetti company as he walks to and back from work.

Strangely enough, only a German production house had filmed some of the stories though the series hasn’t been distributed widely. It’s time someone in the English-speaking world stepped up and gave us Venice and Brunetti in all their glory.

Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romances

Regular readers of this column will know what a dedicated fan of Heyer’s romances I am. So, it would be no exaggeration to say that I have spent the last two decades of my life waiting for someone to make a TV series based on her Regency novels. But much to my disappointment, while every ‘period’ work from Poldark to Howard’s End is regaling TV audiences across the world, nobody seems willing to give Heyer a shot.

It’s a baffling state of affairs. These are ready-made storylines, incredibly well-plotted, laced with humour and wit, and almost cinematic is their treatment. The characters are very well-drawn as well, both the dashing heroes and the sparkling, willful heroines who are no shrinking violets. And yet, nobody seems to have thought of bringing the lovely Arabella, the masterful Frederica or the amazing Grand Sophy to life.

Well, the first one who does will have a bonafide hit on his or her hands. Meanwhile, I live in hope.

Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers series

These were my absolute favourite books growing up. I would devour them late into the night, reading by the light of a torch that I had smuggled into my bed. And then, when I finally fell asleep I would dream of midnight feasts, night-time swims, classroom pranks, and so much more, waking up even more determined than ever to go to boarding school.

Well, that never happened. So, I guess the next-best thing – now that I am all grown up – would be to be transported to the world of Mallory Towers via my TV screen. Strangely enough, while the Famous Five and Noddy have had their stints on television, Darrell Rivers and her friends at boarding school have never managed to make that transition.

And that’s a pity, if you ask me. It’s time a new generation of children was introduced to the antics of this group of girls: the sensible but hot-tempered Darrell, her best friend Sally Hope, the spoilt little brat Gwendoline Lacey and the resident joker Alicia Johns. And what better way to do that for this non-reading generation than through the medium of television?

End of a chapter

As the year winds to a close, it’s time to update that reading list

The one thing that is as certain as one year bleeding into another, isthat it will be accompanied by a profusion of lists. You know the kind I mean, don’t you? The kind that crop up in every newspaper and magazine, on every news and gossip website, or even on TV entertainment shows, as everyone tries to sum up the year that has gone by in short, sweet listicles.

So, you’ll have Top Ten Business Personalities jostling for space with The Best Hip-Hop Albums of the year. There will be a list of natural calamities fighting for attention alongside one that cites the

political disasters of the year. And so on and on and on.

But for me, this is a time to take stock of what I read over the last one year, which new authors I discovered, which old favourites made a comeback, and which ones made the cut for the list of My Favourite Books of the Year. So, here they are, in no particular order of

importance.

•       Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult: As is always the case with Picoult, this book has at its heart a very human story. A white supremacist couple has a baby at a hospital where African-American nurse, Ruby Jefferson, has worked for 20 hours. They insist that she is not to touch their baby, and the hospital puts that instruction on the file. But when the baby suffers a medical emergency, the only person in the room is Ruby. How she reacts in that moment and the chain of events that follow give us an insight into race relations in America, a ringside view of the legal system, and how lives can turn on an instant.

•       Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz: The author has already paid homage at the shrine of Sherlock Holmes, with A House of Silk. With Magpie Murders, he worships at the altar of Agatha Christie, the queen of the whodunit genre. But the conceit with Magpie Murders is that it comes in the form of a book within a book, with each story as enthralling as the other. There is the bucolic setting, the country-house murder, a slew of suspects and a generous supply of red herrings. In other words, classic Christie territory with just a dash of Horowitz. You can’t go wrong with this one.

•       Frantumaglia by Elena Ferrante: If, like me, you have devoured every word that Ferrante has ever written and are hungry for more, delve deep into this book that compiles all her letters, interviews, emails to give us a deeper perspective into what makes Ferrante the brilliant writer that she is. Best read alongside the books she refers to so that you can actually see how a writer’s mind works its magic on the page. And no, it doesn’t tell you who Elena Ferrante ‘really’ is; because all you need to know is that she ‘is’ Elena Ferrante.

•       Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen: If The Boss’ songs have been the soundtrack to your life, you will love this book, which gives you the backstory and context to so many of his greatest hits. But the bits that resonated the most with me from this excellent autobiography are the parts where Springsteen deals with his depression, his complicated relationship with his father and growing up working class in America.

•       I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh: The beauty of this book resides in the mother of all plot twists. It opens with a hit-and-run accident that kills a five-year-old child, whose mother let go of his hand for only a second, and everything follows from that tragedy. I am not going to post any spoilers but suffice it to say that when things turn on their head, you will ask yourself how you could have got hoodwinked so completely. Well, that’s because Mackintosh is a master at her game, even though this is only her debut novel.

•       Orphan X by Gregg Hurwitz: If you love the Jack Reacher or the Jason Bourne series, like I do, then you will enjoy this fast-paced thriller. The hero, Orphan X – so called because he was the 24th person to be inducted into The Orphan program (after the 24th letter of the alphabet, X) that turned boys like him into killers for the government – has travelled the world executing people on behalf of his country. But what happens now that the program has been shut down, and he has been cut loose? Well, I’ll leave that for you to find out; but you can be sure that there won’t be many dull moments.

•       Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder: This one is a bit of cheat, because I first read it when the first English translation came out in 1994. But I went back to it this year, plucking it out of my

bookshelves on an impulse, and before I knew it, I was down that rabbit-hole again. This is described as a novel about the history of philosophy but it is so much more than that. It is a guided tour through the mysteries of the human mind. And even after all these years, there hasn’t been another book quite like this one. If you still haven’t read it, clear a couple of days on your calendar and dive in.

Face off

Why the unmasking of Elena Ferrante makes us all so uncomfortable

It was in the February of this year that I last wrote about Elena Ferrante. The English translations of her books were being launched in India, and it seemed as good an opportunity as any to write about one of my favourite authors.

The central theme of that column was how it helped that we didn’t know who Elena Ferrante actually was when we got lost in her fictional world. And how the author’s decision to hide behind pseudonymous anonymity was not just a writer’s caprice or a brilliant publicity stunt set up by her publishing house. Ferrante’s anonymity had a purpose: it allowed her the freedom to write about stuff that we struggle to acknowledge to ourselves, let alone say aloud to the world. And it was this liberty that allowed her voice to soar as high as it did; and to speak to the rest of us.

Well, today it is my unhappy duty to inform you that the veil of anonymity that Ferrante wrote behind has been rudely ripped apart by an ‘investigative journalist’ called Claudio Gatti, who discovered her true identity or, more accurately, invaded her fiercely-guarded privacy by rummaging through her financial and property records. And that he ‘outed’ the author in no less authoritative a journal than the New York Review of Books.

Well, be that as it may, I am not going to play Gatti’s game. I am not going to refer to the author of the Neopolitan Quartet of novels as anything other than her chosen nom de plume, Elena Ferrante. That is how she wishes to be known to the world. And it is not for us to decide otherwise.

Nor is it necessary to know the ‘real’ woman to appreciate what an enormously talented writer she is. That kind of autobiographical detail actually detracts rather than adds to an author’s mystique. The relationship between a writer and a reader is essentially one of imagination and a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. Sordid reality plays no part in this social contract. If anything, it takes away from the reading experience rather than add to it.

So I, for one, am not going to enquire too closely into who Elena Ferrante ‘really’ is. I don’t want to know where she grew up. I don’t care about her romantic life. I am not interested in whether she is married, divorced or single. It doesn’t bother me if she identifies as straight, gay or bisexual. And I certainly don’t need to know whether her political beliefs verge to the hard right, the liberal centre, or the extreme left.

This is not a decision I make lightly. No, it is a decision born of bitter experience. Over the years, I have lost count of the number of authors whose books stopped speaking to me when I found out too much about their personal lives or even political beliefs.

It all began when I made the decision to study English literature in college. Once I had signed up, it was not enough to just read texts – poetry, prose or drama – and appreciate them for what they were. No, we also had to learn about the author’s, their lives, their beliefs, and all that had influenced them in the course of their literary careers.

Well, given that I was the bookish, nerdish type, I entered into the enterprise with all the enthusiasm at my command. I had no idea how badly this would go.

It began with T.S. Eliot, a poet I had always admired, some of whose passages constantly played in my mind like the lines of a much-loved song (“I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”). So you can imagine my despair when my research into the person led me, somewhat inevitably, to the discovery that he had been something of an anti-Semite.

I thought I would be okay with Philip Larkin, the writer of such immortal lines as “Sexual intercourse began in Nineteen Sixty-Three (which was rather late for me). Between the end of the “Chatterly” ban And the Beatles’ first LP”. And yes, it all seemed to be going rather well until the 1992 publication of The Selected Letters of Philip Larkin.

That’s when the essential banality of Larkin’s existence was laid bare, with its judicious mix of racism, classism, sexism and misogyny. Sample quote: “The lower-class bastards can no more stop going on strike now than a laboratory rat with an electrode in its brain can stop jumping on a switch to give itself an orgasm.” Ah, quite.

Since then, I have steered clear of getting too up close and personal with writers I admire. But I thought I was on safe ground when I picked up a biography of one of my girlhood favourites, Georgette Heyer. This was a woman who had made her reputation with Regency Romances that I had read so often that I knew the punchlines and plotlines of each by heart. And what do you know? She turned out to be a fan of Enoch Powell (yes, he of the “rivers of blood” fame)!

So, thanks very much, but I am not taking any chances with Elena Ferrante. All I need to know about Ferrante, the author, lies within the covers of the many books she has written. Everything else belongs to the private person behind that name; and that person is entitled to her privacy, keeping it safe from the rapaciously prying eyes of the world.

  

The book's the thing...

And sometimes it’s even better when it is adapted for TV or a movie

If you are a fan of Elena Ferrante, and (like me) are suffering withdrawal pangs after having devoured every word she has ever written, then I have some good news for you. The Italian film and television production company, Wildside, has announced that it is working on adapting Ferrante’s Neopolitan quartert into a TV series, along with producer Fandango. The series will be shot in Italy, and in Italian.

The four novels, which trace the friendship of Lenu and Lina over half a century, will be adapted into a four-season TV series, which each novel taking in eight episodes, making it a 32-episode blockbuster. Ferrante is believed to be involved in the production, though nobody quite knows in what capacity or how closely. But then, given that nobody even knows who Ferrante is – she is still jealously clinging tight to her anonymity – that can’t be very surprising.

No release date has been announced but I am already salivating with anticipation. The story of Lenu and Lina consumed me entirely as I raced to the final book in the quartet, The Story of the Lost Child, and I can’t wait to see this tale of female friendship retold in a visual medium.

Of course, this anticipation is tinged with a dash of fear. It is the same fear that every book-lover experiences when a well-loved book is turned into a movie or a TV series. I felt that fear when the first series of Game of Thrones was released, not sure how that tale of kings and knights, love and lust, pride and passion, would work on the TV screen.

Would it all look a bit ridiculous, like some costume dramas tend to do? Would the story have the same power on TV as it did in the book? Would the characters be reduced to caricatures because of the demands of the visual medium? Would it just become yet another bodice-ripper of the kind that litter the television universe?

You can imagine my relief when the TV series proved to be as much of a triumph as the books. Of course, I felt a little miffed that I already knew what was going to happen, thus losing out on the thrill of anticipation that other viewers, who hadn’t read the book, were feeling. But then, George R.R. Martin, rather obligingly, went off script in the later seasons, and I could watch with the same edge-of-the-seat excitement that non-readers were privileged to experience.

So, yes, I am a tad nervous about how the Ferrante will survive the transition to our TV screens. Just as I am both nervous and excited about the movie adapation of Longbourn that is in the works. Random House Studios and Focus Features have acquired the film rights to Jo Baker’s novel about life below stairs in the Bennet household made famous by Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice), and the release date is tentatively set for 2017. I just hope and pray that this adaptation remains true to the original and doesn’t go down the Downton Abbey route.

But the one author whose works I long to see on television is Georgette Heyer (just one of her books, The Reluctant Widow, has been made into a film – and a pretty bad one at that!). The prolific author of Regency Romances has given us such amazing characters as The Grand Sophy, Arabella, Frederica, Venetia, and it would be an absolute treat to see them come alive on the TV screen. But for some reason, British TV companies are too busy filming Pride and Prejudice again and again and again to pay any attention to the possibilities inherent in these Heyer heroines.

And that is an absolute pity, if you ask me. Heyer tells absolutely cracking stories, intricately-plotted and leavened with wit and humour. And her heroines are the absolute best; plucky little creatures who do their best in a society that hems them around with strict rules of etiquette.

Who else but Heyer could come up with a heroine like Sophia Stanton-Lacy who comes visiting her aunt with a little monkey to gift her young cousins, and thinks nothing of confronting an evil moneylender with an elegant but effective pistol? Or the impish Leonie de Saint-Vire, who masquerades as a young page in Parisian society, before being unveiled as an aristocratic beauty? Or even the stunningly beautiful Deborah Grantham, relegated to the fringes of polite society as Faro’s Daughter, who makes the greatest conquest of them all?

I could go on listing the marvelous, resourceful, witty, intelligent, beautiful women who people Heyer’s stories (the headstrong Lady Serena Carlow, Judith Taverner, Mary Challoner are just some names that come to mind) but then we’d be here forever. Instead you could go over to petitionbuzz.com and sign a petition asking that Heyer’s novels be made into a movie.

Though, if you ask me, television is better suited to telling Heyer’s stories (in my view, movies are like short stories, only TV series can do justice to the sweep of a novel). Surely the BBC or ITV, which spends millions on period dramas of dubious quality, could pick up one Heyer Regency Romance – my personal favourite would be The Grand Sophy – and adapt it into a six-part series. I would bet my entire collection of tattered copies of Heyer’s novels that it would do so well that production companies would be scrambling for the rights to the books yet to be filmed.

So, come on guys, look sharp. This is a world of fiction beyond Jane Austen and Julian Fellowes that beckons.

What's in a name?

Why it helps that we don't know who Elena Ferrante is when we get lost in her fictional world

Who is Elena Ferrante? Nobody really knows. Well, except for her publisher, her literary agent, and possibly, her best friend. For the rest of the world, Elena Ferrante is just a name. Or, to put it more accurately, just a pseudonym. The real woman behind it remains a mystery.

There are some things about Ferrante that we can guess at. She is an Italian. She grew up in Naples. She came of age around the 1960s. She has some experience of growing up poor and unprivileged. And she has struggled to play the traditional roles required of women.

But all that is pure conjecture. We don't know anything about her for certain. All we can do is extrapolate from her books to imagine what kind of life she must have led, what her life experiences were, and how they shaped her as a woman and a writer. So we imagine that she is a woman who had difficulty coming to terms with what society (and her family) demanded of a wife and mother -- or indeed a daughter. We imagine that she struggled with romantic love. We imagine that she broke some hearts and has hers broken in turn.

Despite speculation to the contrary, I for one am quite sure that Elena Ferrante is a woman. Only a woman could have mined her interior life so ruthlessly; only a woman could so perfectly express feminine angst; and only a woman could understand the complicated relationships that exist between women.

But Ferrante is not just any woman. She is one who has become the voice of an entire generation of women who came of age in a pre-feminist era, who had to fight for their education, their right to work outside the home, the right not to be reduced to their primary relationships, the right to be seen as individuals in their own right, the right not to be seen as a sum of their body parts. Sample this sentence from My Brilliant Friend: “The beauty of mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn’t find an outlet, Greco, and it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and it will be as if she never had it.”

So Ferrante's women rage. They scream (sometimes out loud, sometimes silently). They push against boundaries. They explore their sexuality. They laugh. They cry. They behave badly. They tear down stereotypes. They look at the world around them with unflinching eyes. And they are completely authentic no matter what they do. Their voice is the voice of everywoman. Their thoughts are the ones that we sometimes barely acknowledge to ourselves, leave alone give voice to. They are both light and dark, both good and evil, both sinned against and sinning.

My introduction to Ferrante came via her quartet of Neopolitan novels, which is best described as her tribute to female friendship. It is the bond between Lenu and Lila – the Cerullo and Greco quoted above, two girls growing up in the same poor, deprived, brutish neighbourhood in Naples -- that provides the central framework of a story that takes in their entire lives, beginning from the 1950s and continuing into the first decade of the 21st century. The bond between the two women sometimes chafes, sometimes grows loose, sometimes binds them close, and sometimes becomes so tight that it suffocates.

And it is through their story that we see the enormous changes that are occurring in the world around them. You see the world expand through their eyes, as they marry, birth children, make careers, deal with the betrayals of love and the treacheries of life. All of this unfolds through the books following My Brilliant Friend: The Story Of A New Name, Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay, and The Story Of The Lost Child.

It was after I had devoured the entire quartet that I started on the books in which Ferrante had begun to find her voice and learnt to deploy it with devastating effect. Her first book, Troubling Love, is about a daughter’s search for her dead mother and the discoveries she makes along the way. The Days Of Abandonment plumbs the depths of the despair of a wife whose husband has left her for another woman. And The Lost Daughter tells a tale that most mothers and daughters will see something of themselves in.

It is only when you read her novels that you realise that Ferrante's insistence on anonymity is not some writer's caprice or a brilliant publicity stunt set up by a publishing house but an absolute necessity. It is her anonymity that allows her the freedom to say things that we sometimes find hard to even say to ourselves in the depths of our subconscious mind.

And what freedom it is! She can write about the first fumblings of adolescent love. She can shine a light on the resentment mothers feel towards their children no matter how much they may love them. She can examine the dark eroticism of adultery, as it lurks in shadowy corners. And she can do all this without worrying about anyone drawing parallels or seeking common ground in her own personal life.

Perhaps it is this liberty that allows Ferrante's voice to soar as high as it does. And that is what allows it to speak to us. But don’t take my word for it. From this month on, all of Ferrante’s books are available in India. Read and experience her magic for yourself.

The writing is on the wall

The e-book may be here to stay; but the physical book is alive and well, and doing better than ever

So, were the rumours of the death of the physical book greatly exaggerated? You remember them, don’t you? All those articles in the media bemoaning the fact that people were switching over to digital reading devices, and that the sales of actual books were declining year on year. It was inevitable, these doomsdayers assured us, that the book as we know and love it – rustling paper, beautifully crafted covers, and that ineffable smell of print and ink – would soon become a novelty item. Instead all of us would adapt to digital devices and do all our book-reading on one kind of screen (e-readers like Kindle) or another (smartphones and tablets with an e-reader app).

Well, the facts would seem to belie that assertion. According to a recent article in the New York Times, e-book sales fell by 10 per cent in the first five months of 2015 in America. And a Nielson survey showed that the portion of people who read books primarily on an e-reader fell to 32 per cent in the first quarter of 2015 from a high of 50 per cent in 2012.

In the UK, its largest book retailer, Waterstones, announced that it would cease to sell Kindles in its stores, because the sales were ‘pitiful’. It would use the space freed up to display physical paperbacks and hardbacks instead. The move makes sense, given that the sales of physical books in Waterstones rose by 5 per cent in December 2014. The Guardian reported that figures released by Nielson Bookscan showed that sales of print books for the first 36 weeks of 2015 rose by 4.6 per cent when compared to the same period in 2014, the first time such growth had been reported since 2007.

Amazon was quick to read the writing on the bookstore walls. It moved to open its first physical bookstore in November 2015 in Seattle’s University Village neighbourhood (though, of course, there was a designated space for e-readers as well), with the most popular books that week displayed behind the checkout counter. Prominent signs assured customers that the prices in-store were the same as they are on Amazon online, so nobody need fear missing out on a good bargain.

I couldn’t help but smile with quiet satisfaction as I read these stories. It felt good to see that the physical book was pulling its weight in the battle between digital platforms and real-life reading. Except that in my experience, it isn’t so much an either/or situation, but a bit of both.

Speaking for myself, I was a late convert to the pleasures of digital reading. I still don’t own a Kindle but I do have the app on my Ipad. And over the last few years, I have built up quite a library on it, with titles ranging from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (I couldn’t find the physical copy the night I watched the movie; hence the impulse purchase) to all five books of the Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (downloaded before I went on holiday so that I could read those ‘heavy’ tomes without weighing down my suitcase).

But my new-found fondness for the Kindle doesn’t mean that my love affair with the physical book is over. Not by a long measure. I may ‘cheat’ on my first love from time to time, guiltily dipping into the Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Cazalet Chronicles or my favourite Dorothy L. Sayers mystery late at night, as I read undisturbed on my IPad without disturbing the slumbering household. But after this late-night straying I always slink back home in the light of day, suitably chastened and eager to make amends to my physical read of the moment. Since you ask, it is All The Light We Cannot See, a brilliant book by Anthony Doerr; do pick up a copy or download.

My brain now automatically sorts books between those that I wish to possess physically and those that I am happy to have stored electronically. So, favourite authors like Donna Leon and Daniel Silva are bought in bookstores, and then propped up on my bookshelves to be dipped into as and when I fancy. Books that I am unlikely to want to re-read are downloaded on the Kindle: Jodi Picoult, Robert Galbraith, Harlan Coben, Lee Child are among this list.

Then, there are those authors who enter my life through Kindle and then push their way on to my bookshelves through sheer persistence. I first read Gone Girl on Kindle, but was sufficiently moved to track down and buy physical copies of all the previous books of Gillian Flynn. I discovered Elena Ferrante (the writer not the woman, who still hides behind her pen name and her anonymity) when I downloaded My Brilliant Friend on a whim. But such was the power of the writing that it leapt off the screen and took possession of my nightstand. Since then, I have bought physical copies of all four books of her Neapolitan quartet.

Sometimes this process works in reverse. I discovered Sarah Dunant in print and still treasure the physical book I bought (The Birth of Venus). But the last book (Sacred Hearts) didn’t really resonate, so her latest (Mapping The Edge) has been consigned to my Kindle. Ditto, with Sophie Hannah and Kate Atkinson.

And so it goes, as the e-reader and physical books continue to co-exist happily in my life; as I am sure they do in yours.