Not bellissima. Or, dare we say, a real Nino move. The upcoming Elena Ferrante novel The Lying Life of Adults is delaying its release due to the coronavirus pandemic. The English translation of the book, which was originally scheduled to be published on June 9, will instead have its grand literary unveiling on September 1. (We should let you know, though, that the Italian version has been out for a few months now. Fancy a quarantine crash course with Duolingo?) At least Ferrante’s publisher was nice enough to tweet out the first few sentences for us:
Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly. The sentence was uttered under his breath, in the apartment that my parents, newly married, had bought in Rione Alto, at the top of San Giacomo dei Capri. Everything — the spaces of Naples, the blue light of a very cold February, those words — remained fixed. But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story yet in fact are nothing, nothing of mine, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even she who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.
HBO also just released a new season of My Brilliant Friend to soften the blow, although the panoramic shots of the Italian coast may make you sad.