DISPATCH FROM ITALY

Libreria Acqua Alta Venezia

The magical Libreria Acqua Alta in Venice, complete with a canal-side entrance and books shelved inside of canoes and gondola.

There is an engineering phenomenon known as the Ferranti Effect (something to do with electrical transmission over distance), but in literature, the "Ferrante Effect" may be even more powerful. Since finding her success with My Brilliant Friend and the other books that comprise her Neapolitan Quartet, her name has become practically synonymous with Italian literature in the English-reading world. At the start of last Sunday's book club gathering, I even joked that we were just here for a discussion of her books. 

A throwback to a decade ago, when Ferrante fever was in full-force. "America has nothing short of a love affair with all things Italian. Italian food, Italian coffee, Italian design. What’s missing is an equally obsessive interest in Italian literature." 

Is Italian Literature Having Its Moment?, Jeanne Bonner, Asymptote Journal, February 10, 2016.

But for as significant as Ferrante's books have been, our group took this month's reading destination as an excuse to venture further afield and try some new authors. The upswing of Ferrante's success has been renewed interest in other female Italian authors, in part championed by Ferrante's translator, Ann Goldstein. When translators have more visibility and a greater role in publishing, they become some of the best scouts for new and overlooked writers. And obviously, the increase in translated Italian women has meant a different sort of story reaches readers. These stories, both post-war and more contemporary, explored how women live within and push against a patriarchal society.

Goldstein is so prolific that this interview could basically serve as your syllabus for Italian literature. "The reality is that many mid-twentieth-century women writers were known in Italy, but not seriously studied. They certainly were not translated. Some appeared in English when they were first published, only to be forgotten."

Translation as Feminist Practice: An Interview with Ann Goldstein, Sara Marinelli, Asymptote Journal, May 27, 2026

My Natalia: Aamer Hussein reviews The Complete Short Stories of Natalia Ginzburg, Aamer Hussein, Asymptote Journal

But lest we assume that only women were impacted by patriarchy, several of us read nuanced portrayals of male interiority, friendships, and queer loves.

As we talked about these works, we kept returning to the role of the translator, and perennial question of what changes between the original and the translation. This is particularly interesting given that Italy is a nation of dialects so distinct they could well be considered separate languages. At unification in the 1860s, it was estimated that only 10% of the population spoke Italian. Even in recent decades, authors have been criticized for when their writing diverges from the Tuscan standard. When asked about translating for dialects, Ann Goldstein replied "In general, I stay close to the written text and try to convey the variation that way. I don’t really see another option, because there is no true equivalent in English, and it’s very difficult to make a dialect feel natural when English doesn’t work the same way." 

So what, then, makes an "Italian" book or an "Italian" author? Is it simply a matter of writing in "proper" Italian? Just ask British-American author Jhumpa Lahiri, who for more than a decade has been writing, in and translating from, Italian. 

People who don’t know me assume, looking at me, that I don’t know Italian. When I speak to them in Italian, when I ask for something . . . they say, puzzled, ‘I don’t understand.’ It’s always the same response, the same scowl. As if my Italian were another language.
—Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words

Lahiri's stories complicate notions of belonging, often centering immigrants and minorities otherwise excluded from fiction. No one in the month's group picked up a book by one of Italy's many immigrant writers, but if you're looking to diversify your Italian reading, here are two places to start:

And then read through this survey of Italian immigrant/emigrant writing. "Italy has only existed as a single, united country for a little over 150 years (and that as a nation it has only included Rome, now its capital, for 146 of those years). And that for most of its history it was actually a melting pot of diverse peoples, traditions, religions, and languages. It has suffered through wars, invasions, and periods of foreign domination."

Italy and the Literature of Immigration, Francesco Durante, Word Without Borders, September 1, 2016.

Belonging and Italian-ness aren't only a matter of race and language, but also of geography and class. Italy is known for an exaggerated identity divide between a more industrial, affluent North and a more agrarian and impoverished South. This has been reflected in generations of migration away from rural areas to urban hubs and out of Southern Italy at large. Three contemporary books read by our group cast an eye on class issues and economic mobility:

Two books set in Italy by non-Italian authors came up as stories that use the scenic setting as a backdrop for stories of "foreigners abroad." (I maintain that A Room With a View holds up as a remarkably fresh satire of tourism).

I've come back to this op-ed time-and-again over the last year, regularly finding connections to Latronico's analysis of "world literature" via English-language publishing. He writes, "As books were translated and read across borders, a slightly paradoxical notion of two-layered reading emerged: novels offered, on the one hand, a very precise depiction of a specific place and time and national spirit; but through the specifics, something general could be glimpsed outside the national confines – about what it feels like to be a person, which to me sounds like a serviceable approximation of what the art of the novel is about."

'It's another form of imperialism': how anglophone literature lost its universal appeal, Vincenzo Latronico, The Guardian, August 8, 2025.

And where was the weird? The magical? At all of our book clubs, we've ended up finding elements of "magic realism" in a lot of writing. While that phrase is weighted with a lot of baggage and quite rooted in a specific Latin American context, it also was absent from a lot of the Italian fiction we read. One notable exception: the formal inventiveness and wide-ranging imagination of Italo Calvino. To be sure, there is Italian sci-fi and fantasy and plenty of surreal and larger-than-life novels to be found in the nation's writing. Explorations for another day!

In terms of "genre" fiction, a few readers found a lot to love in Italian crime fiction, particularly Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano series. This Sicilian detective is equal parts sleuth and gourmand, lavishing mouthwatering descriptions on the meals he consumes during his investigations.

"For Montalbano too, food provides a civilised and nostalgic relief from the horrors of his work. [...] And he prefers to eat alone, as if for all his humour and levity, he trusts more to the comfort of food than the uncertainties of human relationships."

Dining with death: crime fiction's long affair with food, Miranda Carter, The Guardian, November 5, 2018.

To think ... this is just what we discussed on a busy summer Sunday morning. Thank you to everyone who came and joined the conversation, to everyone who picked up an Italian book, and to all of you who are inspired to read further. Looking for your next book? I always have ideas...

And be sure to "book your tickets" for our next destination: we're reading INDIA for our September 13th book club!

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