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Arturo's Island

A Novel

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Arturo's Island

By: Elsa Morante, Ann Goldstein - translator
Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
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Once considered the greatest writer of Italy's postwar generation - and admired by authors as varied as John Banville and Rivka Galchen - Elsa Morante is experiencing a literary renaissance, marked not least by Ann Goldstein's translation of Arturo's Island, the novel that brought Morante international fame.

Imbued with a spectral grace, as if told through an enchanted looking glass, the novel follows the adolescent Arturo through his days on the isolated Neapolitan island of Procida, where - his mother long deceased, his father often absent, and a dog as his sole companion - he roams the countryside and the beaches or reads in his family's lonely, dilapidated mansion. This quiet, meandering existence is upended when his father brings home a beautiful 16-year-old bride, Nunziatella.

A novel of longing and thwarted desires, filled with Morante's "brutal directness and familial torment" (James Wood), Arturo's Island reemerges in this splendid translation to take its rightful place in the world literary canon.

©2019 Elsa Morante Estate; translation copyright 2019 by Ann Goldstein (P)2019 HighBridge Company
Classics Coming of Age Fantasy Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Magical Realism Magic
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Author is obviously making a point about these terrible male characters but got tired of the point because the hate for women just went on until I couldn’t stand listening anymore.

Terrible, nasty, ugly & misogynistic

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