Arturo's Island

A Novel

By: Elsa Morante, Ann Goldstein - translator

Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan

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

If only I could give less than 1 star!

The narrator is a disaster!
The book was highly recommended to me but the struggle to continue listening to the totally robotic narration was infuriating.

I managed to complete it - but... I would have enjoyed it much more if the narration was human!

Among the best books of my life

Amazing book it grabs you tightly and never really leaves you. Not even after the bit ter sweet ending. I’ve read it years ago and loved it like no other book, but listening to it was a wholly different experience which made it magic. A MUST READ book. The book was so mesmerizing I forgot the narrator … so I guess he was pretty good at it … isn’t this, finally, the goal of every narrator ? Giving voice to the book itself and disappear in this task?

Awful

Way toooo long. Just could not follow and did not finish this rambling makes no sense depressing story. No redeeming factors.

An Italian Catcher in the Rye

Hard to know who to blame for this. The performance is horribly monotonous broken by a strange German accent on occasion.

The author wrote one of my favorite books — History, A Novel. Set between the wars, this is the story of an adolescent on a Neapolitan Island. Her writing brings the Island to life but only as the flawed narrator perceives it, and so one never trusts it as real.

I can most easily compare this book to the Salinger novel, dominated by a self-obsessed, truly awful kid who is left alone too much. His personality is the mirror image of his father’s who is just as awful. The book is filled with terrible people in histrionic situations. I wish they all had had therapy instead of populating this novel.

Why did I finish this? I don’t have a clue, maybe to see if the main character ever got it together. He didn’t.

What a bad narration

Couldn’t read more than 5 min
Wish you had chosen a woman narrator. Hillary Huber would have been a perfect narrator for this book. Instead you chose a robot?
Very disappointing.