Critical Assessment "Ferrante has said that she likes to write narratives 'where the writing is clear, honest, and where the facts—the facts of ordinary life—are extraordinarily gripping when read.' Her prose has indeed a bare lucidity, and is often aphoristic and continent, in Ann Goldstein’s elegant, burnished English. But what is thrilling about her earlier novels is that, in sympathetically following her characters’ extremities, Ferrante’s own writing has no limits, is willing to take every thought forward to its most radical conclusion and backward to its most radical birthing. This is most obvious in the fearless way in which her female [...]