At the back a hand was raised.
“Please.”
A tall young man, with long, unruly hair and a thick black beard, spoke in a contemptuously polemical way of the preceding speaker, and, a few times, even of the introduction of the nice man who was sitting next to me. He said we lived in a provincial country, where every occasion was an opportunity for complaining, but meanwhile no one rolled up his sleeves and reorganized things, trying to make them function. Then he went on to praise the modernizing force of my novel. I recognized him most of all by his voice, it was Nino Sarratore.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elena Ferrante was born in Naples. She is the author of The Days of Abandonment, which the New York Times called “stunning;” My Brilliant Friend, which James Wood, in The New Yorker, described as “large, captivating, amiably peopled. . a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal;” and two other novels, Troubling Love and The Lost Daughter.