It's one of the hardest things to translate anything that's not standard.

I always hesitate to say that something is lifelike.

The Neapolitan novels have a lot of references to things outside, to things of the world, to culture, politics, the city of Naples. People have mentioned that Naples is like a character in the novels.

I have very strict rules in my head that seem to me to be the way things should sound.

Primo Levi's - I mean, he's a very different kind of writer. He's a much more formal writer. He's a much more -almost detached. I mean, I wouldn't really say that he's detached ultimately. But he does write as a scientist, and so he describes things very - in great detail, very carefully.

I think that being an editor, someone who works with words, is very good training for being a translator because it trains you to be attentive to words in a very specific, very concrete, very literal way.

It's really the story of a young woman, or two women, growing up in Naples in a poor neighborhood. The way that they get out of it - or don't get out of it - that's part of it. But it's also the story of the mid-20th century in Italy so it's really like a social, historical and personal novel. I think that even though I didn't live in Italy in those years, it did cover that same type of generational upbringing that someone like me might've had in America.