The first time I picked up the Italian writer Elsa Morante’s 1957 novel “Arturo’s Island,” in this new translation by Ann Goldstein, the gifted translator of Elena Ferrante’s novels into English, I put it down after 75 pages. Morante’s vision is so baroque, and her prose so operatic, that after reading her I needed some alone time, with cucumber slices over my eyelids.

“Arturo’s Island” is about a semi-orphaned boy’s coming-of-age on the island of Procida in the Bay of Naples in the years just before World War II. The book’s themes — incest, misogyny, narcissism, homosexuality — slide across the pages like lava.