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.

Morante delivers epic emotions. Her people don’t talk so much as they exclaim “with a contemptuous sneer” or “a loud, haughty cry of derision.” They tremble with violent disgusts and savage attitudes. They strike poses of fear, loathing and, in the words of one character, “aggressive, insolent vehemence.” They rattle the cutlery and they rattle each other.

“Arturo’s Island” kept calling out to me, however. It had set its brutal hooks. Before I picked it up again, I found Lily Tuck’s slim and sophisticated biography of Morante, “Woman of Rome” (2008). Reading it is an experience I recommend. Morante led a striding, unconventional life; a life that helps put the soaring cadenzas of feeling in her novels in context.