Elena Ferrante, Author of Naples Novels, Stays Mysterious
By RACHEL DONADIO
DEC. 9, 2014
In her most extensive interview in years, Ms. Ferrante, who publishes under a pseudonym and has never revealed her identity, addressed her choice of anonymity — or “absence,” as she called it. In an interview conducted by email and through her publisher, she disputed the oft-circulated notion that she might be a man. “My identity, my sex, are found in my writing,” Ms. Ferrante wrote in Italian in response to written questions conveyed by her longtime Italian publisher, Sandra Ozzola Ferri, who said the writer had declined to grant an in-person interview.
As to rumors regularly recycled in the Italian press that she is the Italian novelist Domenico Starnone, Ms. Ferrante said she felt guilty. “I have great esteem for him,” she wrote, “and I am certain that he understands my motivations.” (Mr. Starnone, who has said he is tired of answering questions about this “groundless hypothesis,” said in an interview that he hoped Ms. Ferrante’s answer here would “close the issue definitively.”)
Ms. Ferrante also discussed her aims and challenges as a writer, the influence of the classical world and of motherhood on her work, and her views on contemporary Italy — “an extraordinary country that has been made completely ordinary by the permanent confusion between legality and illegality, between the common good and private interest” — and on her native Naples, “the best and worst of Italy and the world.”
The few things known about the author who signs her work Elena Ferrante come from what she has revealed in written interviews. She says she was born in Naples, studied classics, admires the novelist Elsa Morante and has a day job, which she has said “is not writing.” “I discovered as a girl that I liked telling stories,” she said in her interview with The New York Times, adding that she started writing at age 13 and made it a habit in her 20s.
Traditional in structure and sometimes veering into potboiler territory, the Naples novels follow the friendship of two women, Elena and Lila, from their impoverished childhoods in postwar Naples well into the women’s 60s. Elena escapes the city, attends college and becomes a writer, while Lila, whom Elena has always envied for her access to true feelings, stays behind and works at menial jobs, though she never loses her intellectual brilliance.
Published in Italian by Edizioni E/O and in English by its sister house, Europa Editions, the series begins with “My Brilliant Friend” (2010, English translation 2012) and continues with “The Story of a New Name” (2012, English translation 2013), and the third volume, which has just been released. The fourth and final volume in the almost 1,700-page series appeared in Italian in November and is to be released in English next November, translated, like all her novels, by Ann Goldstein.
“Her terrifying truthfulness, the pleasing stringency of her storytelling” contribute to her popularity, said James Wood, a literary critic for The New Yorker, whose glowing review of “My Brilliant Friend” in January 2013 helped put Ms. Ferrante on the international literary map. He added: “We’re in a period of profound misogynist backlash, and Ferrante’s work, though never fitting easily into available ideological modes, certainly offers a powerful feminist vision.”
In her interview, Ms. Ferrante revealed the mix of fragility and ferocity that is a hallmark of her work. She said that it was only after overcoming the challenge of writing “The Lost Daughter” (2006), which she called her “most daring, most risk-taking” novel, that she could tackle the Naples series, in which Elena and Lila are the characters closest to her heart.
FICCIONES
ROME — The Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s
gripping novels about the rich and complex lives of women — as mothers,
daughters, wives, writers — have won her a devoted cult following. After several
years of growing critical favor,
her readership reached new levels this fall with the release of “Those Who
Leave and Those Who Stay,” the third volume in her series of Naples novels,
which recount the lifelong friendship of two women.
In her most extensive interview in years, Ms. Ferrante, who publishes under a pseudonym and has never revealed her identity, addressed her choice of anonymity — or “absence,” as she called it. In an interview conducted by email and through her publisher, she disputed the oft-circulated notion that she might be a man. “My identity, my sex, are found in my writing,” Ms. Ferrante wrote in Italian in response to written questions conveyed by her longtime Italian publisher, Sandra Ozzola Ferri, who said the writer had declined to grant an in-person interview.
As to rumors regularly recycled in the Italian press that she is the Italian novelist Domenico Starnone, Ms. Ferrante said she felt guilty. “I have great esteem for him,” she wrote, “and I am certain that he understands my motivations.” (Mr. Starnone, who has said he is tired of answering questions about this “groundless hypothesis,” said in an interview that he hoped Ms. Ferrante’s answer here would “close the issue definitively.”)
Ms. Ferrante also discussed her aims and challenges as a writer, the influence of the classical world and of motherhood on her work, and her views on contemporary Italy — “an extraordinary country that has been made completely ordinary by the permanent confusion between legality and illegality, between the common good and private interest” — and on her native Naples, “the best and worst of Italy and the world.”
The few things known about the author who signs her work Elena Ferrante come from what she has revealed in written interviews. She says she was born in Naples, studied classics, admires the novelist Elsa Morante and has a day job, which she has said “is not writing.” “I discovered as a girl that I liked telling stories,” she said in her interview with The New York Times, adding that she started writing at age 13 and made it a habit in her 20s.
Traditional in structure and sometimes veering into potboiler territory, the Naples novels follow the friendship of two women, Elena and Lila, from their impoverished childhoods in postwar Naples well into the women’s 60s. Elena escapes the city, attends college and becomes a writer, while Lila, whom Elena has always envied for her access to true feelings, stays behind and works at menial jobs, though she never loses her intellectual brilliance.
Published in Italian by Edizioni E/O and in English by its sister house, Europa Editions, the series begins with “My Brilliant Friend” (2010, English translation 2012) and continues with “The Story of a New Name” (2012, English translation 2013), and the third volume, which has just been released. The fourth and final volume in the almost 1,700-page series appeared in Italian in November and is to be released in English next November, translated, like all her novels, by Ann Goldstein.
“Her terrifying truthfulness, the pleasing stringency of her storytelling” contribute to her popularity, said James Wood, a literary critic for The New Yorker, whose glowing review of “My Brilliant Friend” in January 2013 helped put Ms. Ferrante on the international literary map. He added: “We’re in a period of profound misogynist backlash, and Ferrante’s work, though never fitting easily into available ideological modes, certainly offers a powerful feminist vision.”
In her interview, Ms. Ferrante revealed the mix of fragility and ferocity that is a hallmark of her work. She said that it was only after overcoming the challenge of writing “The Lost Daughter” (2006), which she called her “most daring, most risk-taking” novel, that she could tackle the Naples series, in which Elena and Lila are the characters closest to her heart.
“All my books derive their truth from my
experience,” she wrote, but Elena and Lila, “are the ones that best capture
me.” Not in their personalities and in the plot, but “in the movement that
characterizes their relationship, in the self-discipline of the one that is
continuously and brusquely shattered when it runs up against the disorderly
inspiration of the other.”
Ms. Ferrante said she began the series six
years ago. “I thought I could manage in 100, 150 pages,” she said, but the
writing “unearthed memories of people and places from my childhood — stories,
experiences, fantasies — so much so that the story went on for many years.” The
book was conceived as a whole and divided into four parts after she realized
the material wouldn’t fit in one book, she said.
Her books have done well in Italy — “My
Brilliant Friend” has sold a formidable 100,000 copies there, and the second
and third volumes have each sold 60,000, Edizioni E/O said — and has generally
received favorable reviews, but her growing reputation abroad has also raised
eyebrows in Italy’s hothouse literary culture.
This fall, the Turin daily La Stampa compared the Naples novels to an
Italian soap opera. “I don’t think the Italian literary world has taken
Ferrante very seriously,” said Goffredo Fofi, the editor of Lo Straniero, an
Italian monthly. He said critics had been most attentive to “My Brilliant
Friend” and her first novel, “Troubling Love” (1991), both set in chaotic
Naples, but that her other novels, which were more interior, were less well
received. (The state broadcaster RAI is developing the Naples books for a
television series.)
In all her books, the complexities and
anxieties of being a mother are central themes. “Sometimes I think I haven’t
written about anything else,” she said, calling motherhood “both thrilling and
threatening.”
“It’s an experience close to awe, that
ancient feeling that mortals had when they found themselves facing a god, the
same feeling that Mary must have felt, immersed in her reading, when the angel
appeared,” she said.
As to how E/O had come to publish Ms.
Ferrante’s work, Ms. Ozzola, who founded the publishing house with her husband,
Sandro Ferri, said only that “Troubling Love” had reached her “via a friend.”
It tells the story of woman who goes back to Naples to figure out what happened
to her mother before she drowned. “I was immediately struck by it, by the
violence and carnality of the book,” Ms. Ozzola said. “The way she handled the
sexuality of the mother really struck me.”
The book gained more traction after it was
made into a 1995 film by Mario Martone. But the Italian press also seized on
Ms. Ferrante’s anonymity, which she said disturbed her so much that she
retreated. “I didn’t publish anything for 10 years, at which point, after much
anxiety, I decided to release ‘The Days of Abandonment,’ ” she said of her 2002
novel about a woman whose husband leaves her. It appeared in English in 2005.
Ms. Ferrante has always said she wants
readers to focus on her work, not on her. “I didn’t choose anonymity. The books
are signed,” she wrote. “Instead, I chose absence. More than 20 years ago, I
felt the burden of exposing myself in public, I wanted to detach myself from
the finished story; I wanted the books to assert themselves without my
patronage.”
Ms. Ozzola refuted the idea that in
image-obsessed Italy, Ms. Ferrante’s anonymity was a clever public relations
move. “Not to have an author means she doesn’t go on TV, doesn’t go to
festivals, doesn’t collect prizes, so you can’t enter her in them,” Ms. Ozzola
said. “What kind of marketing strategy is that?”
Ms. Ferrante was asked what she hoped
readers would take away from her work. Her answer revealed the sense of what is
at stake in her books: “Even if we’re continually tempted to lower our guard —
for love or weariness, for sympathy or kindness — we women shouldn’t do it. We
can lose from one moment to the next everything that we’ve achieved.”
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