In one of my early care packages, my friend Paula sent me all four of “the Neapolitan novels” by Elena Ferrante. The thousands of pages and sprawling story of a friendship between two women was both a wonderful goal and literary experience during chemotherapy.
I also became caught up in the big question: Who is Elena Ferrante? The author behind the pseudonym managed to keep her identity secret for decades, but in a recent article in the New York Review of Books, her identity has been revealed.
It wasn’t that hard to find her– anyone who has sold 3.5 million books worldwide is likely to leave a royalty trail, and her purchase of two large apartments in an expensive area of Rome led the reporter right to her. But that’s not at all interesting.
Since the “outing,” all media everywhere have jumped on the question of whether she was owed her privacy– lots of outrage has been expressed by those who would no doubt have broken the story if they could.
For me, the question of “who is she” has actually been about an assessment of her accomplishment as a writer. Because the question has been: How can someone so fully inhabit a character, a fictional character, who tells her story in the first person (suggesting for most readers a close relationship between author and character, fair or not) so compellingly? Is she a great fiction writer, or is this a 21st century project that like so many others blurs the line between truth and fiction?
The answer seems to be that she is truly an extraordinary fiction writer. Whatever parallels — familiarity with small publishing houses and 1970s-80s feminist writers, connection to a college in Pisa which her daughter, not she herself, attended, knowledge of Naples through her husband– she made up this world and these stories.
Knowing the author also helps us track and understand her influences. What I find actually interesting in the article is the connection between Anita Raja (Elena Ferrante) and Christa Wolf, whose work she translated from German into Italian. Christa Wolf was the first person to shape for me the loose links between memory and memoir, between writing and recall of a life and shaping a narrative. I carried around her book Patterns of Childhood for years. (Ironically, this book has been renamed.) In it she tries to reclaim and tell the story of her childhood in Hitler’s Germany, in a town that by her adolescence was part of Poland. Raja herself was born in Worms, Germany, where her family of Polish Jews had emigrated. Surely this information offers possibilities for more in-depth analysis of her Quartet.
But maybe most interesting of all, it allows us to explore this fictional accomplishment– not just the four novels, but also the writing she has done “around” the issue of her own identity and the identity of her characters. My desire to go further into this character, if not the author, led me to order the book The Lost Daughter, which seems to be alluded to in the final book of the Quartet, and which gives a different account of a similar story to the one told there, although the narrator is now an outsider observing a large Neapolitan family on a beach.
Maybe this earlier book is the autobiographical source, a story that she then took to its logical conclusion– through her imagination– in the Quartet. Maybe they are both invented.
There is another volume referred to in the New York Review of Books piece, though, the Frantumaglia, which the reporter translates as “a jumble of fragments.” It is, now that we know the identity of Elena Ferrante, an even more impressive compilation of fictional pieces, this time posing as clues to her identity, the “daughter of a Neapolitan seamstress.” You want to know more about who wrote those books?
I will invent an author for you.
I for one like knowing the secret. I think it adds depth to the overall project. The past decade has been one story after another of authors masquerading behind memoirs and autobiographies that are exposed as fictions. Here we have the crazy reverse– an author who insisted her fiction was fiction and we couldn’t quite believe it. We wanted memoir and autobiography instead. We wanted it to be true. Even though no traces of it– not of Lina and her shoes, not of Elena and her radical novels, not of the Solara brothers and their specific brutality (though it is not hard to find brutality, or radical novels, or beautiful Italian women in shops). Perhaps the only echo, slight and itself a romantic fantasy, is in the nickname Ms. Raja calls her husband, that of the romantic “hero” of the books, Nino.
(For more fun, Google “fan casting Elena Ferrante,” for a look at some delicious possibilities for Nino when the inevitable films are cast!)