![]() I’m awed again and again by how you have managed to root the relationship between your writer-narrator, Elena Greco, nicknamed Lenù, and her friend Lila Cerullo so deeply in the gritty uniqueness of Naples and the particulars of Italian history, politics, and society, while also carrying us along in a drama that feels so universal, so relatable. Your Neapolitan novels are a forceful saga of 20th-century women forging their way out of the world of their working-class mothers and finding their own place in a new world. ![]() Maybe we’re protective of you-the outcry over Gatti’s revelations certainly cast you into a new role, the role of victim-but truth be told, you’re also kind of a tease.Īnd you have pulled off something remarkable. ![]() But rereading your novels and revisiting your collected interviews, I think that even though you insist on staying invisible, you’ve also been inviting us to keep probing. But what about you, Elena? What about the disembodied author behind those texts, the author I feel I know so well, yet know so little about? Yes, you chose absence. Though I’m a bit reluctant to see specific faces and bodies put on the characters I feel I know so well, I’m eager to watch the series. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking again about your work at this moment, as the television adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan novels, arrives on HBO and RAI, the Italian state broadcaster. “My identity, my sex,” you wrote me-by now, your familiar sphinxlike refrain-“can be found in my writing.” But you refused to put the mystery to rest. You told me in our interview that Starnone was right to be fed up with constantly denying he was Elena Ferrante, and that you felt guilty for causing the intrusion. Actually, you didn’t remain completely mum on the Starnone question. That notion-if you were a faceless but highly successful woman, then you must be a man-seemed to say as much about Italy’s sexist culture as it did about your work. Of course your devoted readers were outraged at the mere suggestion that a man might be behind your work. He happens to be Raja’s husband, and one of Italy’s most important living novelists-to my mind, one of its best-as well as a prolific screenwriter for Italian film and television, and a longtime newspaper columnist who was once a culture editor for the Communist daily Il Manifesto. Various Italian literary sleuths (and scholars using computer programs to analyze prose styles) had for years proposed that Domenico Starnone might be writing your books. You hadn’t deigned to weigh in on earlier rounds of speculation about your identity, speculation that had prompted different accusations of sexism. Your refusal to show your face seemed a bold act, and even bolder when your Neapolitan novels made you a bona fide global superstar.Įven then, I wasn’t entirely surprised that you didn’t say a word. Gatti’s story landed a month before Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, when the righteous anger of women was very much in the air, and some Anglophone readers saw the attempted unmasking as a violation a few even compared it to an act of sexual violence. When his story ran concurrently in The New York Review of Books and outlets in France, Italy, and Germany, readers fiercely defended your right to remain faceless. In his sleuthing, Gatti had rifled through financial and real-estate records, and discovered that Raja had struck it rich just when your Neapolitan novels were becoming international best sellers. You kept your strategic silence even after the bombshell in the fall of 2016, when the Italian investigative journalist Claudio Gatti posited that the person writing under your pseudonym was Anita Raja, a retired librarian and freelance literary translator for your Rome-based publisher. With those books, you published more than 1,600 pages in three years, from 2011 to 2014. Your refusal to show your face seemed a bold act as social media exploded, and an even bolder one when your four Neapolitan novels, which trace the lives of two girls born in poverty in postwar Naples, made you a bona fide global superstar. When you reemerged in 20 with two more slim, raw novels featuring female protagonists navigating difficult and painful moments in their lives, The Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter, you stuck to your vow. You published nothing for a decade after the glowing reviews of your debut. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |