Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels

Halfway through volume two (of three, although wiki is saying a fourth volume will be available in Italian by next year!!) and they are great.

Really a lot of praise seems to have been heaped upon vol.1 (My Brilliant Friend), but have there been any articles talking about what an achievement this appears to be? Maybe everyone is so busy w/Knausgaard or something..

I am curious but have never gotten around to read her. Still haven't gotten to Knausgaard either.

But am here to say: Good luck and Godspeed, you single author non-rolling thread!

- ok so now I started with this, compared to Knausgaard and in terms of writing this is purely conventional. The first chapter gives 'the ending', so I expect when this does end at whatever volume it will have that circular structure.
- Similarly I've been spending time w/Doris Lessing so the various pains and resentments and costs that come w/women having children -- because of what it doesn't allow women to pursue if they want to explore whatever there is to life (and the cost of the flipside of that -- to choose not to have them -- seems to be talked about not only in this trilogy but also in her other, smaller, works, only one of which I've read, but its a clear preoccupation).
- Love that almost nothing is known about Ferrante (if -- a big IF -- she is a man as it has been claimed then forget Knausgaard or anybody in the history of literature because no man can surely write with this level of sensitivity about women; maybe they could, but I'll stop from speculating as to what the requirements for that might be) because you wonder how much she knows from experience of her circle or what. The stuff on the working class -- this whole series is about the lives of two girls who start of as best friends, one of whom seems to escape her fate by education, another who is smarter but cannot make it as she is in the process of being ground down -- the creative and destructive energies in Lila, the resentment provoked by education or lack of...I mean, a lot of that has been dramatized in yer kitchen sink dramas, but I can't remember the last time I've seen it so skillfully interwoven. I think its also too humble to be all epic like despite it having soap operatic elements.
- So an example of that skill for me -- and why I choose to get this into a thread -- is the level of quarreling in this family. Its a sheer hell, but very sober, its what they do and how they work through their day-to-day problems, but it doesn't allow Lila the time to think and escape, or explore her creative energies. At first I thought this is too much repetition, but actually on the bus on the way home just now I thought actually we need to feel some of that pain.
- but then escape to what? Elena (also the name of the narrator) seems to be working her way to becoming an academic, and I don't need to go on about what a fantastic thing that is...they are 17 or so at the moment so there is a while to go for that.

xp

Bought a copy of Days of Abandonment when I thought I was going to read all the Europa Editions, but never got round. If you are going to the trouble to start a thread maybe I will download an esample of My Brilliant Friend, which ebook is actually pretty cheap since it is the first in the series.

Ppl I know who are reading brill friend love it. My analysis of it thus far is that it's such a stupid title

Agreed. But maybe something got lost in the translation? *ducks*

i read these recently but they didnt really leave me with much except a bad mood and feeling of not really measuring up

i read them around the same time i read 'native son' and so theyre linked in my memory they share this claustrophobic dissatisfaction that seemed total - 'my brilliant friend' just chokes everything else slowly

Really well put Lamp - just feel this is a *positive* in my book. Very hard to create that totality.

Not sure I'll read the third volume just yet. Might want to read this with the 4th volume.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/31/elena-ferrante-literary-sensation-nobody-knows

(I have vol 3 on order from my library, can't wait)

re: that link. All I can say is: ILB ahead of the curve again.

So I liked this piece although I don't know about that Kafka comparison. Almost any novel with multiple four-dimensional expressions of self-disgust goes back to Kafka.

I wonder how it compares to those old De Beauvoir novels. I read a couple a long, long time ago and they didn't register with me. Probably because it wasn't the right age to be reading them, although my impression was that the voice was fairly pedestrian, but I'll need to read them.

Couple of other things: I love how certain figures in Italian cultural history make an appearance in this. I mean it could be some of the 'weaker' scenes the piece talks about, like the talk w/Pasolini Lila and Nino try to go to. Sorta roughly thrown in but its so amusing to see.

I think its perfectly reasonable to think that Lila could've been a pop star. She is v punkoid. She (as conceived by Elena) is a hurricane of creative energy. She disrupts, says no, rebels, never forgets, you can physically beat her (although if you aren't careful she could knife you) but she'll pick herself up and try again. I don't believe this trilogy is 'an evolution' in her work. I have read a few of Ferrante's other books and the voice and authority and themes were fully formed (I can believe she probably was in her late 30s early 40s or older when she started writing) from pretty much day one. But in this series she is finding another framework, and it really is in the creation of Lila that she is finding that something extra and why these novels may endure.

Guardian article was quite convincing.

So far, I've liked all quotes from and descriptions of her novels. Where should we of slender means start, keeping in mind it might be just the one book for a while?

I just paid $2.99 for the ebook of the first one, My Brilliant Friend. Read about 1/6, so far so good. Reminding me, in its cool, hardheaded appraising intelligence of Enfance, by Nathalie Sarraute.

Seem to also recall enjoying another one of those Europa Editions featuring the same translator, but can't remember exactly which.

This one: http://www.europaeditions.com/book.php?Id=36

Also, her page over there says:
http://www.europaeditions.com/author.php?Id=17

She received a PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award and was a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome. She is currently editing the complete works of Primo Levi, for which she received a Guggenheim Translation fellowship.

Reached Adolescence last night. Loved the part about studying for the Latin test,to pick only one thing.

If I find paper copy of Days of Abandonment I can mail it to you, don.

Thanks! But I think I should start w My Brilliant Friend, based on descriptions. 'Bout to order it

...thus continuing under the banner with a soup-stained device: "One book by everybody."

lol.

About 2/3 of the way through that one now.

After I'm done with this, wondering if I should start on the second one or finally get around to Knausgård.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/21/women-on-the-verge

Above placed here for future reference, skimmed the beginning very briefly.

Wow. Didn't see it coming. On to the next one, I guess.

99p on kindle at the moment.

Friend of mine is on the third one. Says she wants to go to Naples to eat, same as Camilleri made her want to go to Sicily. Me, I still have to make some headway into the second one.

NYRB also gets busy on it.

The fourth book in the Naples series has just appeared in Italian and is scheduled to be published in English in November 2015

Wow, not going to read until I finish because spoilers.

Finished the third book last night. Now to wait a year to read the last of these. Roll on Nov '15.

About 1/2 way through My Brilliant Friend, to where they (especially Lila) dance the new thing, the rock and roll, and there's a huge confrontation among the guys and all the girls defer bloody denouement by bursting into tears---even Lila does this, and even the narrator has ever seen her do this, so maybe even more huge. Love this:
I think its perfectly reasonable to think that Lila could've been a pop star. She is v punkoid. She (as conceived by Elena) is a hurricane of creative energy. She disrupts, says no, rebels, never forgets, you can physically beat her (although if you aren't careful she could knife you) but she'll pick herself up and try again. I don't believe this trilogy is 'an evolution' in her work. I have read a few of Ferrante's other books and the voice and authority and themes were fully formed (I can believe she probably was in her late 30s early 40s or older when she started writing) from pretty much day one. But in this series she is finding another framework, and it really is in the creation of Lila that she is finding that something extra and why these novels may endure.

― xyzzzz__, Saturday, November 1, 2014 6:18 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Also, re "something extra," note the tough probing realism also leads to Lila's mention of her panicky visions of people places things (esp. the first) losing their borders, and her impressions of the street while flying out of the window via her father, and the narrator's own description of the waves, when first seeing the sea (via her own father, the one day they ever spent together, and free of their neighborhood selves' emotional stew).

"even the narrator has NEVER seen her do this," of course.

and the narrator's own description of the waves, when first seeing the sea

Yes I loved that scene. The NYRB review mentions it too.

Making my way through Elsa Morante's Arturo's Island. Its a similarly brutal book. Can see what Ferrante took from her.

Mentions her in the Q&A - which is great.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7f1c9ed4-4269-11e4-9818-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3NEM0bdQA

Struck by neither girl knowing about 30s-40s Italian history 'til Pasquale denounces Don Achille, and then is made to explain his terms---the girls are 12 then, I think, which would be 1956. Their official schooling includes Greek and Latin, and some ancient history, but nothing at all recent, it seems. (There are just a couple of hazy references in passing, to somebody older having been killed in an air raid, a kid who touched an unexploded bomb...) I was reminded of this when reading last weekend's WSJ book reviews, incl. quotes from The Third Tower, about visiting Fascist Italy, "an aesthete's paradise, " but also "The newspapers appear not to be written by journalists, but by celestial angels...a dying man's vision of heaven." This Never-Never Land leaves behind the shaky Now which the girls' older relatives and neighbors try to live in, as much as possible. A few people have tried to go forward, to expand their businesses, mainly, but mostly it hasn't worked out, so far. Even punky, too-smart-for-her-own-good Lila actually wants to stay in the neighborhood, to make it safer...but once she and the narrator learn to read and express themselves (to themselves, as well as others)in Italian, not just dialect, look out.

There is another passing mention, of a name learned in school, Comandante or Commandante Somebody, who seems to be or to have been in charge of Naples or Italy (not Mussolini, but still with a military title)--again, just kind of a vestige.

i read days of abandonment this spring and it was one of the best things i've ever read. this sounds dumb but it made me feel really strong emotions, just spending a week living every thought shudder and curse of a dejected wife and mother's lonely walks and paranoid screeds. the scene with the dog at the end is a masterpiece of building tension, almost unbearable at times, but i stayed up until like 4 am that night. i remember it as a sweaty, queasy, and unmistakably italian novel. bummed to hear that people aren't feeling this trilogy, but if it is anything like knausgaard then maybe it's nothing like abandonment because that book is the complete opposite of knaus

Think most everybody on this thread enjoys the trilogy, and I'm looking fwd to Days

And everything else by her

sick. you're gonna love days, dow

Even punky, too-smart-for-her-own good Lila actually wants to stay in the neighborhood, to make it safer...but once she and the narrator learn to read and express themselves (to themselves, as well as others) in Italian, not just dialect, look out Code-switch sparks already flying upward in first chapters of The Story of a New Name: even the title might be referring to this in one sense, switching from ref to fateful married-lady name. Lenu tries to say something conciliatory to her boyfriend, but it comes out in that there fancy-ass Italian, more salt in his wounds! While Lila spits the ghetto pepper at just the wrong moment, to just the wrong person----don't want to drop any spoilers--will note that her silence can be a problem too, and Lenu maybe for the first time specifically articulates something at least implied in the first volume: "The photographer had been fortunate. I felt that he had caught the force that Stefano had talked about; it was a force---I seemed to grasp---against which not even Lila could prevail."(Though obv. in some sense she does prevail. since the whole series begins, is provoked by, her 66-year-old punkoid acting out). Also, contemporary politics are just starting to get closer to young adults' POV, via possible or supposedly possible business deals.

Also, the Truth, via dirty dialect, can be too much, too lucid and too lurid to let yourself believe. Ditto even just the plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face truth, in basic Italian or dialect: to the right person at the right moment, "You're just like your father"is an elephant tranquilizer.

I really 'preciate the fact that the author isn't playing any coy shell games re an Unreliable Narrator: right from the beginning of the first book, we know that she is recalling events filtered through decades, generations really, gradually reeling in the years, avoiding tangles with all the mad skills and gifts that she and Lina were born with and to, inextricably---the webs are deep enough, without any tangles. She's also (in case Lila's really finally pushed luck and everything else too far this time) recreating life in words vs. death---incl. "reducing it to words," as she describes Lila's own writing at one point, recreating violent crimes from newspapers, as a way of setting her own, then-currently plausible fears and speculations down in manageable containers. And/or revving herself up for whatever might be required to get Lila out of a jam one more time, or at least wrap her brain around it (figure that's the subject of the final volume, the English title of which will be The Story of The Lost Child, I think).
Also, she drawing on long-ago memorized pages from Lila's own notebooks, plus conversations with their other friends from childhood, whose further entanglements with L. developed while the narrator wasn't present. The differences/attachements between Lila, as the rest of the neighborhood calls her, and Lila, the side of her named that by the narrator alone. get more and more dynamic (aside from the very brought married name). And of course the narrator (who forthrightly acknowledges that her own voice as a writer always has notes of Lila is )named Elena, same as the pen name of the author, who seems to be cultivating, harvesting her own Lila-ness, the truth-bringing outsider, probably far beyond the career of the in-book Elena/Lenu. but we'll see(maybe schoolteaching, b-plus writer Elena Greco gets a creative breakthrough/bust-out best seller from her memoirs and the real Lila shows up again, and the narrator diligently inspects her for "you owe me" vibes)

very *fraught* married name, that is.

Also, speaking of suitable containers, and challenges, can see how wrangling 60s computers, another bit mentioned at the beginning of the series, will prove worthy, at least for a while: looks like Lila's punk spirit will go proto-cyberpunk, even got the grunge city surroundings of 80s per-se cyberpunk (although I can't help remembering "We would say study even when reading a science fiction novel"---zing, ouch! Have mercy, ladies)

The early days of IT consulting bit was amazing and totally unexpected direction for the book to take.

I am just two thirds through 'My Brilliant Friend' and enjoying it. But I'm also finding it ... stark? Moving very slowly, at least, though not unenjoyably so. The dalliances of the courtyard and the adolescent romantic hijinks aren't to me adding to much, and it reminds me often of film more than literature. I've felt (obvious) connections to I Vitelloni, a whole catalog of Spanish bildungsroman, and even, some Bergman and Fassbinder. But I'm also intrigued by the way in which the book is both picaresque and modernist. I'll read the second one, 'though I may need a palate cleanser in between.

i used commas like an amateur

I hate commas! The first book takes them from early childhood to 16, a densely packed passage for anyone anywhere, and maybe especially for a couple of wired, brainy girls pushing through that neighborhood. The second book goes from 16 to 23, and is maybe even slower, but roomier,warmer, and somewhat less (or differently) frenetic. They're growing up absurd, but they're growing up.

The early days of IT consulting bit was amazing and totally unexpected direction for the book to take. Right, and I've recently been reading about what an ironic turnabout the current sexism of Silicon Valley is, since so many of the early programmers were female, and the orginal computers were too: lady calculators, doing their lacy maths, and engineers were the hardy, practical men. (So the original sexism of pre-Silicon Valley, but also a striking transition, in terms of trusting/depending on female smarts in the modern world. The earliest ads for "business machines" I've seen all feature women in elaborate Victorian/Edwardian office attire, smiling like Mona Lisa as they operate very complicated-looking gear;)

People should read Ellen Ullman's novel 'The Bug' for more on that (70s/80s era)

There is the IT element but also the consultancy element but there would be spoilers in talking about this as it doesn't come in till the 3rd volume.

I've felt (obvious) connections to I Vitelloni, a whole catalog of Spanish bildungsroman, and even, some Bergman and Fassbinder.

Which Spanish bildungsroman (one of the finest words in any language huh?) would you be referring to?

I finished watching Fassbinder's adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz recently and I can totally see it (Bergaman too in Cries and Whispers??) The recurring theme of domestic violence, the idea that actually getting away from that particular place (which does not happen in Berlin) is the best thing these people can do.

I don't know who could play Lenu tho'?

So Lenu's memories---used for what seems more and more like autobiographical fiction, novels-within-novels---are filtered through first-person testimony, from her own experience and that of mutual friends, also gossip, and the pages of Lina's notebooks, long-gone but once memorized (all of the above "reduced to words," as she describes the secret side of Cap'n Ahab Lina's lifelong efforts to contain and control chaos), *as well as* the author/narrator's own reading, watching, listening to other voices, other artful and/or entertaining constructions. As anyone's are ("If we write about this," my friends and I agreed when the Big Thing happened in high school, "It'll likely be some more end-of-the-innocence shit." Respect for reflecting and getting past or deep into that, Elena/Lenu).
Of course, she's also got the diet of your basic late-20th Century/early 21rst media chowhound, and that of a media professional, who may sometimes still feel like the scholarship kid from the backstreets, forever catching up.
Would like to see this as a four-season miniseries, though might have to be online, since not sure if will be enough boobs 'n' blood (prob former, suspect not the latter) for HBO/Showtime.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante

she has such a great voice

put a hold on the first of these books at the library then i noticed i was 86 in line wow

just finished days of abandonment and it was quite something. the scene in carrano's apartment is just

have a week in greece in april & I'm saving part 2 of the neapolitans for that.

"the land that feminism forgot" indeed. eek

the relationship with her kids is so well drawn and close to being genuinely disturbing as it increasingly seems like she will abandon them (or worse). thought her final judgement on her husband was especially brutal too

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-22/reviews/those-like-us/

Started as soon as you posted the link and immediate lol:

If Starnone is behind Ferrante’s work, I would like to meet him. No man I know would write so well and not take credit for it.

Re xpost pioneering female IT

Jennifer Ehle retweeted
Andrew Rader ‏@marsrader 7m7 minutes ago

Margaret Hamilton next to Apollo flight computer code she hand typed @MIT to help send humans to the Moon in 1969.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CC0swqEWIAEaYez.jpg

How much of that code she also wrote I dunno, but some killer typing yo

Started Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay a couple days ago, rolling waaay into the first third on the Ferrante Express. Lenu's olfactory sense is working overtime, also she wonders if she gives off the erotic charge she's increasingly getting from so many of her peers in the heat of verbal battle (getting to be more than verbal over on Lina/Lila's turf). Seems really unusual, at least in any contemporary fiction this promoted, to foreground the nuances and trajectory of students and workers, arguing and otherwise struggling toward a common cause, common action, choosing and swept along.
So far more use of small-world coincidence than expected, but it's working.

off to naples in june so saving pt.3 until then. the scene in the factory at the end of pt.2 is just...

Shifting, for now, from the class strife of labor to that of competitive matriarchs with young mothers in play, new feminism (not topically contrived, seems natural), secret vision of the smarter Solare brother ( but with his own matriarch lurking in the shadows, finally glimpsed for a moment), a young husband who's kind of goofy but somewhat sympathetic then again can see how bad he might be up ahead...

Slamming into the finish today, unexpectedly. Guess I'll keep my mouth shut about the details, but amazing how some other characters feel the need to rise toward the absolute self-assertion that Lila exemplifies, in their minds--while she herself seems to want to keep a lid on things, becoming another hard-boiled matriarch of the old neighborhood (or so it seems). Maybe she'll even be the next Signora Solara, in terms of loansharking, anyway (the computer could come in even handier).
But it's also a matter of non-Lila/Lina pressures, even or especially on and in the self-obsessed, in the particular churn of 70s Italy.

Been a couple of weeks since I saw Lessing's Each His Own Wilderness, v in line with Angry Young Men in '59 type stuff (from my v thin knowledge of it) but also much broader range, given her political commitments and her views of relationships between men and women in those pressure cooker circles (if not in general). Nothing too new if you've read The Golden Notebook.

Put it here for the utterly warped and toxic mother-son relationship. Saw it as proto-Ferrante in the way it dealt w/resentment of motherhood, detailing how women sacrifice their intellect and other passions, slowly dying inside if they only focus on bringing up children..

i'm halfway thru #1 and i just wanna ask: are all three about lila and lenu?

y

Also, the forthcoming Vol. 4, most likely. But their worldviews expand and contract in various ways: for instance, in being and having children and parents, and in the way they influence (incl. manipulate) each other, and others, within and beyond the neighborhood.

Paris Review interview now online (and she's started following me on twitter---uh-oh):
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante

Maybe she confused you with tattoo artist?

who?

who's the tattoo artist, I mean

I dunno I looked at your twitter and you had a namesake with that profession.

Your name plus a one ("1") at the end

*starts following Elena Ferrante*

Afraid I don't tweet or twitter. Any updates?

Her account seems to be a lot of re-tweets from other people's praise. Her own tweets are in Italian.

That interview was great, lots to say but I already said it. On twitter :-)

finished my brilliant friend the other day. completely adored it and can't wait to read the next. only caveat would be to suggest to ferrante-virgins: read days of abandonment first. they're both probably equally amazing but days just jumps out at you in a way the trilogy doesn't. it's like a fever dream, while the trilogy so far is actually pretty happy

jesus really? i'm nearing the end of MBF right now and the whole thing seems suffused with dread

my brilliant friend still has that hope springing from the upward trajectory of young life: lenu's academic progress, the cerullo shoe factory. also there's a beautiful, complex friendship at the centre of it. whereas days of abandonment is just 'husband left me and dog is shitting blood while i've locked myself out of the house' and the only glimmer of hope or friendliness is a sad, flaccid neighbour.

can't wait!

https://twitter.com/reynoldsmichael/status/601028422865915905

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1609452860/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1609452860&linkCode=as2&tag=conversatio07-20&linkId=5XDCXBIYPMGBKW5Q

the final part - its nearly here.

Saw that the other night

Automatic thread bump. This book is dropping next week.

— System

have received a copy of vol 4 through cunning means, but have not yet read vol 3, so my smugness is misplaced

you a lol blogger?

i have a well-connected and kindly cousin

Looking forward to part 4, should be out in Danish in spring 2016.

#1 remains my favorite and I'd rank them 1 > 2 > 3 but maybe 4 will wrap everything so nicely as to trump them all...

I've only read 1 and started 2. Feel like I should maybe reread 1 before proceeding further.

^ Yeah, same. I've read a couple chapters of the second. I liked the first, but just priority-wise I'm not sure if I want to keep going.

I mean once you get going on 2 & 3 they're real page turners, the writing is good and the whole milieu is great so def recommend them to anyone

long interview -

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/elena-ferrante-interview-the-story-of-the-lost-child
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/elena-ferrante-interview-the-story-of-the-lost-child-part-two

'the storey of the lost child' is probably the best of the four, searing, i think, its really incredible

have any of you read it? dont want to spoil it but have been dying to examine some of the pieces

Its good to know that you (who didn't like it as much as some of us) found this great.

I have seen this in the shops but haven't got it as I want to finish a couple of things first (funnily enough Mandelstam's Hope Abandoned does examine her friendships with Akhmatova and others too).

Please start talking about it. I just won't look at this for a while.

To wait for the Danish translation or buy the English version... that's a tricky question.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/joanna-biggs/i-was-blind-she-a-falcon

LRB almost never publish a review to coincide with publication..

i liked that review a lot although the parts about 'genre fiction' sent it (and me) off the rails. its one of the few that has mentioned what i think is most powerful and disquieting about reading them, their intense physicality, the way ferrante insists on the mind being bound to the body. i have a vague memory of feminist essay i read as a teenager where the author claimed that the astronaut in his spacesuit was the patriarchal ideal. pristine, white, mechanical, armored, divorced from the messy flesh of being. and i think its interesting to contrast the heaviness of ferrante's characters with the weightlessness of knausgård (to cast around for the closest example at hand). i had such trouble with the earlier parts particularly 'the story of the new name' because its wearying. walking up the last flight of tenement stairs after a long day of work. ferrante links the mental - art, friendship, intellect - to occupation of physical space in a way that seems radical, feminist.

idk theres a lot i liked thinking about here particularly the way that art forces coherence on life, that it attempts to coalesce, define boundaries, delineate identities. how false that can feel, how important truth is.

i lost my copy of brilliant friend somewhere :/

I am not sure I am getting where the shorter older stuff is more 'polished'. Both phases of her writing life present bks that are very fast and addictive as a read. To do with the short chapters and I also think she devised a bunch of characters and placed them in a universe that enabled her to write in this feverish mode for hundreds of pages...this comes back to the literary vs. genre opposition which the LRB peddles and I don't really like that.

That aside I liked the review.

Not read the bk or this artcile but love the headline:

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1604540.ece

Just finished (prob re-read some of) The Story of The Lost Child, and I predict another comeback hit for Elena Greco, which I hope she won't come to hate, as she says of her first comeback, A Friendship. Though she as her character/perhaps truest self yet, ends up on the page like she does (won't spoil, but she's somewhat bummed out/dissatisfied, as has often happened of course), hope she regards this as confessional validation, as much as possible, of her own worth, beyond being the well-scrubbed little girl from the ghetto who made good by following the now quaint rules for moderns, in a mediocre, backstabbing world. But of course, the Devil has the best lines.
Some of this Elena-Lenu x Lina-Lila (who seem to be merged in the voice of pre-Neapoliton Novels Ferrante, judging only by excerpts)may come from the back and forth of Anna the publicist, called Anita in the Neapolitan neighborhood recently visited (lost the link), and her novelist husband, or maybe not. But my experience in English makes translator Ann Goldstein seem invaluable, re the rough elegance and sometimes poetic turns of phrase, though the turns of the whole story must come through in the original as well, I assume---anybody read it in Italian??

I think this was at least *mostly* written by a woman, with husband or other editorial pushback/critiques, as every writer needs.

There's also the sense that, as Ferrante's referred to it in interviews, this is not a quartet, but one story (a multi-volume novel, like her childhood 19th Century heroes tended toward). So Elena Greco stops it at a good place, but it doesn't really seem like The End; she may still be writing, whenever there are new developments---but we'll probably (?) be left to speculate, as she does, and leaves spaces for us to do so in these books (so much detail, but she knows when to leave room for our brains, I think---def leaves a lot to be learned about Italy and everywhere else, no matter how much she says).

seems like this is everywhere lately

One of the big questions for up-from-the-bottom literary careerist Elena Greco is and always has been: how do you creatively represent/tap into your origins---semi-familiar to many, in terms of their undeniable churn, their real-life-whatever-that-is melodrama---without breaking faith, without (over-) exploiting the people you still care about? As a product of the 50s-60s-70s (etc.) American Deep South, I def get some of the problems of this Southern Italian, especially when---well, I don't want to be accused of spoilers (not that most of this turned out like I expected).

Greco's doubts about her own degree of artistic achievement, incl. integrity---oh yeah, and basic (?) talent, esp. compared the self-semi-tutored genius and/or charisma of you know who---are presented as plausible and entertaining.

seems like this is everywhere lately

― hot doug stamper (||||||||), Tuesday, September 22, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Good.

Reading book two - immediate punch in the face, every paragraph feels like it's one word away from exploding violently. The first one set this up so beautifully and here it's just one KO after the other.

On my paperback cover a quote by a critic reads "Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you'll have some idea ..." - I don't get it.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/03/this-best-selling-author-is-still-anonymous.html

Reading this at the mo - for literary tourism its pretty good.

Made me laugh:

(Why is Shakira always on the radio in Southern Italy?)

Nice this quotes Shirley Hazzard - whom I am reading (though its not been a great week for reading anything) - Bay of Noon is another Naples book.

On Austen http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/16/sense-and-sensibility-jane-austen-elena-ferrante-anonymity

Great link, thanks. Pasted yr post on What Are You Reading?

my brilliant friend still has that hope springing from the upward trajectory of young life: lenu's academic progress, the cerullo shoe factory. also there's a beautiful, complex friendship at the centre of it. whereas days of abandonment is just 'husband left me and dog is shitting blood while i've locked myself out of the house' and the only glimmer of hope or friendliness is a sad, flaccid neighbour.

― flopson, Tuesday, 9 June 2015 16:42 (5 months ago) Permalink

can't wait!

― goole, Tuesday, 9 June 2015 17:02 (5 months ago) Permalink

yah p much

Finished book 4 saturday, it's been a great ride, kind of feel - and this sounds maybe a bit over the top but I think it could be true - like a slightly better person now

two thirds of the way through part one, will probably get the next three tomorrow

i don't know how much i can say other than pointing at bits and saying, huh, this is great, huh

it's also very--i mean, for a highbrow lit hit it's also kind of soap-opera functional in a way i can see my mother enjoying (in fact i am probably going to get my mother a copy of the first one, we'll see how that goes)

I think a lot can be said abt these books apart from the writing being outstanding

It's interesting to me that a novel with a relatively conservative form can seem so contemporary and alive - in part because the writing's fresh, in part because the themes it deal with resonate with current ideas on privilege, democracy, sexual roles, the body

great post upthread about the heaviness of bodies in ferrante (juxtaposed knausgaard)

for a highbrow lit hit it's also kind of soap-opera functional in a way i can see my mother enjoying

The covers were criticised as basically being low-brow but they actually say something about this quality of the books.

Reckon my mother would at least like bits of it - but idk perhaps she'd struggle with the setting. Hmm..

I'd be happy if this series apart from being fantastic fiction would also help blurr some dated genre distinctions...

must admit I was surprised by the cover of my American ed of vol. 4, like the Danish covers more:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AHSC_QGQxxw/Vcr1RERK9oI/AAAAAAAADX0/n1TJDbeI-XI/s1600/PicMonkey%2BCollage.jpg

'fantastic fiction' -- lol, there are parts that make me think of sci fi -- but that's another thing

i liked the cover a lot more once i started reading--they started to feel like seeing idk kodachrome images in mad men. idk if ever kodachrome was a thing in mad men. mb the one on the slides.

the xpost twitter account recently dropped the posts and started looping images, incl. quite a variety of covers. Check it out, if you don't mind getting stuck inside a mobile.
The soap opera devices might relate to the 19th Century literary inspirations she's mentioned in all the interviews I've seen, which may have helped upstart female authors get past initially unfavorable and frequently ludicrous reviews, infiltrating the new mass audience, to some extent. George Eliot wasn't above killing off a major character at just the right/most convenient moment, and satisfyingly so, because we can expect good stuff coming. Same with Ferrante; we just barely have time to say, "Hey, wait a minute," and ba-boom, another onslaught of development. And of course, dealing with the daily onslaught, with sensory overload at times, is one of the main themes of this saga, maybe *the* theme, when you come right down to it. Which doesn't seem very 19th Century overall, but prob some early examples?

xp lol didn't mean "fantastic" fiction just meant it's great

i know! but i wanted to remind myself to develop that comparison when i had time

i just finished the first volume and aw man, seriously, that's where this ends? hell of a fucking cliffhanger

is it? i haven't cracked the second one yet but i'm p sure they stay together

cliffhanger is the wrong word but so is revelation: i guess one can work through all the intermediary steps by which the shoe made its way to the foot. i guess what i mean is basically "oh shit moment"

indeed (speaking of Mad Men)

Ending to second may seem a little too soap opera, ending to third volume is "Damn, girl!" (not "You go, girl," at least not from me), ending to four is perfect punchline for the whole story (multi-volume novel, another 19th Cent thing).

man I don't even know if I liked these or not

Finished the third book last night. Now to wait a year to read the last of these. Roll on Nov '15.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, 15 December 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

4th vol ordered from the library last night, so I'll get it just in time for xmas.

In volume four Lina more than once provokes Elena with her claim that Elena's work is neither one thing nor the other: that it neither fairly represents the jankiness of life nor pulls any kind of satisfying novelistic clarity of through-line out of it. This claim is foregrounded and repeated enough that it seems a fair extrapolation that we're meant to look at the novel we're reading in these terms, which is unfortunate, because I found it deeply frustrating. By halfway through the last book I was pretty certain none of the threads we'd been reading about were going to be resolved, ever, which I was right, with the exception of the story of the dolls, which I'd given up going 'but wait, what did happen to the dolls' a thousand pages ago. (I think, too, a little too on-the-nose for Elena to remind us more than once that Tina was the name of her doll, to draw the line for us between the two disappearances, to remind us that she set up Alfonso's queerness so many pages ago, too ... )

I don't know where I'm going with that complaint. Or rather I guess I think it's kind of ... I don't think whatever point is being made about art and life is so necessary as to make it worth denying the reader the consolations of narrative neatness which are so much in play for the first 600 pages or so; I think it's cheating too to have this freight at the same time as letting the book be driven so much by convenient it's-a-small-world-after-all re-appearances. One thing I do think is kind of a major narrative failing is that Lila's success with computers is so half-assed, that Elena just tells us 'I don't really understand how that happened': why is the thing that eventually affords her some kind of escape given so much less space than 'The Blue Fairy', than the Cerullo shoe factory, than the Solara store? but then maybe no one else wanted to read about the transition from punch-cards to BASIC in European industrial and home computing.

It was definitely a page turner for me because it had great narrative drive, but otoh I don't think the novel was "about" the narrative, at least I didn't really care that much abt loose ends or probability but more abt the characters, the milieus etc. Like, I think the way it depicts friendship, class, Italy and bodies makes it a great work - so if it's soapy in places and maybe a bit unresolved, oh well.

One thing I do think is kind of a major narrative failing is that Lila's success with computers is so half-assed, that Elena just tells us 'I don't really understand how that happened': why is the thing that eventually affords her some kind of escape given so much less space than 'The Blue Fairy', than the Cerullo shoe factory, than the Solara store?

iirc the shoe factory and shop are tied together to a number of relationships and specific places. Also yes "some kind of escape", its never complete.

When she takes up computing she sorta falls into it with the one person she escapes that place with. All felt 'new': the displacement from the town (where she would've never left in a prev generation) to a place and industry she could get into w/out a specific degree (unlike the narrator who uses education to escape; Ferrante shows other get-out routes opening up) and prosper, but I suppose the lack of that kind of BASIC detail does tie in with other, rough-ish aspects of this series.

Its just whether you look at this as merely rough or a flaw that can't be waived.

just setting myself up to disagree with the above in a couple of weeks.

i notice that i'm doing a kind of ferrante-ish sentence structure in the bit you quote, so obviously she's still inside of my head somewhat

i should also note that i've been on a bit of a downer the past couple weeks, so maybe that's influencing my feelings about the book -- that i was starting to query whether the book being a chore was getting in the way of my ability to focus on it (or anything else), or whether my inability to focus on it (or anything else) was rendering it a chore

really don't think complaints about denying us/taking away the pleasures of narrative neatness go with complaints about on-the-nose and it's a small world after all. As for the latter, she's been up front in interviews about 19th Century literary inspirations from early on (note that the little girls' big intellectual etc encounter is w Little Woman, and it's a long time before we get to mentions of any modern authors). Popular books that later became part of the canon were not above devices also used in schlock stage works of the time, or what we associate with soap operas, chick/dick lit etc (so Eliot kills off Casaubon at just the right moment; sucks for him, yay for us). Ditto Shakespeare etc--doesn't always work, but think EF redeems the use (no wrong notes, depending on what's played next)
Don't really want injections of The History of BASIC etc., which would seem like boilerplate, though could say lack shows limitations of first-person narrative, but the point of the latter is we don't really know whether Lina/Lila is " really"all that cracked genius or not (I've had the experience, a couple times, of finally meeting somebody my friends say is awesome, and thinking, "Whut?"). Point is the effect she has on others. Also she's a canary in the coalmine/extreme case re "dissolving boundaries," information overload, social implosions/explosions etc.

really don't think complaints about denying us/taking away the pleasures of narrative neatness go with complaints about on-the-nose and it's a small world after all

bro did you even read my post

In volume four Lina more than once provokes Elena with her claim that Elena's work is neither one thing nor the other: that it neither fairly represents the jankiness of life nor pulls any kind of satisfying novelistic clarity of through-line out of it. This claim is foregrounded and repeated enough that it seems a fair extrapolation that we're meant to look at the novel we're reading in these terms -- like ferrante is definitely rubbing the readers nose in the way she's both doing a bunch of unlikely narrative reconnections while also refusing certain others

Agree with that part, and Elena/Lenu's drive x insecurity about her own work and identity is related, connected to Lina/Lila's, one stays, one goes, the former comes back, because they both have to go round and round with this stuff, with each other, even when confrontation's in their own heads (finally externalized once again, via postal, at end).

personal politics eh

Didn't mean the Eliot etc or any of it as a lecture, just thinking loud x caffeine, sorry

that i was starting to query whether the book being a chore was getting in the way of my ability to focus on it (or anything else), or whether my inability to focus on it (or anything else) was rendering it a chore

this happens to me too

she talked quite a bit in one of those interviews about how it's also really the prose itself that counts, the sentences, the tone, language - having read 1-3 in danish and 4 in english, gotta say her voice comes through very clear in both translations, and I believe this is really a big part of how great it is - as thomp says, it gets under your skin/into your language

and that's one of the greatest thing writing can do

lol *things*

Come to think if it, if I'd read all four books in rapid succession, might have seemed like a chore at some point. Took me maybe 18 months, with gaps incl. waiting for US publication of the fourth.

i'm going to start with part 2. good idea or better start from 1? heart 2 was better..

i think ive posted already itt about how physically wearying i found reading these, although i also found them p worthwhile overall. theyre kind of dogged, almost nagging sometimes.

@thomp i disagree with how literally (or completely?) were supposed to take linas critique of elenas writing, i do think the failure of large parts of the narrative to cohere was successful in its attempt to be 'truthful' to our experience of life? punctuating with a qn mark since im uncertain of how i mean this, precisely

I think it coheres enough. Dealing with the onslaught of information (in media, in the streets, in relationships is one of the main themes, and Lenu's no genius at herding cats, we know that. nostromo, I can't imagine starting with vol. 2. You'd be constantly wtf, even more than otherwise, I mean. Maybe 2 is better for some readers, but 1 seems essential, as the genesis of so many situations in the rest of the story (and has an isolated fascination all its own, funky childhood teenhood neverneverland etc, later maybe more like Brigadoon).

Also agree with lamp re Lina's critique: right or wrong, she's never gonna let Lenu get too comfy. That would be bad for the writing, esp. if Lenu's greatest achievements, the Linacentric ones, of course, come from such tough love.

A guy I work with picked up my copy of volume two out of a lack of anything to do at that moment and read the first six or seven pages. His judgement: "so is this book, like, going to be about the mafia...?"

Another problem I maybe had is that I thought Elena-the-narrator was a total asshole.

I thought she was a pretty complex character

I didn't but I have a high tolerance for arsehole-ism.

Reading through today's interview with the FT

If I were Lina, I'd banish all first-person narrators, including the Unreliables. I often think they're overselling, but somehow Lenu's up-front anxieties don't have that effect on me. As Mary Karr teaches and demonstrates in her own memoirs, you have to lay it out there, but also leave room for the reader to judge, whatever that judgement may be. So, this is presented as such a memoir, confessions of, even, after one operatic collapse, "Today, writing this, I can smile at my younger self"---even better once we know she better smile while she can, cos Lina's not done with her yet." We see how younger self thought this or that was a good idea at the time; we also see some of the effects on her hubbie (Casaubon and yet not, an unexpectedly sympathetic figure in some ways, despite some dangerous tendencies/limitations) and especially her kids. So I don't think Ferrante would mind somebody thinking Greco is an asshole---poster child-to-woman in all the stages of social change, but still something of an asshole, if differently fucked up than Lina---she might even enjoy it (seems like there's a wicked sense of humor behind all this, though a serious one, too, like, "Whaddayagonnado? All I can do is write about it.")

most assholes are pretty complex characters imo

reading part 1. somewhere in the middle. nice enough but i can't see the greatness and can't justify the hype (yet?!)

Hm

I should finally be getting to the last part of this by next week.

Anyway revived because I am reading Peter Stamm and I think he is a pretty good for anyone looking for a similar sensibility crossed with a kind of intensity. I'll think more on this later.

ah, i bought a copy of Brilliant Friend last night.

i haven't read these yet, but i already want to read the fragments book. she's my kinda talker.

https://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-author-is-purely-a-name/

i might look for these books tonight. i have a chance to sneak into Amherst tonight, and i'm almost certain that Amherst Books would have them. it's a great store. within spitting distance of emily's house.

More Ferrante - its cool: https://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-author-is-purely-a-name/

so I should read these novels, right? I almost bought the first last month.

Only if you like what is behind the link.

nobody listens to me when i tell them this but you should read 'Days of Abandonment' first, Alfred. it's wild.

Cool! I'm sick of reading Isherwood and about the CIA.

started the first book. bought them all. i love Amherst Books. such a great store. they had all her books. page-turner so far!

Finishing this soon-ish. Just to go back to this:

One thing I do think is kind of a major narrative failing is that Lila's success with computers is so half-assed, that Elena just tells us 'I don't really understand how that happened': why is the thing that eventually affords her some kind of escape given so much less space than 'The Blue Fairy', than the Cerullo shoe factory, than the Solara store?

There is a scene where the narrator starts comparing her and Lina's daughter as they sit. Lina is showing them the new personal computer. The latter is attentive and the former does not want to know and wants to play as normal. The level of anxiety that was already written about earlier -- is my daughter normal? is she stupid? -- is speeded up in this scene. Its true that the techie stuff is sorta lost, and we really don't know the division of Labour so much. According to Enzo and Elena its Lina this Lina that. She is a sponge that picks up anything and moves on to being better at it than you, which is yet another shade of the 'my perfect cousin' syndrome.

Started the first book too: a hundred pages.

50 pgs from the end - coming to the conclusion that a more pruned and powerfully concentrated book about Lila and the relationship between her and the narrator only - with men, work, children really away/at the background (or as simply talk between the two of them) might have been more: i) more amazing as literature and ii) would have sold 10 copies.

But I think there is a tension (perhaps unresolved) between the above and what we have - the 80s/early 90s just seem forgotten.

or was there a blackout? idk.

Finished this on the train. Then got in the Tube and someone was just starting vol.1 #proudFace

i read so much sci-fi so i'm right at home with the lack of precise descriptions of people, places, and things. which i guess i kinda expect in lit fic. those microscopic proustian evocations of past smells and physical details. hardly any food in this book so far. an ice cream. an image of a woman by the stove cooking pasta. a litany of items found at the grocery store or bakery. but i guess you have to save your strength when you have to detail all those past feelings and moods so minutely.

That sounds like something I might potentially like. I am not big on lots of visual description (maybe because I have aphantasia--hey, there's a new official name for something I've been interested in since high school).

Thirty pages from the end of the first volume!

But visuals where they count most, like a moment during the day Lenu spends out and about with her father, that one day in all their lives. Also the way things look with "boundaries dissolving," while Lina's flying through the air, after her father's thrown her out the window.

No surprise, saga seems suitable:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/10/arts/television/elena-ferrante-novels-destined-for-television-series.html?smid=tw-nytbooks&smtyp=cur&_r=0

started the 2nd book. ready for more.

I'm going to start the second book next week. The first one left little impression on me.

The hookup with her boyfriend's dad was well done

Really liked the first one, just finished the second and it dragged in the middle, I briefly thought it was going to go all chick-lit. Last 1/3 made good on the bleak and traumatic promise of the first 40 pages though. Bookshop owner told me the third one was the most light-hearted of the four - yay? - going to take a break though.

Are you still able to read, ledge? Because ...

Yeah, for a month or so...

It could be a long break.

Why did you think it was going to go all chick-lit and what do you mean with "chick-lit"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_lit - actually i probably meant more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mills_%26_Boon - just during the more floridly romantic passages on the holiday in Ischia, only a couple of pages and I knew it wouldn't last.

Scroll down for something amazing that did not quite happen:
http://www.westsidespirit.com/city-arts-news/20150819/new-and-in-charge-at-symphony-space

just finished the first one. thought it was really magnificent. really put me through the wringer in places: the constant atmosphere of male violence, and the oppression of poverty, the inexorable neighbourhood squabbles and feuds.

wonderful climax, the protagonist coming to a realization of not belonging to her neighbourhood by virtue of her intelligence and education. the very last part about the shoes at the wedding.

i can already tell that shitbag nino sarratore is going to be a shitty boyfriend

and stefano a shitty husband

I should start the second one in the middle of next week. I'm looking forward to participating, for at the moment I don't have anything but "It was OK" to write about the first.

i already like the 2nd book better. the aftermath of the party at the teacher's house - oof! such a huge thing for the narrator and lila just rips it to shreds in the car. ouch!

aha! or not.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/14/books/who-is-elena-ferrante-an-educated-guess-causes-a-stir.html?hpw&rref=books&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

He said he had embarked on his analysis after spending time in the company — or rather the shadow — of Ms. Ferrante last year, when both his novel, “Come Donna Innamorata” (“Like a Woman in Love”) and Ms. Ferrante’s “The Story of the Lost Child” made the five-book shortlist for the Strega Prize, one of Italy’s top literary awards. Both lost to “La Ferocia,” (“Ferocity”) by Nicola Lagioia.

so he was stalking his competition...

Jeff Vandermeer Googles her location:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CdiwRv2WEAAVryK.jpg:large

good post about the novels' covers:

Another way to put this is that the Neapolitan novels, which are about poor women with restricted access to education (and the class mobility that aesthetic taste enables), look like books that might be sold to poor women with restricted access to education. Note that literati readers love to identify with the characters, Lila and Lenu, who are women who use reading to escape their lives. So why are we so unwilling to consider ourselves to be anything like the women who are Lila and Lenu’s real world reading counterparts? Why are we so determined to stand against their reading practices and aesthetic tastes?

http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2016/03/25/this-week-in-ferrante/

nobody listens to me when i tell them this but you should read 'Days of Abandonment' first, Alfred. it's wild.

― flopson, Thursday, January 28, 2016

Took your advice.

very glad to hear it!

I've now heard this thing a few times about the covers -- I guess I don't get it, I feel like the covers are very subdued and look very much the way I expect "tasteful literary fiction" to look.

same

Seems like if Lina-Lila ever really thought she could "escape through reading," gave it up pretty early. When she eventually tunnels into the deep history of Naples, more like material for her secret writing and getting further inside the place and space she's never left, and tried to find a way to control (incl. reading early computer manuals), despite tirades about the basic chaos, and how everything else is a fuckin' lie.
The cover of the first one, with a stately marriage procession proceeding to the edge of a cliff, as good old Vesuvius drowses across across the bay, as usual, turns out to be very appropriate. Covers of the others, with generic greeting card romance, seem like more examples of that xpost Ferrante humor, considering contrast with contents.

I feel like the covers are very subdued and look very much the way I expect "tasteful literary fiction" to look.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Friday, March 25, 2016 6:18 PM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, March 25, 2016 6:23 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

don't know that i agree. got any examples?

i'm not sure what "books that might be sold to poor women with restricted access to education" would look like. personally i imagine some raunch harlequin novels? that's probably classist and sexist of me...

the neapolitan covers look plain in a way that is not quite of this time, they make me think of like, the literary equivalent of old soap operas. but i don't associate that style with the covers of contemporary tasteful literary fiction. i'm bad at describing design but i think the trends in contemp lit fic book covers are like: stencils, rough textures, blurred photos of the sea or forests, the indie comics aesthetic...

http://slimpaley.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/donna-tartt-the-goldfinch-book-cover.jpg?w=870
http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/t/the-flamethrowers/9781439142004_custom-7e81f0840812e7c2097afb8f1ed7955662489442-s300-c85.jpg
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Wood-Best-Books-of-2015-1200x822-1451928637.jpg

don't care about covers tbh

i care about spines

yep!

I agree the cover doesn't look very "designed" the way lit fic from big presses do. I guess I'm saying it reminds me more of something you'd see from a university press. Like, isn't the cover type actually Times New Roman?

The point is, it's definitely not something that would be mistaken for "the kind of book marketed to poor and lower-middle-class women."

i paid almost 80 bucks for all four books so definitely not priced for poor people. i justified it cuz i only buy new books about once a year.

have now finished all four, best thing i've read in don't know how long

wonder what she'll do next

Is this a literary thing or more young-adult?

I loved Days of Abandonment, most especially because it didn't present its heroine as virtuous.

The covers look aspirationally literary. See my mom's bookshelves. My mom isn't a poor woman with restricted access to education, but she was once.

xp- i love how it's a book about a mother but it's not about being a mother; she finds no comfort in the love of her children. the kids are just background noise in the frantic haze, just another constraint in the balancing act, placed there to add to the chaos.

Is this a literary thing or more young-adult?

― calstars, Saturday, April 2, 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well its easy-to-read, but a lot of literature is easy to read.

Not long afterward, the underground war that occasionally erupted into the newspapers and on television - plans for coups, police repression, armed bands, firefights, woundings, killings, bombs and slaughters I was struck again by in the cities large and small.

Eh?

I presume the narrator's referring to the Years of Lead.

I presume she is trying to say "Not long afterward I was struck again by the underground war...", there must be a missing dash after 'slaughters' but even then 'in the cities large and small' is entirely out of place.

ows posted a link of commentary as it relates to Knausgaard, here is the stuff on Ferrante: http://173.254.14.229/2015/06/the-slow-burn-an-introduction/

Just read the first post, which is brilliant, thanks. Right about the resistance to settling on/into one identity, and reminds of EF interviews re finding the freedom of the two main characters (exchanging etc., as the commentator says here)(but also on and off what becomes their own tracks, as they live so long). Judging from excerpts of novels before this quartet, their one or dominant narrative voice was more like Lila/Lina, or maybe even like Lina/Lila and Lenu/Elena G. simultaneously, trapped in the same body---anyway, the two lifelines provide more range, it seems (though I'll have to read those earlier books).

Finished 3, the soap opera is strong with this one. As is the irony, that just as she is on the verge of becoming a feminist crusader, just as she realises what a chauvinist nino is being, just at the exact moment that she goes to give him a piece of her mind... she falls into bed with him. Ferrante sells it though. Certainly rings more true than the end of The Bostonians.

Yeah, for sure, but also, the husband seems like such a foole at first, and he is---but not, as also seems at first, lol Casaubon and he's done, son---no.he actually, maybe starting when he doesn't back down from the student---oops spoiler for others---well he has his own bit of dumb stubborness/luck--->saving grace under pressure=adaptablity---needs a whole lot more of this last, but---well, you'll see in 4. Also: her child-rearing, also her not child-rearing practices...

well this sucks

The allegation about her identity? I agree; it seems like a pointless violation of Ferrante's privacy.

Went through her thrash - very tabloid. NYRB publishing this reflects v badly on them - the excuse this is being published in other newspapers in different languages doesn't scan. Not sure what other line they can take to defend it. The accompanying article on Raja's family I have not read but it begins by stating that "There are no traces of Anita Raja’s personal history in Elena Ferrante’s fiction", which assumes I would be looking for that when reading her books.

EF's been quoted to the effect that she wouldn't stop writing if outed, but she would stop publishing.

YES

i would rather enjoy resenting and blaming whatsisname for the rest of my days until her estate publishes her posthumous books

Reckon she'll burn 'em before dying. Nothing less than what we deserve.

This is kind of awful. I can think of at least one other writer that some of us have read who was unable to write after their cover was blown

And of course in this situation the damage is magnified a hundredfold.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ct5Tte5XgAAIGPl.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tJGk4ofc18

I have seen about a hundred comments and articles deploring this 'outing' in the strongest terms.

I have not seen one comment, anywhere, praising it.

They can't be thinking it was a very good thing to do! Or: who would think this was a good thing to do?

(I have not read EF but do not support the outing)

had to happen sooner or later. if she had sold literary fiction numbers nobody would have cared. but if you sell millions of books and you are a "mystery" people are gonna see that as a challenge. i honestly don't see it making much of a difference. she can still live an anonymous life. nobody is going to recognize her anywhere.

i do love that she lied in interviews about her history!. so sneaky. and fun too.

i also love the east german/christa wolf thing. very interesting. i can't wait to tell my german-speaking translator wife who as part of her college thesis translated multiple stories by east german women writers about this.

I think I'll leave it up to the woman in question whether or not this violation of her privacy will 'make much of a difference'... She chose to be anonymous for a reason, and that reason was shat on by an arrogant asshole for no good reason.

The other thing that really pisses me off, which people talked a bit about after the robbery of Kim Kardashian, was how there's just no way to win for a woman artist. If you choose to be a public figure, well then you've chosen to be a public figure, and you should expect the abuse and harassment that always follows female public figures. If you choose to no be public, then you're a 'mystery', and you should expect people seeing it as a challenge to violate your privacy. There's no winning, the only answer really is to not be a brilliant artist. Leave that to the men, ay?

Fuck that shithead journalist, and all the misogynistic harassment he represents.

"for no good reason."

journalist with a hot story! totally a good reason. if you are a journalist.

it's too tempting for people. why is that so hard to understand?

I just don't think shitting on people is ok because it's 'too tempting'. If I saw that asshole irl I'd be mightily tempted to knock his fucking teeth out, but that wouldn't be an excuse, would it?

Like, men should not be allowed to violate a woman's privacy because it's 'too tempting'. Stop blaming the victim.

This is papparazzi behavior--it's not like there was some angle, like "Did someone from the Clinton campaign write Primary Colors?" or "Is this JT Leroy thing for real?" This is just: "Hey, check it out! Elsa Ferrante is actually this woman you've never heard of."

Don't really see how this is any different from journalists (or fans!) pursuing Salinger or Pynchon - every mystery creates a detective.

Well, that's assholish too. The obvious difference is that neither Salinger nor Pynchon were writing under pseudonyms.

This is pretty good: https://newrepublic.com/article/137400/sexist-big-reveal?utm_content=buffere5fe5&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

The obvious difference is that neither Salinger nor Pynchon were writing under pseudonyms.

The main parallels I keep thinking of are musicians like Burial (who I believe outed himself when tabloids were trying to do it for him). Or Banksy.

this isn't *praise*, but it's not condemnation: http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/10/elena-ferrantes-unmasking-wasnt-the-end-of-the-world.html

idk, i guess i'm mainly surprised that nyrb was a party to it rather than, say, . . . gawker

from that npr thing from last year:

"One published theory claims Ferrante is really Anita Raja, Anita being the diminutive of Anna. Raja is a consultant for Ferrante's Italian publisher. She is also the wife of the Neapolitan writer Domenico Starnone, who himself has been "accused" of being Elena Ferrante."

"And besides, Vicinanza says, it doesn't really matter who Ferrante is anyway."

http://www.npr.org/2015/09/01/436289199/in-new-neapolitan-novel-fans-seek-clues-about-mysterious-authors-past

i think it matters - to the reader - as much as you want it to matter. though there is certainly plenty of grist for the academic mill no matter how you slice it. a woman who wanted to not be present/known/get accolades for herself writing about women who...well, you get the idea.

i'd have to imagine her life was already pretty complicated. doesn't that kind of evasion always create complications? hiding/having secrets takes a lot of energy.

right on time: http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-identity-of-a-famous-person-is-news-1787392847

agree with that piece that nobody has any right to privacy

going to go out on a limb and say that being anonymous is much easier than being internationally famous

doesn't that kind of evasion always create complications? hiding/having secrets takes a lot of energy.

especially now that there aren't any phone booths to change clothes in

I'm completely uninterested in this outing - other than being generally against it - excepting the fact that the author of the neapolitan novels not being working class and from naples will definitely change the way some readers view the books, which I've often seen alluded to/assumed as being autobiographical.

especially if i think like - imagine if there were a critically acclaimed series of books written about working class glasgow in the mid-19th century where the characters are luridly brutal and the pseudonymous author turned out to be a rich person from edinburgh i would probably not be too stoked

20th century blah

I think making up stories that didn't actually happen to you is a pretty cruel thing to do to people who read novels

It's like when that Shakespeare guy pretended that HE was the one that wrote about the nobles and such.

where did the whole "mystery" thing originate anyway? italian newspapers? with her publisher? i would never have known it was even an issue if i hadn't read about it a ton. i mean i just would have read the books and probably never would have questioned her identity. the whole thing of doing computer analysis to figure out who she was - that started in italy, right? they do mention in one of those articles that in italy writers are everywhere and they are on t.v. all the time and that's not really true here. so there must be more pressure there to have some sort of public role.

well, with Eco now gone there aren't too many Italian novelists well known outside of Italy. It must be like having your star soccer player wear a mask all the time.

so many writers have written books with pseudonyms. and don't have their picture taken. and nobody cares. but her popularity and the romantic idea that these books were somehow a re-telling of someone's actual past helped create this thing. which is why you get such strong reactions, i think.

this is all just reminding me that i still have to read 3 & 4.

"It must be like having your star soccer player wear a mask all the time."

yeah, this is true too. italy wants to pat her on the back and she doesn't want to be patted on the back. how dare she? this whole thing is very human and right out of a novel written by a human.

If that deadspin article wasn't talking about ruining peoples lives just for the hell of it, it would be laughable. It can only discuss this in the terms of 'journalistic policy' and what people think in 'the field of journalism'. The self-obsession amongst these dipshits is so immense that it can't for one minute enter their minds, that this might actually have been a question about art and literature, and should be up to fans, critics and academics to figure out. No, this is a journalistic question, so here's how the most important people in the world, the journalists, should think about it. I honestly hope some stupid billionaire sues this piece of shit publication into oblivion as well, the world would be so much better without these assholes running around.

"literary scholars have tried to track her down by analyzing the text and the biographies of various possible Ferrantes. The problem here seems to be that Gatti actually got it RIGHT. Part of the Ferrante phenomenon — a sensation that I don’t think it’s crass to call massively profitable — was driven by the mystery of who the author was. People are naturally curious about the people who make the culture they consume, especially when it’s culture that they feel as strongly about as they do about Ferrante. And especially when the books themselves seem to invite a conflation between narrator and author. Despite her anonymity, Ferrante has given plenty of interviews, especially recently. If the pseudonym allowed us to encounter her work in a specific way initially, the status of the work has changed in the last several years: Enormous success comes with burdens as well as benefits, but it certainly makes her identity more newsworthy than it was when she first started writing under a pseudonym."

NYMag thing says it a lot better than i do...

The Deadspin piece needs to get more precise about what a journalist's obligations are. One moment he's saying that journalists can't be obligated not to expose a public figure, the next that there's a positive obligation to do so. Which is it? and why is this an obligation as opposed to simply a reason, which can be outweighed by other reasons? I'd grant that a journalist has (mainly self-interested) reasons to expose Elena Ferrante, but that doesn't mean that there aren't stronger reasons not to. I also wonder about the implication that journalists have some special set of duties that are different from those of non-journalists. Does he think that it would be wrong for a non-journalist to expose her?

bit eliminationist there frederik

if an anonymous artist, male or female, becomes successful, people want to know their identity. I think the outing was creepy and unnecessary and I reckon most people, despite curiosity about her identity do too. some of the reactions to the outing act as if the entire literary world stood up and applauded spitefully thinking "now we've put her in her place" - like many such things, I didn't see any such reaction, it was all assumed in the name of thinkpiece, I mean apart from a screengrabbed one-line comment or two, as usual considered a convenient stand-in for wider public opinion.

i think that ny mag thing is the last thing i need to read about it. i agree with most of what she says and it's really well-written. and i've got real reading to do now!

Hm, most of what I've seen uses the public uproar against the doxxing exactly as proof that it was unnecessary?

Scott, you're again quoting a journalist telling us what the rest of the world wants, without asking anyone but themselves. There's a massive difference between speculation based on literary analysis, and doxxing someones personal finances.

all the extremely woke takes on this seem rote and sort of stupid abt how the world works, wish ppl had gone for some kind of 'professional anonymity of the kind ferrante enjoys is a symbol of the new opacity of wealth and is thus bad' take instead of this especially as a woman verz.

Writers should be able to be fucking anonymous if they want to. Even if they become successful. Even if they are middle class instead of working class.

writers can be anonymous, and some do, they just have to hide their tracks better

'professional anonymity of the kind ferrante enjoys is a symbol of the new opacity of wealth and is thus bad'

it was her wealth that allowed her to be tracked down though, no?

yes, the wealth she partially earned by being mysterious and anonymous!

So you think being anonymous is part of her job, and yet you think it's okay to wreck her livelihood?

No one will ever buy her books again now that they know she's this person she is

i just thought it was kinda cool that i live with someone who has translated stories by christa wolf. small world! personally, i would never have tried to find out the true identity of elena ferrante. legally or illegally. i didn't really care who she really was. i liked the books i have read so far. that's enough for me. you will find in this world that when you ask someone not to do something they sometimes will do it anyway. that much i know.

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/i-dont-want-to-know-who-elena-ferrante-is-1787411405

Don't really see how this is any different from journalists (or fans!) pursuing Salinger or Pynchon - every mystery creates a detective.

― Foster Twelvetrees (Ward Fowler), Tuesday, 4 October 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If you listen to the journalist you'd think Ferrante was as deceitful as a politician, except she isn't one. Really you'd think the concept of fiction is lost on him. Ferrante has actually been generous, given interviews (brilliant interviews at that) and has asked to be left alone, that she has specific reasons, she wants the space etc.

Many of the reactions from women such as this one come from a place of hurt, from women who generally feel hounded by men and find it tough to find a way in literary circles. Ferrante's fiction (where women are often brutalised and hounded) speaks to that.

OI MEMBA BURIAL WAS SOME BLOKE INNA HOODIE INNIT

all the extremely woke takes on this seem rote and sort of stupid abt how the world works

otm. so much stuff with a tone of "typically she can never get the respect she deserves" when it's like, erm no, she has massive respect. or a lot of stuff mentioning knausgaard (whom i like) as some contrasting figure who is adored, whereas ferrante is suddenly now a figure of ridicule apparently, when it's p clear to see that ferrante has way more literary cred than knausgaard, and comparing the two is just some reaction to their being thrown together due to both being successful simultaneously, rather than any significant similarity.

it actually knocks ferrante down to be defending her in this madly precious manner. like fuck the expose but she isn't part of some mass cause or solidarity movement, her anonymity absolved her from that too.

"OI MEMBA BURIAL WAS SOME BLOKE INNA HOODIE INNIT"

it was one of the guys in Blur. same with Banksy.

Not sure comparing ferrante with professional selfpublicists like kardashian is useful

Kim is actually playing Lila in the Netflix mini-series.

That could well be true for all i know, world is fukt

she will be a vampire though.

is it weird that i struggle to understand why this is a big deal? create a mystery and people will try to figure it out.

I don't know if it's a huge deal, but the NYRB was a baffling read. Long as shit about some James Bond antics just to go against this woman's wish. I think if a name with connection just dropped in the lap of other publications they'd publish it, but to dig through trash like this..

Oh now I remember what it reminds me of, in all its gleefulness.

In October of 1778, when Evelina was entering its second print run, George Huddesford published his satirical poem Warley. In the poem (his first published work, as Evelina was for Burney), Huddesford exposes (Frances) Burney as the author of Evelina in terms which are less than endearing:

Poetasters I hold it a sin to encourage,
Let a pump or a horse pond supply them with porridge.
Will your scurrilous dogg’rel a dinner ensure ye,
Or the fee-simple pay of your Manor of Drury?
Will your metre a Council engage or Attorney,
Or gain approbation from dear little Burney*?

An asterisk next to Burney’s name laconically explained, at the bottom of the page, that she was “The Authoress of Evelina,” destroying, at a stroke, the complex undertakings which Burney had made to protect her identity.

Burney told Susanna this was a “vile poem” and “she couldn’t eat or sleep for a week” because of “vehemence
and vexation” (Harman 129).

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/12/books/review/elena-ferrante-beach-at-night.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=wide-thumb&module=mini-moth®ion=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/books/review-elena-ferrante-frantumaglia.html

Despite his being the author of 'Capital', a rather good short bit by John Lanchester on the Ferrante unmasking: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n20/john-lanchester/short-cuts

"That, in fact, is what anonymity, that idea so tempting to so many writers, has become in contemporary society: a tool for empowering and magnifying misogyny. Tens of thousands of men using anonymity to berate, abuse and threaten women online? A daily reality. We as a culture are fine with it. A woman writer using pseudonymity for creative reasons? Put an end to that right now. Who does she think she is?"

This is a text by Anita Raja, a terrific essay discussing Crista Wolf, Bachmann and Buchner: http://www.asymptotejournal.com/criticism/anita-raja-translation-as-a-practice-of-acceptance/

I see it was taken from a lecture delivered two years ago. I wonder if Raja will make appearances again as a translator..

Sorry last year.

This was an ok rev of her latest book: http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-ferrante-frantumaglia-20161006-snap-story.html

A woman writer using pseudonymity for creative reasons? Put an end to that right now. Who does she think she is?"

who actually said this? i've yet to see a single person defend the outing. yet i've seen hundreds of people say almost exactly what lanchester said, putting these words into imaginary mouths.

the idea that the identity of a similarly feted and pseudonymous male literary phenom would have garnered no attention or journalistic investigation seems speculative, to put it mildly

as does the idea that people are wildly speculating or bitching about a literary critical darling who is barely a concern to the general public. the people who have heard of elena ferrante aren't exactly likely to be knives out misogynists. it's actually worse to propagate sexist tropes which nobody else is propagating in an effort to erect a strawman.

any widespread desire to find out who she is is just the same faintly tedious need to expose the person behind an alias that we've seen with like banksy, or burial, or lol rex the dog.

I'd agree that this is more in line with a number of tabloid hack jobs (plenty of anon blogs as well) except in the context of what Ferrante has said about why she needs to be left alone to create as a woman and what her writing depicts in terms of women being tracked and hounded and brutalised in a masculine Italian culture (which Raja actually dwells upon in her piece). There is definitely something to that charge.

A point which Lanchester doesn't make.

I think the charge will be felt by her fans, many of whom are women who often feel hounded. It doesn't have to be strictly and factually true.

yeah i mean i disagree with the outing, utterly, as i said upthread. i just don't think anyone supports it. maybe within an italian context there's something there but i've not read an italian perspective on it.

No one supports it - but the point is that it has happened! So why did it happen?! Why couldn't the supposedly nice people, thoughtful people at NYRB told this guy to fuck off w/his 'scoop'! That's as much of an issue in the literary culture.

Its an Italian context but its also all over Ferrante's fiction too.

The NYRB are hilarious - there must be thousands of pages of reviews on Feminist theory and novels, sociological type studies detailing how gender inequality manifests itself and operates in both the West and the rest of the world..and then they do this.

The TLS shortly came out with a snarky article saying they would never do it. The TLS is now edited by the former managing director of The Sun. Of course they would've!

Bet the LRB would've done it as well. Its infested by male London literary scene morons who waste pages on any ink that the likes of McEwan and Amis publish.

actually i think none of those three claims are really true: i've been reading the nyrb since the early 80s and there's really been very little in it on feminist theory and the rest of it; contrariwise for the lrb, which is p good on gender (tho yeah, i'm not really a fan of adam mars-jones, who reviewed "like punk never happened" and chris cutler's pre-rewrite "file under popular" and enthused about the wrong one) (in the tls, in the early 1800s) -- and i think the tls, which i read least, has actually done p well to retain its trademark prissiness (stig abel seems to be treating it as the means of his intellectual atonement)

i read the tls the least by some way, so this is the one i'm likeliest to be wrong about

In the last few years there often are articles that will come at or review some kind of work on the gender and its inequalities/where are we at. Not that I've counted. And yes, not feminist theory as such, but here is a recent example:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/hot-sex-young-girls/

The point stands - if they publish this but then don't extend any courtesy to Ferrante - and there has not been any editorial answer to the anger this has provoked either that I've seen - then something is wrong.

I'd say LRB is very much male London Literary scene for most of the time I've been reading, especially in regards to their coverage of fiction. Just as a thing they don't keep an eye on (but given their reviews on gender they probably should) (ironically enough the latest LRB has two fictional works by women reviewed in it)

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n15/adam-mars-jones/the-love-object

Adam Mars-Jones gave this book by the only female member of Oulipo a bad review in the LRB last year. It was actually pretty convincing to me.

who do you mean then re lrb? i mean yes, they do cover every other amis/mcewan probably -- which seems unnecessary -- but which other novelists/reviewers do you have in mind that fall into that category? adam mars-jones isn't in it very often thankfully; lanchester? mainly does the big stunt pieces now (which i never read bcz i don't think he understands economics AT ALL); andrew o'hagan? i tend to like his journalism i have to say (which again is mainly what he's there for)

maybe i just bleep that kind of stuff out (i probably skip more of the fiction articles than not)

i totally agree there's something wrong w/nyrb publishing the ferrante piece, i just don't think they keep up with gender stuff as well as you seemed to imply

haha i think my mars-jones radar just goes "still an idiot hence not representative of a TYPE" (abd ditto amis/mcewan to be honest) -- the settings on my in-built killfiles are too high to allow me to judge the aggregate content properly :)

To me its the lack of any meaningful fiction coverage in the LRB..a lot of unneccesary booker nominated stuff that I just usually groan at (don't have any names rn as my box of 100+ issues are at my parents'). I'll mostly read for the non-fiction. I am observing the absence of it rather than counting what there is of it.

The Brian Dillon piece on Claire-Louise Bennett was terrific (I think it was his favourite book last year), but they don't do much of that in comparison to the McEwan types.

Their only fiction reviewers I like are Jenny Turner and Michael Hoffmann (just because he is so mad and rude when reviewing the male literary types/has no respect; but its often a performance, and it plays a role for the editors of the LRB against the London literary blah charge)

(Point taken on NYRB, I only read the free articles on the web and only buy the odd issue of the LRB these days)

lrb is definitely terrible at reviewing fiction by women, and at getting women to review anything written by men

lanchester? mainly does the big stunt pieces now (which i never read bcz i don't think he understands economics AT ALL)

i really like Lanchester on economics & finance. what don't you think he understands?

Ditto

Wait, Michael Hoffmann the poet and translator?

xyzzzz, the fact that you think the LRB would run an investigative journalism piece exposing Ferrante's identity makes me think you can't ever have read the LRB.

--- 'Its infested by male London literary scene morons who waste pages on any ink that the likes of McEwan and Amis publish.'

As far as I can recall, they have reviewed the last two Amis and McEwan novels and absolutely trashed them. That takes pages, and ink, but it's probably not welcome to Amis or McEwan, and it doesn't suggest intimacy between those writers and the paper. Nor does it suggest that the reviewers are morons.

I agree with what Local Garda said upthread. No one is defending this outing. All are agreed it's bad. The gender element is overemphasised.

Mark S also correct that feminist theory is hardly the major exhibit in the NYRB. Half their articles are about 'can the Dems retake the Senate this Fall???'

Re: Lanchester (from ) here

I started Whoops! but (again)* didn't get very far -- and some of the reasons Capital is bad (as per this superb thread) also apply. JL seemed to spend a lot of time over-carefully explaining fairly simple things I already understood and then nervelessly sweeping past stuff that really needed dwelling or on getting inside. (I have a close friend who used to be a banker who agrees about this; and talking to him about the sector makes me think that Lanchester's dad's connections and understanding may well not actually give as much purchase on the finance&trading world of the early 00s as you'd expect; that banking had in some key way slipped into a new phase, and that this was what needed exploring…)

*In many ways I am the world's most distractable person when it comes to reading, probably because proofing has been my day-job for such a long time.

"AT ALL" upthread was a bit overstated, yes -- but this^^^is my problem w/lanchester

In fact, the last Amis was trashed by michael hofmann
Xp

Hey, found Michael Hofmann's ever-amazing poem "Marvin Gaye" online
http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/marvin-gaye/

along with an interesting blog post about it
http://robmack.blogspot.com/2008/06/14-marvin-gaye-michael-hofmann.html

That poem doesn't seem at all good to me, though the last line has some force.

^vmic

Guess Hofmann views himself primarily as a critic.

As much of a poet/critic/translator.

There has been a lot of interesting fiction - and translations of older fiction - published in the last few years the LRB have not bothered with. Instead they are happily indulging the likes of Amis and McEwan. Yes I know they are bad reviews (I've read the odd one), but why publish at all? That goes for Kundera's last book - its an entertaining review (Hoffmann again) but its such a slight nothing of a book to bother with in the first place. They have no economic considerations to consider so what is this all about?

The NYRB are giving much coverage to the election...given that there is an election on! But there have been one or two pieces discussing the relationship between Hilary and feminism, given the data showing younger women were seemingly casting their votes toward Sanders in the primary season. They constantly provide commentary on women's issues. Its no more or less than class or Wall Street, but the editorial team should be wholly aware of all those issues when that article by this tabloid reporter dropped in and they didn't bat an eyelid. They cover it!

There is a rhetorical aspect to the gender element at play, but given what's happened its fine.

"AT ALL" upthread was a bit overstated, yes -- but this^^^is my problem w/lanchester

― mark s, Wednesday, 19 October 2016 09:20 (nine hours ago) Permalink

so your friend who is a banker confirms your suspicion that he is not good because he explains things you already know..? (lol). also, who is his father? someone important in finance? can't find anything googling

someone on the thread i linked to said they skimmed an interview with JL in which he said his dad was a banker -- that's all the lead i have, it may be nonsense, he may be self-taught

no my friend confirmed that he over-explains the easy stuff and skips past the tricky stuff

basically if someone is not bothering to explore or explain the bits i think need explaining then i stop reading them -- i agree this is not the same as "knowing nothing" but for my purposes it is the same as "not knowing enough", since the bits i need to learn about are the bits not yet being explained properly

i could go back and reread whoops! and report to you exactly what those are but it seems a bit pointless, as you're happy with what you're getting (and seem to be making heavy enough weather of my post)

All good, mate. just thought maybe there was some good dirt on Lanch i didn't know about, and was curious is all. ftr I like him because he is a good elucidator of the simple yet tricky to the uninitiated basics of finance (even though I studied this stuff & should be among the initiated)

All good, mate
Are we talking about Cortázar on this thread too?

re: Lanchester. I probably need Economics explained that way. The problem with the pieces is that it still feels abstract, the need for education in this stuff has never felt greater and Lanchester never feels like its bridging the gap.

I quite like to take economics classes. I know certain branches of Momentum were doing some. Delivery of an understanding of how this stuff works (or when it doesn't and why) sounds like a good battleground. Lanchester is just not in that conversation.

yeah sorry flopson, i was in a foul temper on wed eve and that was leaking out sideways a bit

FYI Ha-Joon Chang's 'Economics - A User's Guide' is a much better primer in that vein than anything by Lanchester.

no my friend confirmed that he over-explains the easy stuff and skips past the tricky stuff

This is OTM.

What would you consider some of the tricky stuff he evades? Most recent Lanch I read was the Bitcoin one and it was great

i have NO idea what you guys are talking about on here now. though you did inadvertently make me go listen to miami bass on youtube the other day:

"I started Whoops! but (again)*..."

Finished. No more will I see the figures I have come to know walking along the stradone and think to myself: "what the hell is a stradone anyway?"

i too am finished and now i'm at a loss. anyone got any good articles about the novels to recommend?

I like Dayna Tortorici's overview of Ferrante's fiction; there's also Ferrante's Paris Review interview.

The second half of the final book feels as long as the rest of them put together. I'm still enjoying it, I've just slowed waaay down after flying through everything else.

How words build up in these incredible inedible edifices, then collapse, and some people start over, some just endure, maybe stash some of the pieces. Also the shuddering implosions and aftershocks of Mid-20th Century, and later, especially in Italy, if only because that's where the characters are born and bred, but also it makes a great example. The narrator Elena/Lenu is maybe afraid of falling into the void within her edifice, her facade, so she's always drawn to, and afraid of Lina/Lila, the magnetic control freak who sees the void in all things, sometimes cynically, sometimes freaking right the fuck out---so much uncertainty---though no doubt the narrator sets herself up for the punchline.

Not saying either of them is right or wrong to feel the way they do (although the narrator also invites our sympathy, and her great frenemy is a badass babe even as a crone). It makes sense, when you know where they're coming from.

Then again, for example, do we have to have an actual literal earthquake in there, even at that point? I mean of course it has consequences and shit, but oh well getting apoilery I guess but who among you are really surprised it's in there, even if you haven't gotten that far. I'll shut up now though.

But Lina/Lila really does try, in her way, to be free, and live life, and deals the only way she can see---kinda cracking my heart some more, thinking about it again without wanting to---damn, girl!

(On AMC by the end of the decade, I bet, and that may be the best way to experience it.)

btw just found a series of podcasts: Radio Ferrante

Might check one or two.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/29/elena-ferrante-writing-again-publisher-says-neopolitan-series-novel

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/18/elena-ferrante-to-become-guardian-weekends-new-columnist

Not sure this is a good idea - Ferrante is someone that (as she says) needs privacy and space ("remove oneself from all forms of social pressure or obligation"). Not sure how turning out pieces on deadline fits into that. Hope I'm wrong.

bought my mom Days of Abandonment for xmas and she loved it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntoN-sDFvZc

I've just started listening to MBF on Audible. Too early to really tell whether it's my thing or not.

I did smile at the scene with the dolls. Give it a go once its out on DVD

Weird! I just started the second book.

Every so often I half bake a theory about how Lena and Lenu are actually the same person, the narrator vocalising different halves of their personality, or Lena writing Lenu as the life she would like to have had, but I don't want to read the books again or go too far down that rabbit hole for fear of ruining these amazing characters for myself.

For real though the second half of the fourth book feels super rushed and would have worked better as a fifth novel in its entirety.

Wondering if the audiobook narrator puts on a comedy italian accent for every mention of the stradone.

why film this

They're popular books, that's why

I've gone back and forth on it, personally, but do I often get 'prestige TV' producers putting big money and talent behind a story about two poor smart girls in Naples growing up dealing with their intellects? No, so I'll take the change of pace even as it'll obviously not represent the book experience

Why not film? Not only is it popular but you can film it. One of her earlier books has already been made into an Italian film.

finished vol 1, sure everyone's already gone over the various ways it's great but she really does such an incredible job of conveying the social logic that underpins the community

xp. def seems like something that could be a prestige cable show

Mildly annoying how the suthor seeks to 'connect' to Ferrante in the interview - that aside its pretty good.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/31/magazine/elena-ferrante-hbo-my-brilliant-friend.html

Having not read the novels (yet): this series is, at times, absolutely mesmerizing en wholly captivating. The four actresses playing both the kids Lena/Lila and teenagers Lena/Lila are so natural and display just the right amount of mystery/ambiguity. They're directed masterfully. Been quite a while since I saw such an engrossing show. Can't wait to dig in the novels.

Her Guardian columns, now being collected in book form, are surprisingly feeble.

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god - new Ferrante novel will be published in Italian on 7 November. I am going to faint. https://t.co/TZvMLiI6Qi

— Barbara H. (@behalla63) September 9, 2019

Publisher tweeted the beginning:

It begins like this. #ElenaFerrante #NewNovel Translated by Ann Goldstein. pic.twitter.com/wHoNW5yBB2

— Europa Editions (@EuropaEditions) September 9, 2019

Europa Editions
@EuropaEditions
·
6h
We don't yet have a title or English publication date.

We now have all of that and more (news):
https://www.elle.com/culture/books/a29609124/elena-ferrante-the-lying-life-of-adults-announcement/

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/03/elena-ferrantes-form-and-unform/

right on: It’s an intriguing thought experiment to consider the difference between this long work, L’amica geniale, and the short novel that Lenù produces at the end of volume 4, simply titled Un’amicizia (“A Friendship”). That book, whose publication revives Lenù’s literary celebrity, proves the end of Lila and Lenù’s relationship. Lenù speculates about what makes Lila turn away from her when it comes out, but none of her guesses seem to strike at the implicit truth, visible to Ferrante’s readers if not her narrator. It is perhaps the novella’s static precision and taut shapeliness, so unlike L’amica geniale’s long, ungainly battle between form and unform—between, in Lila’s paraphrased words, “telling things just as they happened, in teeming chaos” and “work[ing] from imagination, inventing a thread”—that makes it such a dishonest and inauthentic betrayal of the truth of their lives, both together and apart.

Then again, we can only guess, as Lenu does, because Ferrante doesn't include the text of the short novel, just a few of the narrator's brief summaries, flashlight passes. But yes, this is the great tension to be sought, as precision, however (necessarily?) static to some degree, and omg taut shapeliness gimme more, 'til time for more unform.

“work[ing] from imagination, inventing a thread” which of course is part of what Ferrante does, ditto both friends, in their own ways.

Finished Troubling Love (1995) (her first book) and happy to report that the style, themes, rhythms were all there from the beginning.

I do think Ferrante's pre-quartet novels are a species of writing in itself that that deserve a mapping out. Short, intense, sharply unreliable ways to talk about trauma and abuse in families that take it away from the documentary. Thinking of Marie Darrieussecq's My Phatom Husband (1998) and The Helios Disaster (2015) by Linda Knausgard. Previous generations were perhaps using half-blank historical events to bake these themes in: Cassandra by Christa Wolf (1983) and Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian (1951). Maybeee...if anyone knows more like it then please recommend.

This June 9, Ferrante’s international publishers will gather to discuss the art of translation, Ferrante’s work, the worldwide success of her Neapolitan quartet, and the author’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults, coming September 1, 2020. The conversation will include a multilingual, transnational reading from the new book, and a panel conversation with celebrity Ferrante fans. It will conclude with an audience Q&A.

Elena Ferrante’s “star translator” Ann Goldstein will be joined by novelist, biographer, and short-story writer Roxana Robinson (Sparta, Cost), author and academic Merve Emre (The Ferrante Letters), comparative literature professor and Ferrante scholar Tiziana de Rogatis (Elena Ferrante’s Key Words), author and Guardian columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (The Tyranny of Lost Things), and others.

Preorder The Lying Life of Adults at Bookshop.org.

You are invited to join thousands of fellow readers from around the world at this unique celebration. It is happening online, on a laptop computer or smart phone near you, in our virtual #PiazzaFerrante.
Register above.

If you enjoyed Europa’s #OurBrilliantFriends After Dinner Book Club and Watch Party series, you will love this international celebration of translation and reading.

Registration for this event is free, but please consider making a minimum donation of $5 when you register.

All proceeds will benefit the PEN America Writers’ Emergency Fund, a long-standing and recently expanded fund intended to assist fiction and non-fiction authors, poets, playwrights, screenwriters, translators, and journalists who are unable to meet an acute financial need—especially one resulting from the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak.
More info:
https://us3.campaign-archive.com/?u=24b74ea1f8a82219b78215f23&id=a11255d396&e=14ba70a7b5

Update today:

Dear Friends,

A private funeral service for George Floyd, who was killed by police in Minneapolis on May 25th, has been scheduled for June 9th in Houston.

Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death and the subsequent widespread reactions, June 9th will undoubtedly be a day more suited to reflection than to celebration.

For these reasons, we have made the decision to reschedule the #OurBrilliantFriends event. The event will now be held on Tuesday, June 23rd, at the same time.

You will not need to register again. You will receive a reminder email about this event closer to June 23rd, and an email with details on how to join shortly before the event starts.

We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your support.

Best wishes,
Europa Editions

reminder, for Tues.

https://img.evbuc.com/https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.evbuc.com%2Fimages%2F103421898%2F277252655646%2F1%2Foriginal.20200612-152347?w=800&auto=format%2Ccompress&q=75&sharp=10&rect=0%2C0%2C2160%2C1080&s=8816b22454618ad653d2bff332355214
if can't see that, basic info:
Date And Time
Tue, June 23, 2020

3:00 PM – 4:30 PM CDT
Same participants as above, maybe more? Free etickets etc:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/our-brilliant-friendsafter-lunch-book-club-tickets-104692616434?aff=ebdssbeac

New novel is nearly here:

"Ferrante’s fiction reminds us that sometimes you need someone else to help gather the scattered fragments of your existence. A writer is a friend who can [give] you the beginning and end you need—if not in life, then in fiction." @TheAtlantichttps://t.co/xOFaDts1kL

— Europa Editions (@EuropaEditions) August 10, 2020

The few of these I've read are def worth picking: A Manual For Cleaning Women, The Year of Magical Thinking, The Lover, some of the stories in Dear Life, and Gilead, which I'm reading now. I hope to get to the others (although I keep being put off by Zadie Smith's nonfiction, which can start well and go sideways).

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/21/elena-ferrante-names-her-40-favourite-books-by-female-authors

Only two duds of the nine I've read - Normal People and A Little Life. But they're event books, if you care about that kind of thing. Love Gilead, would also stan for Outline and Memoirs of Hadrian.

Surprised Ferrante engaged in that kind of thing.

Available March 15, 2022
$20・176 pgs・9781609457372
Europa Editions is excited to announce a new collection of essays by Elena Ferrante on the “adventure of writing”—her own and others’. From the author of My Brilliant Friend, the New York Times best-seller The Lying Life of Adults, and The Lost Daughter, come four revelatory essays offering rare insight into the author’s formation as a writer and life as a reader. Ferrante warns us of the perils of “bad language”—historically alien to the truth of women—and advocates for a collective fusion of female talent as she brilliantly discourses on the work of her most beloved authors.

Three of the essays in this collection are lectures that will be delivered publicly by actress Manuela Mandracchia in Bologna on November 17-19 as part of the “Umberto Eco Lectures” series.

La scrittura smarginata
The Umberto Eco Lectures by Elena Ferrante
Performed by Manuela Mandracchia

November 17, 18, & 19
8:30 pm CEST・2:30 pm ET

World premiere

Live-steaming available on the Facebook pages of
ERT, Teatro Arena del Sole; Unibo; & Edizioni E/O.
YouTube livestream via ERT & Unibo

The event will be in Italian with English subtitles.

Wednesday, November 17, 8:30pm CEST (2:30pm ET)
Pain and Pen

Thursday, November 18, 8:30pm CEST (2:30pm ET)
Aquamarine

Friday, November 19, 8:30pm CEST (2:30pm ET)
Histories, I

Unibo:
FB https://www.facebook.com/unibo.it
YT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emiliaromag

ERT / Teatro Fondazione:
FB https://www.facebook.com/ErtFondazione
YT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emiliaromag

Teatro Arena del Sole:
FB https://www.facebook.com/arenadelsole.it

Edizioni E/O:
FB https://www.facebook.com/edizionieo

Event produced by: Centro Internazionale di Studi Umanistici “Umberto Eco”, University of Bologna & ERT / Teatro Nazionale. In partnership with: Edizioni E/O.
Be there or be quadrato.

The Lost Daughter

R, 122 minutes

Coming to Netflix Friday, Dec. 31

An appealing take ( also, had wondering where the hell Ed Harris was)
https://www.nashvillescene.com/arts_culture/film_tv/maggie-gyllenhaal-s-i-the-lost-daughter-i-aims-at-a-cherished-institution/article_cd936764-5d0f-11ec-8990-7701b03a82ef.html

i watched this on netflix last night and it's honestly not very good -- my unkind capsule twitter review was "like THE DURRELLS except everyone is horrible"

i haven't read the novel but my sister has and she was also disappointed -- chatting to her abt it just now as she drove me back home to london we agreed that the central performance is interesting and watchable in itself but maybe somewhat adrift from the book's key character (if this matters), that the flashbacks are probably the best and most convincing streches of the film, that key character then and key character now don't really jigsaw into one another in any readable way, and that the village (and most of the rest of the dramatis personae) is way too full of NPCs

ed harris is fine but he doesn't have much to do

ha I had the opposite response: the flashbacks bored me whereas the present-day material felt lived-in and odd (kudos to the editing).

The book is my favorite Ferrante, a condensation of the Neapolitan novels if you don't want to read them.

i thought this was p good (also have not read the book); the flashbacks are convincing but the present day stuff works better imo, agree with the editing/perspective being why it is effective; felt some possible illusions to death in venice whether intended or not

Well the ending was a very clunky copy of Ozu's Late Spring.

rude to keep posting my tweets abt this film but also rude not to lol:

"olivia coleman and jessie buckley are good tho i don't see how the latter grows up to be the former affectwise -- but i thought the entirety of the "other family" was thin stereotypy stuff (probably not helped by switching the locale from southern-most italy to a greek island)"

i think the reason i preferred the flashbacks was that the children in it -- especially the older child -- were more filled out and wilfully characterful: mum with her two kids was very dense and complex. dad was an NPC. the child of the other family was one of the many NPCs that made up the bulk of that family. also i don't think it's well conveyed that coleman remains *at time of story* an Academic PowerhouseTM: she came across fubsier and more hapless, with flashes of command -- like all that was actually past her. but i can't pretend that i missed this or reacted against it while watching (have not read novel; contributed to my sister's disappointment, as she has also done time in the academic salt-mines) -- not being "like the book" is not necessarily a sin…

we (sister and i) did have a good conversation abt how "conferences be like that!" -- tho more often in the fending off than the partaking lol. the academic scenes were very cartoony but i didn't mind that bcz academics SUCK j/k

The flashbacks were more powerful I think bcz it dramatised the complications around motherhood a bit more (this is one of the themes that run throughout Ferrante's writing). In the present day you get a glimpse into the price paid but I wasn't too convinced about the connection the main character makes with the young mother.

Well the ending was a very clunky copy of Ozu's Late Spring.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, January 3, 2022 10:43 AM

Paul Schrader is praised for doing something like that in every film now.

I watched this with my mum on New Year's Day (!) and really enjoyed it. Haven't read the book but I've read the first two Neopolitans. I didn't realise it was a Ferrante story till I read the summary halfway through the movie, and then I was, like, immediately, "Okay I get this now."

There are many moments of easy-to-ridicule earnestness (EVERYONE TAKING EVERYTHING VERY VERY SERIOUSLY) and on-the-noseness (OH NO A METAPHOR FELL ON MY BACK) but Colman is terrific and the story is compellingly (if slightly first-ime-director-showoffishly) told.

I'll disagree about the NPCness - for me the point was to experience the Colman character's alienation, so it kind of makes sense that no one's really "knowable" or makes sense.

I appreciated watching a movie that was miserable without being punishing or over-dour, and recognises that there are ups as well as downs.

We both thought the ending was annoying though

What is NPC? You guys.

Non Phungible Coleman.

non-player characters = eg these lads

https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.661487109.1166/pp,840x830-pad,1000x1000,f8f8f8.u1.jpg

Oh yeah, Proust did that too, and I thought of it as maybe being influenced by visual arts: principals surrounded or among massed turds I mean swells at social gatherings (not really parties unless Charlus shows up)

Paul Schrader is praised for doing something like that in every film now.

― Chris L, Monday, 3 January 2022 13:40 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

01/07/2022 pic.twitter.com/WHwa78CZja

— paul schrader's facebook posts (@paul_posts) January 8, 2022

01/26/2022 pic.twitter.com/VTfrHg0NeC

— paul schrader's facebook posts (@paul_posts) January 27, 2022

maybe get back to us when paul schrader writes a book

Another one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn0SL4pi2a8

Another one?

We've already had 50 years to discuss his first one.

excited that they are continuing to make these. I still need to watch season 2 and read book 4, guess I better get on that.

Aa has been discussed here, there has been a lot of speculation as to who Ferrante might be. I mean, the mystery is pretty much solved when that tabloid journo dug through her trash. Until then the speculation (from an academic paper) was that Ferrante was Domenico Starnone. The journo came up with Anita Raja, a translator who happens to be Starnone's wofe.

Well I have been reading Starnone's Ties. A man leaves his wife and children, with all the drama. The novel is short, but in about five pages it manages to go through a meeting between the man and his two children years after the separation, then many years later where the children are grown-up and a line or two about what happens to them is told to you, then back again when there is some sort of reconcilliation between the man and the wronged woman (I've got about a third left to go). You could say its either too busy, or of a risk taken with the writing. Anyhow, a lot of what is happening here is basically Ferrante from a man's perspective (before the Quartet where the writing really expands out). I would not at all be surpised if Ferrante wasn't a collaboration between Starnone and Ferrante (or that Starnone wasn't Ferrante too).

All that aside Starnone should be read as well.

I've only read the first two novels of the quartet so far but they both seemed like they were from a woman's perspective

otm

Lol yes the books are from a woman's perspective. Not denying that.

Starnone not half the writer Ferrante is imo

Lots of European novels that are like "relationships suck". I talk about some of them in April 2020 (Marie Darrieussecq's My Phatom Husband (1998) and The Helios Disaster (2015) by Linda Knausgard). From men I would add Peter Stamm to that (especially Seven Years).

Definitely reading more Starnone, it's comparable to early Ferrante and really good anyway.

"they both seemed like they were from a woman's perspective"

Does this mean: they seemed like they were written by a woman?

That seems question-begging, until we know what the criteria are for recognising that something is written by a woman.

Supposing that there are criteria (eg: something that a computer could recognise), it follows that these could be manipulated, and a male writer could use these codes to create a false impression.

But none of this is to deny that Elena Ferrante is a woman - I don't doubt that she is! (I've not yet read her.) My observation is merely theoretical.

Ferrante has written a lot of non-fiction pieces and most of them are about the experience of being a female creative, writer, female writers through history, women writers and the shield of anonymity and so on. It would actually be kind of weird if she wasn't a woman. And there's never been a compelling reason to believe she isn't.

Yes. I assume that she is.

My own comment was purely a theoretical one about the meaning of the phrase "seemed like they were from a woman's perspective" - not an expression of doubt about this particular author.

My sense is, with the best will in the world, I don't think I've read a book from a women's perspective by a male author that didn't have a few glaring false notes or elisions. I don't get that feeling from Ferrante.

Skimming Starnone he seems more heavy-handed, less rigourously precise.

Supposing that Chuck Tatum is right (and there's a lot of supposition all round here):

Would the reverse logically also be true, ie: a woman author can't quite convincingly write a novel from a male POV?

I don't think I have ever heard anyone say so, or raise it as a problem.

One justification for NOT saying so, and NOT believing that this problem happens, could be: "The world has been male-dominated - thus, women authors have a good idea of what males think and what their POV is - from literature, media, discourse - whereas the reverse is not true, and males do not have enough insight into women's lives".

I feel that that line, though very broad-brush, is ... *partially* convincing.

But one reason why it might still NOT be convincing is that knowing what "male discourse" is like would not necessarily give you a full insight into being an individual person, who happened to be male (and who might eg: feel little connection to some of that discourse).

There is much more to say on this, including that the whole thing is question-begging, ie: I am not certain that there *is* a male or female POV as such, nor what the limits of fiction might be or should be ... My comments are merely speculative.

I'm sure there are plenty of good books written my men from a female perspective - yes, it's just a supposition based on my limited reading.

I can think of plenty of good novels written by women from men's perspectives but I am stumbling to think of any in the other direction - there must be many obvious ones.

(FWIW, the ones I can think of were The Beginning of Spring, the two Tana French books Faithful Place and Broken Harbour, the first Earthsea book... of course the Fitzgerald book is very short, and the French and Le Guin books lean on the reader's familiarity with genre tropes to do some of the heavy lifting.)

Henry James to thread

It would probably be worth having a separate thread for this, it’s an interesting topic

Henry James writes Henry James people, for me it's a bit like saying Damon Runyan writes realistic gangsters

xpost Agree!

Agree as a general principle, but I hate to deprive Isabel Archer and Kate Croy their femininity.

Henry James writes Henry James people, for me it's a bit like saying Damon Runyan writes realistic gangsters

― Chuck_Tatum, Wednesday, March 9, 2022

I think this is quite a good comment -- it points to the fact that authors don't simply write 'authentic women' or 'authentic men', or whatever, but constructs from their own sometimes very particular imaginations. And the most relevant dividing line might then be not M / F but author / author.

So a lot of HJ women, for instance, likely have more in common with HJ males than they do with ... well, Ian Fleming women, to take what may be an extreme comparison.

It would probably be worth having a separate thread for this, it’s an interesting topic

― mardheamac (gyac), Wednesday, March 9, 2022

I think it is, and a very tricky topic, and one on which it's probably easy to say the wrong thing or cause offence in some way.

A founding notion for me is that I would not start out with the certainty that there is a given female POV or a male POV, which a given writer can then get wrong or right - these notions have to be proved. Others may differ.

I have a lot of opinions about this, if nobody else starts a thread in the next two hours I may have to.

now I wonder what y'all think of Mr. Darcy, Dr. Lydgate, etc.

Another aspect of the issue is 'cognition bias' of some kind, possibly confirmation bias, ie ...

Almost every case of 'a woman writing a man', I know is a woman writing a man; and vice versa. I have very rarely been able to have a blind test on this. I haven't read 100 novels, without names or authorial genders attached, and guessed who wrote them. The information has always been baked in from the start. So do I really know what a 'woman's writing' feels like, in itself, separate from being told 'this piece of writing is by a woman' before I started reading it? No.

I think it is possible that in the case of such a blind test of 100 texts, many readers would not be able to tell the gender of the author. And this could well apply even if you threw in the additional factor under discussion, ie: gender X writes POV of gender Y.

And this is before you throw in another issue that I raised upthread, namely: if, hypothetically, there IS a way to write like a man, then a woman author of skill could learn what it is and execute it.

And all this is leaving aside the fact that gender itself is nowadays often discussed in more fluid terms than it used to be.

The tl;dr of this is that writing women by men is like anything else, if it’s invisible you’re doing well. There are weird edge cases like GRRM, where he writes a variety of women in interesting ways but then writes Dany thinking about the way her tits move around as she walks. Stephen King maybe a bit worse than GRRM on this. Then there’s authors where they write all people in a very cold, bloodless fashion such that the actual genders of the characters in question don’t matter.

Then you have the people who can’t write their own gender well. Damn.

gender itself is nowadays often discussed in more fluid terms than it used to be

the other thing that gets into the discussion more than it used to is that gender is performed: by actual people out in the world and therefore also by the characters that (good) fiction writers create to represent them -- authenticity of gender as performed authenticity of gender as fictionally recreated performed authenticity of gender

It is no woman’s writing. Although ladies have written histories, and travels, and warlike novels, to say nothing of books upon the different arts and sciences, no woman could have penned the “Autobiography of Jane Eyre.”

anticipated by Orlando and the Nighttown section of Ulysses

xpost

Thread up, am grateful for your contributions (please paste over if you like!)

i guess i'm arguing it's anticipated by the entire history of good fiction, with critical discourse only more recently catching on with any great energy

and even then there were critics onto the idea an age ago (like oscar wilde, for example)

Ferrante has written a lot of non-fiction pieces and most of them are about the experience of being a female creative, writer, female writers through history, women writers and the shield of anonymity and so on. It would actually be kind of weird if she wasn't a woman. And there's never been a compelling reason to believe she isn't.

― abcfsk, Tuesday, 8 March 2022 bookmarkflaglink

I am more of the view that this is a collaboration, as far as the fiction goes. Don't know if this is the case for these non-fictional pieces, though the series Ferrante did for The Guardian was slight and ended after a while.

There is a lot of investment on her anonymity as a woman who writes that has been placed by others, so if it ever turns out that it was a collab I wonder as to whether there would be a sense of people being played with.

So when reading Ferrante alongside Starnone I was thinking it could be to the benefit of both.

don't know about all of this but am taken aback by your insistence that this was a collaboration, that a man had to be involved in her success as a writer

I don't really read xyzzz's posts like that. More like: a) I have read Starnone, it's similar to Ferrante; b) Ferrante has been linked to Anita Raja; c)Raja and Starnone are married; d)it's hardly unknown for married people to collaborate on things.

i for one am taken aback by the assertion that a collaboration necessarily involves a man

Long piece that makes the case for Ferrante being either Starnone alone or Starnone and Raja in collaboration: https://lithub.com/have-italian-scholars-figured-out-the-identity-of-elena-ferrante/

I hadn't thought of it being Raja and someone other than Starnone---another woman, maybe?
Was thinking of science fiction writer Lewis Padgett, AKA Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, who are also thought to have contributed to some of each other's stories published under their own names.Judging by those, Moore likely was the one who took Padgett stories higher and deeper, while the generally quite capable Kuttner was the relatively dry, ground level structure guy.
I tried Googling this, but Moore and Kuttner are the only ones I knew:
https://www.google.com/search?q=husband+and+wife+writing+team+under+pen+name&ei=uWopYpO7GIHK_Qb77q3ADg&oq=husband+and+wife+writing+team+under+pen&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAEYADIFCCEQoAEyBQghEKABMgUIIRCgATIFCCEQoAE6BwgAEEcQsAM6BggAEBYQHjoICCEQFhAdEB5KBAhBGABKBAhGGABQ3xBY63hg9o8BaAJwAXgAgAG1AYgBvwmSAQM0LjeYAQCgAQHIAQjAAQE&sclient=gws-wiz

(I haven't read nearly all works under those names, but so far seems like Moore was at her amazing best publishing as herself.)

twist ending where it turns out that Raja wrote the Ferrante novels alone, the novels published under Starnone's name were collaborations between him and Raja, hence the similarities

Long piece that makes the case for Ferrante being either Starnone alone or Starnone and Raja in collaboration: https://lithub.com/have-italian-scholars-figured-out-the-identity-of-elena-ferrante/

― Zelda Zonk, Thursday, 10 March 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Thanks for that piece, it was good to see a digestible write-up of those linguistic comparisons I've heard about.

If Starnone could write like Ferrante/Raja I guess I just don't get why he would write like Starnone

but that's just me, found Lacci very inferior to any Ferrante

or well at least any recent Ferrante, will admit it took her sometime to master her craft

The novels pre-quartet are best. Ferrante then departs from that, and it's good...but where both Starnone and Ferrante achieve a mind-meld is in the middle.

Though all of this is based on one Starnone novel, need to read more.

in the middle of what?

Of her career as a novelist.

In The Margins, out today---have any of these essays already been published? Looks appealing, but seems like a lot of you were disappointed by the collection of her columns.
From Europa Editions announcement:
Here, in these four crisp essays, Ferrante offers a rare look at the origins of her literary powers. She writes about her influences, her struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer; she describes the perils of “bad language” and suggests ways in which it has long excluded women’s truth; she proposes a choral fusion of feminine talent as she brilliantly discourses on the work of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Ingeborg Bachmann, and many others.
Here is a subtle yet candid book by “one of the great novelists of our time” about adventures in literature, both in and out of the margins.

guessing a lot already released in Frantugmalia, but that's huge

the columns were not bad, but they were just columns

really I come for the novels

I find the Lithub piece pretty unpersuasive - seems like litfic pizzagate to me. "If Starnone could write like Ferrante/Raja I guess I just don't get why he would write like Starnone" seems otm.

Lol pizzagate is a bit strong

Stuff like this just seems... silly?

Georgios Mikros from Athens University, for example, used the textual corpus to train a machine-learning algorithm to profile authors (that is, identify their gender, age, and provenance) with a high degree of accuracy. This algorithm concluded that the person behind Elena Ferrante was a male over 60 years old from the region of Campania.

There was another long piece in (I think) the NYRB that linked Ferrante to Raja not through computational analysis of writing styles but by following a money trail from Ferrante's publisher to Raja. But as the Ferrante novels are so Naples-specific, and Raja was brought up in Rome not Naples, it seems pretty likely that even if Starnone is not the primary author, he at least has some input.

Judith Thurman summarized it in The New Yorker:

In 2016, Claudio Gatti, an investigative journalist for Il Sole 24 Ore, a business newspaper, claimed to have unmasked her. He had hacked into the royalty statements of Ferrante’s Italian publisher, Edizioni E/O, a small house to which she has been loyal. Inexplicably vast sums, he discovered, had been paid to the account of Anita Raja, a translator from the German and an E/O stalwart. Raja, who is sixty-seven, was born in Naples, her father’s native city, but grew up in Rome; her mother was a Polish Jew who had escaped the Holocaust. If she has published fiction,he has never signed any. But her husband, Domenico Starnone, is one of Italy’s most prominent men of letters, whose best-known work is set in Naples, where he was born into the same generation and class as Lenù and Lila. He has vehemently denied having written or co-written Ferrante’s novels. Yet if their author is a man he has pulled off one of the most improbable—not to mention galling—impersonations in the annals of fiction. So that makes the idea of collaboration seem plausible, and I can imagine him Naples-izing her ideas, also maybe applying his pre-existing skills, which work better, maybe, with her leading the way, or just in the back-and-forth.
But also: maybe she's taking the money to someone else, the true collaborator with Starnone, or other(s).

I tried Googling this, but Moore and Kuttner are the only ones I knew:

Nicci French (domestic thrillers) is a husband and wife team

TIL!

Stuff like this just seems... silly?

Georgios Mikros from Athens University, for example, used the textual corpus to train a machine-learning algorithm to profile authors (that is, identify their gender, age, and provenance) with a high degree of accuracy. This algorithm concluded that the person behind Elena Ferrante was a male over 60 years old from the region of Campania.
― Chuck_Tatum, Thursday, 17 March 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Do you think questions like 'Was Homer the author of both Iliad and The Odyssey?' are silly?

I know that isn't in the same ballpark but some people have a curiosity about the people they are reading. And if it turns out Ferrante isn't quite what it's claimed people will be pissed off about it.

I guess for me, there is a big leap from "X is similar to Y" to "X contributes to Y" or "X is Y".

There are so many ways a couple can influence each other's writing: sentence style, editing style, sense of humour, history, likes, kinks, pecadilloes, etc. This is normal. The Ferrante issue seems wedded to rather old-fashioned sexist assumptions about female authorship (also a problem for female musicians, sports people, scientists...) and the equally questionable idea that appropriating stories from other people's lives somehow lessens you as an author.

There's no gender/authorship issue in Homer AFAIK

Funnily enough there is.

https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/authoress-odyssey-1897

"and the equally questionable idea that appropriating stories from other people's lives somehow lessens you as an author."

iirc I don't think -- in that lithub piece, anyway -- there was an attempt to lessen Ferrante. You could argue this kind of thing could enrich.

"to train a machine-learning algorithm to profile authors"

the desire to know more abt an author isn't silly but the idea that this kind of phrenology-by-robots is any use *is* p silly: it's crappier and more speculative than most forensic and profiling cop science, and we now know that most forensic and profiling cop science is also garbage (up to and including fingerprints)

plus it's done by robots! famously not good at reading novels well imo

Funnily enough there is.

https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/authoress-odyssey-1897

ha! that is great

xposts

Re: appropriating, I guess it's the assumption that an author has to have lived through something (e.g. been raised in, as opposed to just being born in, Naples) to write about it. And therefore anyone who *has* been raised in Napes (conveniently a dude) must QED have written the book or part of it

plus it's done by robots! famously not good at reading novels well imo

― mark s, Friday, 18 March 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Don't think the robot is reading a novel. The lithub piece describes a study where they look at phrases from Ferrante against author a, b, c etc. This analysis took out everyone except Starnone.

There was then a horrible tabloidy investigation years later that pointed to Raja, who is married to Starnone. So in this case it looks like the robot did its job.

I could see how some readers would find it galling, as xp Thurman says, if Ferrante turned out to be a male author with no female input, although of course Raja could be giving him all manner of feedback, guidance, notes, without having the final say, putting down phrases in analyzable way----but I'm always more interested in what's on the page or other medium (controversies in music and visual arts too)

Very excited for this translation of Starnone.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/06/02/boy-remembers-his-fierce-father-rich-family-novel/