Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels

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