Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels

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/