Rifling through someone’s bins looking for clues about their life or identity is considered a tabloid activity performed by low-lifes who sell information on celebrities. In this game celebrities “owe” us something because we made them, therefore we can take them apart via such intrusion.
Now we have the literary equivalent, and it stinks to high heaven. Elena Ferrante is an Italian novelist whose Neapolitan quartet have become bestsellers. Once you enter Ferrante’s world, you are changed by it. She writes so brilliantly about the transformation of women’s lives. Our bodies, our hearts, our politics. The books speak of what keeps us together and what takes us apart. We know nothing about her own life, as she has chosen – as is her right – to be anonymous. Not for her the book tour, the literary festival, the glam author picture. “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.” She has given other, more complicated, meta-explanations of her desire to protect her anonymity, which are to do with the nature of fiction itself.
It does not matter who she really is. She is not accountable to us in any way. Oh, but apparently she must be treated like a fraud or a criminal or dodgy celeb and stripped of her privacy …
An appalling, pompous private investigator claims to have found her through examining the financial and real estate records of a translator who lives in Rome. This literary doxxing by this self-appointed arbiter of “truth” is a nasty violation. Claudio Gatti has no right to unmask this author. His excuse is that because Ferrante had said she may “lie on occasion”, she has relinquished the right to disappear behind her books. He goes as far as to suggest that this woman’s husband writes her books. Who is this man with no grasp of literature, imagination or respect for privacy who says politicians should not lie and therefore he can do this to a bestselling author? He is just an idiotic bin rummager. And what is the New York Review of Books doing publishing this detritus?
Those who love Ferrante’s work are appalled, partly of course because she writes so well about the ways in which men humiliate women. “Male power, whether violently or delicately imposed, is still bent on subordinating us.” Indeed.
Ferrante’s work is often spoken of as a rare glimpse into the interior world of female friendship. It is that, but so much more. It is also about a writer’s obligations to the community they write about. It is about a desire to disappear. It is about male violence and power and politics. The novels chart the changes in Italy from the 1950s to the 2000s, taking in the fascists, the communists, the radical movements, the drugs, the coming of technology. This is social history made flesh. The search for the author’s true identity is also driven by an incredulity that a woman could do that. What if this is not just memoir – the lesser feminised confessional – but the product of imagination and intellect? Is this somehow cheating? This seems to be the implication of this need to investigate her.
How does she do it? Genius is not enough. But I say she owes us nothing. If I found out today that she were really he, I would say the same thing, for this writer has given this world of words. She transforms this world by doing and undoing with words, just as she pleases. She has said that if she were no longer anonymous, she would write but no longer publish. I hope this attempt to undo her by this grubby investigation is but a cheap subplot.
One truth remains: if you want to know who Elena Ferrante is, there is a very simple way to find out. Read her books.
