The Italian’s translator Ann Goldstein fears the novelist’s ‘outing’ will stop her from writing
Alex O’Connell
The Times
Ann Goldstein says her day job at The New Yorker “supports my translation habit”DAVID BEBBER FOR THE TIMES
I am telling Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator, how interesting I found Frantumaglia — a “jumble of fragments” — the collection of the Italian writer’s correspondence and interviews that will be published in English for the first time next month.
“Really?” asks Goldstein, elegant in olive cashmere V-neck, black trousers and a necklace of colourful beads. “I just read this Michiko Kakutani review in The[New York] Times. She lambasted it!”
Ferrante is the Italian author of Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment and the four books known in Britain as the Neapolitan Quartet. Goldstein has translated them all, as…
Good for: Italophiles, those obsessed with the Neopolitan novels, storytellers. Why: Wherever you stand on the reclusive Italian author’s unmasking, there’s no question that Ferrante is an incredible novelist, and this book shows the inner workings of her writerly mind. A memoir of sorts, it delves into her relationship to her work, her books, her family, psychoanalysis, and feminism—part letter to her readers, part to herself. Read it: When you’re feeling introspective about your career, with a glass of wine and a plate of pasta e fagioli, wearing the Lydia (it’s made from soft Italian jersey). (Europa Editions, November)
“Obscurity rids the mind of the irk of envy and spite; [it] sets running in the veins the free waters of generosity and magnanimity; and allows giving and taking without thanks offered or praise given.”
Art by Aleksandr Zinoviev, 1921 (New York Public Library public domain archive)
One such perfect insight came to mind in light of the recent parasitic paparazzo’salleged unmasking of Elena Ferrante. Nearly a century earlier, Woolf addressed the question at the heart of this egregious violation of artistic choice and integrity by juxtaposing the rewards of fame with those of anonymity, or what she called “obscurity,” in the original sense of the word — the state of being not-known, of having one’s identity concealed, of being hidden from view in the public eye.
Woolf writes:
While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful; he alone is at peace.
Extolling the value of obscurity as “the delight of having no name, but being like a wave which returns to the deep body of the sea,” Woolf adds:
Obscurity rids the mind of the irk of envy and spite; [it] sets running in the veins the free waters of generosity and magnanimity; and allows giving and taking without thanks offered or praise given.
Woolf’s words offer the perfect affirmation of Ferrante’s artistic choice to use a pseudonym, which she herself had articulated to her Italian publisher in a beautiful letter penned on September 21, 1991, shortly before the publication of her debut novel, Troubling Love. The letter was later included in the Ferrante anthologyFrantumaglia. She writes:
You asked me what I intend to do for the promotion of Troubling Love… You asked the question ironically, with one of your bemused expressions… I do not intend to do anything for Troubling Love, anything that might involve the public engagement of me personally. I’ve already done enough for this long story: I wrote it. If the book is worth anything, that should be sufficient. I won’t participate in discussions and conferences, if I’m invited. I won’t go and accept prizes, if any are awarded to me. I will never promote the book, especially on television, not in Italy or, as the case may be, abroad. I will be interviewed only in writing, but I would prefer to limit even that to the indispensable minimum. I am absolutely committed in this sense to myself and my family. I hope not to be forced to change my mind.
[…]
I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t. There are plenty of examples. I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana [a fairy-like character of Italian folklore], which I waited for as a child. I went to bed in great excitement and in the morning I woke up and the gifts were there, but no one had seen the Befana. True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known; they are the very small miracles of the secret spirits of the home or the great miracles that leave us truly astonished. I still have this childish wish for marvels, large or small, I still believe in them.
One could open Frantumaglia, practically let the pages fall where they may, and land on a passage where the notoriously private Ferrante (author of the Neopolitan tetralogythat began with My Brilliant Friend, 2012, as well as three previous novels) confirms, asserts, or explains her reasons for writing under a pseudonym and avoiding the media. In fact, the book makes the media-fueled mystery surrounding Ferrante’s identity (just last week the New York Review of Books ran an Italian journalist’s seeming unmasking of the author) a definitively unnecessary distraction: she’s right here.
Its title is the word Ferrante’s mother used to explain “bits and pieces whose origin is difficult to pinpoint, and which make a noise in your head, sometimes causing discomfort,” and Frantumaglia collects the author’s correspondence with her Italian publishers, letters sent (and left unsent) to directors of film adaptations of her books, unpublished or rewritten passages of her early novels, responses to readers’ questions, and many formal interviews that were conducted over email or through her publisher. (A previous version of the book, bearing the same title and comprised solely of this book’s first section, was published in Italy over a decade ago, before the publication of the Neopolitan Novels. Until now only excerpts of that previous version have been available in English. This version publishes in the U.S. alongside her forthcoming children’s picture book, The Beach at Night).
The book divides Ferrante’s 25-year career as a published author into three sections, and lacks a more specific table of contents, a foreword, or an afterword. Words that aren’t the author’s appear primarily to contextualize her responses to them. For example, five questions from an Italian journal yield a response of nearly 70 pages. Ferrante expresses some embarrassment for her “endless letter,” but clarifies that “I have no desire to make a shorter, publishable version,” and sends it to her publisher anyway: “The passionate writer always needs an audience of at least one reader.”
In her own exceedingly quotable words, drawing on myth, theory, philosophy, and, of course, literature, the author reveals herself in her multitudes: she is kind and good-humored, self-deprecating and apologetic, flinty and unwavering. Foremost and repeatedly, she expresses generosity to and respect for readers, without whom her books—the only part of her public persona that matters; the only part of herself she ever intended to be public—are meaningless. While this collection will be most enticing to those already reading Ferrante, it’s also a feast for writers, lovers of literature, and creators of all kinds.
On the cover of Elena Ferrante’s highly anticipated upcoming bookFrantumaglia, which translates to “self-portrait,” a young woman crouches beneath the window of a dilapidated house, her body cloaked in shards of wallpaper, peeled off into fragments, as flimsy as crepe paper.
It’s rare to encounter a wall, often understood as a rigid barrier more than a physical thing, in such a fragile state ― so easily broken, worn like a cloth.
The image is the work of Francesca Woodman, an iconic photographer who took her own life at 22 years old, when she jumped out of a window. It’s Woodman pictured in the photo, her figure blurred like a signature that’s not-so accidentally been smudged. The piece is a self-portrait, though Woodman’s image is purposefully and exquisitely obscured, her boundaries dissolved as if her body were spun of cotton candy instead of flesh.
Woodman’s image is a perfect foil to Ferrante’s words, as both women thoughtfully navigate the space between absence and presence, fame and anonymity.
Ferrante, for example, published her wildly beloved four-part Neapolitan Series under apseudonym, preferring to keep her identity anonymous. In a variety of interviews, Ferrante expressed her belief that the self-promotion required by artists and creators today ends up diminishing the power of their work. Stemming from a “desire for intangibility,” Ferrante opted to evaporate behind her richly textured characters and stories, which took on lives of their own.
Of course, her clearly stated desire was denied recently when Italian journalist Claudio Gatti outed Ferrante in the New York Review of Books, claiming that, because the author admitted to “lying on occasion,” she “relinquished her right to disappear behind her books and let them live and grow while their author remained unknown.”
With his unwarranted and unwanted investigation, Gatti stripped Ferrante of her ability to hide in plain sight, as if the wall that once protected her was unceremoniously ripped down, haphazardly used to cover her exposed parts.
FRANCO ORIGLIA VIA GETTY IMAGES
Woodman’s self-portraits also illustrate the intangible, depicting the moment when the delineated self gives way to something abstract and incorporeal. A body turned spirit, angel, or stain.
In her black-and-white images, which she referred to as “ghost pictures,” Woodman’s edges disintegrate, due to a skilled combination of long exposure shots, movement and time. If Ferrante sought to exist only in words and not in person, Woodman similarly strove to be only image.
“I finally managed to try to do away with myself, as neatly and concisely as possible,” Woodman wrote in a note that accompanied an attempted suicide in 1980. The sentiment is eerily reminiscent of Ferrante character Lina Cerullo, who, in the prologue of My Brilliant Friend, disappears of her own volition without a trace, even cutting her image out of family photographs.
“She wanted not only to disappear herself, now, at the age of sixty-six,” her best friend Elena writes upon hearing the news, “but also to eliminate the entire life that she had left behind.” Determined not to let her win, Elena then begins writing the story of their lives, working to undo Lina’s absence. Woodman embodies elements of both Elena and Lina, the will to document her life and the desire to vanish from it.
Elena’s entire series, then, is an attempt to, through writing, provide Lina with, as she describes it, “a form whose boundaries won’t dissolve.” Woodman’s photographs, however, suggest such a thing is impossible.
…when I am another, my acts are more mine when they are the acts of others, in order to be I must be another, leave myself, search for myself in the others, the others that don’t exist if I don’t exist, the others that give me total existence, I am not, there is no I, we are always us.
from “Sunstone” by Octavio Paz
translated by Eliot Weinberger
On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted … on the fragile border … where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so — double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.
from “Powers of Horror” by Julia Kristeva
1. Boundaries of knowledge
In the opening of Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth book of the Italian writer’s Neapolitan novels, the narrator, Elena Greco, notes: “Now that I’m close to the most painful part of our story, I want to seek on the page a balance between her and me that in life I couldn’t find even between myself and me.” “Her” here refers to Lila Cerullo, as Elena calls her, and these four novels, arguably one large masterpiece, chronicle the lives of and friendship between these two women set against the backdrop of Italy’s charged sociopolitics. Elena’s desire for balance here is representative of the intricate balance and boundary between the self and the other that exists in these novels. Their friendship becomes a continual process of blurring what is imagined and what is real to achieve a sort of truth, a mutual constitution of self and other.
The friendship is both tender and antagonistic, deeply intimate and full of spite, and Elena reflects on the difficulty of telling her own story without Lila in it. There is Lila’s story and there is Elena’s story, but Elena realizes the two are inextricable. The “very nature of our relationship,” Elena notes, “dictates that I can reach [Lila] only by passing through myself.” Lila, however, is adamant that her own story is not interesting, but Elena cannot admit that she is right, nor can she admit that “as the years pass, the less [she knows] of Lila.” And, perhaps, the less she knows of herself.
Rachel Donadio, in her New York Review of Books review of Ferrante’s novels (published before The Story of a Lost Child was released in English) eloquently argues that these books are about knowledge: “What kind of knowledge does it take to get by in this world? How do we attain that knowledge? How does our knowledge change us and wound us and empower us … ? What things do we want to know and what would we prefer to leave unknown?”
It’s a smart, astute observation, to which I would add that these novels feel less about knowledge as a goal and more about its flux, how knowledge not only changes us but how we might have a role in creating that knowledge. New knowledge creates new possibilities, after all, fulfilling certain needs that were limited by its previous lack. This lack of knowledge, and of power, can work as a catalyst, and writing is a way to claim both: “I loved Lila,” Elena notes. “I wanted her to last. But I wanted it to be I who made her last.”
There are boundaries to knowledge, of course. Elena struggles with the fact that “as the years pass, the less [she knows] of Lila.” Knowledge isn’t always absolute, and truth, these novels suggest, isn’t either. The books are about being perpetually in between, about hovering near the borders, about becoming. The story of the complicated friendship explores the idea of boundaries and balance: of narration, of knowledge, of the body, and of the self. A friend is, as Aristotle would say, one’s other self.
So when Lila goes missing, at the age of sixty-six, Elena takes it as a personal affront and a personal loss. “It’s been at least three decades since [Lila] told me that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace, and I’m the only one who knows what she means.” Her whereabouts — the novel’s great unknown, drives the novels forward, but the best suspense comes from what we know, not what we don’t. And we know Elena’s need to write it all down is hardly simply an act of memory or preservation. It’s one of spite, a continuation of a constant battle, and balance, between them; it is also one of desire. Elena muses:
How easy it is to tell the story of myself without Lila: time quiets down and the important facts slide along the thread of the years like suitcases on a conveyor belt at an airport: you pick them up, you put them on the page, and it’s done.
What she means is: without Lila, there isn’t much of a story, or much of herself.
And if in order to know Lila she must more aggressively pass through herself, the boundaries between these two women are blurred and porous. As Montaigne has said of friends: “souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found.”
Wat does a successful female artist owe the world?
An Italian journalist by the name of Claudio Gatti made the decision for Elena Ferrante in a piece published Sunday in the New York Review of Books and three European publications, citing financial documents to expose the identity of the internationally acclaimed author who wanted to remain unknown and used the name Ferrante as a pseudonym.
As aggressors have long done, Gatti justified his actions as inevitable. A successful woman, he claims, can’t expect to forgo public scrutiny entirely. If she won’t surrender and expose herself, someone else will have to do it for her, according to Gatti, for the terms of a woman’s relationship to the public are not hers to decide.
It was this kind of misogynist thinking that led Ferrante, in 1991, to tell the publishers of her first novel that she’d rather place the book in a drawer than put her real name on it and subject herself and her family to the Italian media. She said the reasons she desired total anonymity were difficult to explain. “I will only tell you,” she wrote in a letter, “that it is a small wager with myself, with my convictions.”
Under the name Elena Ferrante, this resolutely private writer went on to publish two more stand-alone novels and a four-part series known in English as the Neapolitan Quartet, every one of which has received more acclaim and readership than the one before it.
Despite 25 years of relentless requests to show up for awards ceremonies, Ferrante has remained firm in her refusal to be publicly connected to her fiction.
The convictions driving what Ferrante calls her “desire for intangibility” are evident on every page of “Frantumaglia,” which contains her extensive written correspondence with her publishers, numerous interviews and her responses to director Mario Martone, who adapted her first novel into a film in 1995. Europa Editions describes the volume as a “self-portrait” of a writer at work — a curious choice for a book by a writer determined to remain unseen.
I suspect the irony of calling “Frantumaglia” a “self-portrait” was intentional, a sly gesture toward the central question that readers of Ferrante’s novels have been debating for years: Would her radical investigation of women’s inner lives and relationships have been read with less reverence if she had allowed her physical body to be displayed on every cover? Ferrante’s decision has led to endless conjecture, in dozens of languages, about what a female writer stands to lose when she complies with the expectation to be photographed and speak at podiums where people can consider her face and body as she reads from her work.
And what is the psychic cost of accepting these requests, of being continually, publicly observed reading from one’s work? Does it impede a writer’s capacity for candor, as Ferrante suspects?
In each interview in this volume, Ferrante repeats her conviction that an author’s duty ends with writing a meaningful book. One of the many pleasures of this book is the increasing feistiness of her replies. “We know nothing about Shakespeare,” she says in a recent interview. “We continue to love the Homeric poems even though we know nothing about Homer. Why would anyone be interested in my little personal story if we can do without Homer’s or Shakespeare’s?”
In 2006, when an Italian journalist opens with the question, “How are you?” Ferrante responds: “An interview that begins with ‘How are you’ is a little frightening. What do you want me to say? If I start digging into the ‘how,’ I’ll never stop.”
Three years before this response, Ferrante went ahead and dug into the “how” with a reply that goes on for dozens of pages. That lengthy answer, the longest entry in this volume, includes an explanation of the book’s title. It is presented as the sort of autobiographical reflection that readers are eager for her to provide.
Regardless of whether it is an entirely invented description, the entry is complex and powerful. She describes her mother in Naples, Italy, complaining in dialect of suffering from a “frantumaglia.” Ferrante comes to understand frantumaglia as a contradictory jumble of sensations, an indefinable disquiet so intense that it leaves her mother dizzy. The author goes on to say that this feeling of “debris in the muddy water of the brain” accompanied her during the writing of her first two books. That feeling of wading through unsettling debris presents itself in her correspondence about those two first novels as well, and in much of the writing collected here. It is a volume of dizzying frantumaglia.
In that same many-page response from 2003, Ferrante writes her way to a moving reflection of her father’s conflicted desire to both display and hide her beautiful mother. The uncertainty of whether this is an actual memory or a concoction only adds to the potency of Ferrante’s ruminations on how she began to internalize this conflict. She describes how she comes to mistrust her father and fear for her mother to such a degree that she conceals herself in a dark closet for hours. The passage doesn’t draw an explicit connection between these childhood scenes and Ferrante’s now-famous wager with herself as a writer. The line, if one exists, between her father’s desire to control who sees her mother, and Ferrante’s adamant refusal to be seen at all is left undiscussed, its nuances left for readers to consider on their own.
When her editors received this post from her, they asked whether she would be open to publishing it with other interviews and correspondence. With reluctance, she agreed, and the book was published in Italy in 2003. Now, American readers hungry for every Ferrante sentence they can get will find many here in which she lowers her knife through the bread of life with the same startling force as she does in her novels.
No matter how many times Ferrante is presented with the same questions, she always responds with care and urgency.
“We are still in the thick of the battle,” she replied earlier this year when asked, yet again, to reflect on her protagonists and their determination to live on terms beyond those prescribed by the patriarchy.
She then discusses how many women still live in abject conditions before returning to the reality of educated women like herself. “Although we are free and combative,” she says, “we accept that our need for fulfillment in this or that field should be ratified by men in authority, who co-opt us after having evaluated whether we have sufficiently absorbed the male tradition and are able to become its dignified interpreters, free of female issues and weaknesses.”
When a writer can send a response of this depth and clarity about the ways a male-dominated society continues to confine women’s lives, even in countries that consider themselves egalitarian, it’s no wonder that some journalist would find the opportunity to finally expose her irresistible.
Would more female writers have been taken seriously enough to become part of the canon if every century had a brilliant writer who could address the cost of being visible and a woman with this much fiery eloquence while attempting to remain bodiless herself? We’ll never know. But I’m grateful the current century has had at least one.
Novey is the author of “Ways to Disappear,” a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the 2016 Eagles Prize.
Women in Translation month may have officially ended, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop reading books by women in translation! Books written by women, books written in languages other than English: despite their underrepresentation, these are some of the most exciting works out there, and we want to read them all year long. Here are some forthcoming books by women in translation that we’re looking forward to.
Yes, we have Ferrante Fever! So we’re eagerly awaiting this one, a collection of her non-fiction. We’re looking forward to reading about her perspectives on motherhood and feminism, as well as her choice to remain anonymous (Elena Ferante is a pseudonym).
Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?
Jonathan Ames has been my favorite at what he does for as long as I can remember. The honesty and rawness of his stories have definitely inspired me. I read everything by Elena Ferrante, whoever she is. But not right before bed, because I have furious nightmares. I think Jason Zinoman from The New York Times has an unparalleled understanding of comedy and comics. Emily Nussbaum, who is a television critic and writer for The New Yorker, is my favorite person to follow on Twitter, and her articles inspire me and make me think. I want her to be proud of me more than my parents, I think. Amber Tamblyn is my friend and a beautiful poet. Martin McDonagh is my favorite playwright. Samantha Bee is the breath of fresh air we all need right now. She’s in your face with the truth and makes me feel like I’m not alone. Jessi Klein, the head writer for my TV show, just wrote a book called “You’ll Grow Out of It,” and this is good news for everyone, because she is hilarious, smart and trenchant in any medium.
In 1926, the novelist Rose Macaulay found herself bothered by the attentions of enthusiastic readers, and one in particular who visited, bringing lilies of the valley. When Macaulay went out to lunch to try to get rid of her she simply tagged along. “Writing books is a terrible magnet for such as her,” confided Macaulay in a letter to her sister Jeanie. “They are so very boring, as a rule.” Being polite in such circumstances only made it worse, and protestations of busyness had no effect. “Anyhow,” concluded the letter, “I have enough friends already, and I do resent people thinking that they can become friends merely by pushing their way in. As a matter of fact, I select my friends with great care, and only have those who please me a great deal. There must be a way out of these problems, I wish I could hit on it. I must ask other novelists what they do.”
Jeanie was a district nurse, and – alongside sisterly love and interesting conversation – provided a rather more pleasant sort of companionship for the hard-pressed writer. How lovely it was, wrote Macaulay in a thank you letter in 1940, to spend a night at her “perfectly appointed house”, where the visitor was “a pampered drone lying on a soft warm couch and waking to news and breakfast, and everything found but beer, as one used to say to servants”.
Macaulay wasn’t by custom much of a pampered drone, and neither was she in flight from society; doggedly prolific, she wrote not only novels but biographies and travel books, and maintained active conversations about politics, religion and feminism throughout her life. But her attitudes towards “friends” – even when that term is enlarged to encompass troublesome fans – is interesting; they must be carefully selected, winnowed according to pleasure. Who might be able to give advice? “Other novelists.”
Novelists, in the popular imagination as well as by self-description, often ping between the solitude of the writing desk and the rivalrous frenzy of the literary circuit. Naturally, most find themselves still able to have human relationships beyond those with their editor and agent, and to describe the complex phenomenon of personal interaction in their work. But recently, there has been a growth in the literary depiction of a particular type of friendship, one that has in the past found itself vulnerable to dilution and deflection by the ostensibly more powerful imperatives of heterosexuality and motherhood. Fictional female friends are suddenly all around us, from Elena Ferrante’s Lila and Elena to Emma Cline’s group of murderous California adolescents in The Girls and Ottessa Moshfegh’s prison employees in the Man Booker longlisted Eileen; they span the strange, creatively fruitful gap between fiction and memoir, such as in Sheila Heti’sHow Should a Person Be?; they sit in a mysterious zone of desire and conflict, as in Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, also Booker longlisted; they act as conduits to unleash repressed creativity and personal ambition, as in Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs.
We increasingly seek more complex and subtle imaginative explorations of identity than societal expectations of gender – and a “realist” elaboration of personality – have often allowed; if we have long accepted that identity is fluid and shifting, it has perhaps taken more time to appreciate that it deserves a similarly sophisticated expression in art. Consequently, that sense of the forced compartmentalisation of a woman’s life – given such powerful structural form in Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel The Golden Notebook, in which Anna Wulf chronicles her life in four separate notebooks and tries to merge them in an eponymous fifth – is under extreme pressure.
In Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, it begins to crack. So much goes on over the course of the four novels – the depiction of the postwar Naples in which the two girls grow up, their dramatically diverging educational, occupational and romantic lives, radical politics and gangsterism, their experiences of motherhood – that readers can be forgiven for getting caught up in the material and straightforwardly accessible emotional reality of what they describe. But from its prologue, the first novel in the quartet, My Brilliant Friend, signals itself as a work preoccupied with the assertion and effacement of identity. As it opens, Lila (also known as Raffaella and Lina), now in her 60s, has disappeared without a trace, leaving Elena (also Lenuccia or Lenu) to muse not on her shock, but on her lack of surprise. Elena realises that what Lila means by disappearing is not beginning a new life, nor suicide:
She meant something different: she wanted to vanish, she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to leave not so much as a hair anywhere in this world.
Lila’s absence is what enables Elena to write their lives, but not from a neutral, or even commemorative, standpoint. “We’ll see who wins this time,” she says, as she turns her computer on; her recreation of the pair’s history is, from the outset, spurred by competitiveness, and a touch of anger. But it is not merely that what follows is sometimes unflattering or damning to Lila, or that at some level, it enacts Lila’s desire to be erased by taking over the telling of her story; it is also that it presents friendship as a complex psychological dance. Their decades-long relationship is punctuated by periods of antagonism, envy and repudiation; at times, they appear not as separate entities but as projections of estranged yet dependent aspects of the same personality. The books’ recurrent theme of boundaries – Lila is visited by traumatic episodes of dissociation, sensations of the borders between objects and people dissolving – is linked to the idea of female identity, and particularly to women as potential generators; of meaning, language, children, history.
It takes a writer of significant qualities to avoid such a story becoming schematic, its characters reduced to representations of positions and outcomes. Ferrante’s ability to animate Lila and Elena’s lives derives partly from the way she merges the specificity of time and setting with the uncanny immateriality of fairytale (the story of the little girls’ dolls that opens the quartet, the dramatis personae – “the shoemaker’s family”, “the mad widow’s family” – that sit at the front of each book). A similar achievement characterises Zadie Smith’s NW, which also tells the story of two friends, their push-pull attachment to the neighbourhood they grew up in, and their contrasting paths through life. (Smith’s forthcoming novel, Swing Time, to be published in November, returns to female friendship and divergent lives in its story of two girls who grow up wanting to be dancers.)
In NW, concrete observations are made strange by the novel’s switches between modes, by Smith’s painstaking focus on the construction of identity; again there are name changes, abrupt volte-face, dramatic renunciations of the status quo. Again, there is the crucial difference in approach between the two characters, as here, when Leah visits Keisha-become-Natalie at university:
“Really good to see you,” said Leah. “You’re the only person I can be all of myself with.” Which comment made Natalie begin to cry, not really at the sentiment but rather out of a fearful knowledge that if reversed the statement would be rendered practically meaningless, Ms Blake having no self to be, not with Leah, or anyone.
Smith has talked about how Virginia Woolf inspired the writing of NW, and modernism’s influence on the creation of such fluid characters as Ferrante’s and those in NW is clear (Woolf’s Orlando, her celebration of her love for and friendship with Vita Sackville-West, is dependent on the idea of identity shifts). But key in these depictions of women’s relationships is how much the warp and weft of their individual lives, thoughts and feelings, are a subject in themselves. This hasn’t always been – and still, frequently, isn’t – the case; fictional women are frequently positioned in relation to men, their interactions seen through the prism of their need for male approval, or their subjugation to men’s desires. Often, of course, this is the point. In Margaret Forster’s Georgy Girl, for example, the plot revolves around the difference between two young women, and in particular their relative sense of self-esteem in the sexual and romantic arena, personified by the dashing Jos:
“Why don’t you say what you’re thinking?”
“Which was?”
“Which was how could Meredith, such a pretty gay little girl, share a flat with a great clodhopper like me.”
“Heh, this isn’t like you, George,” said Jos.
“No it isn’t, is it? Jolly back-slapping hockey stick George.”
“Oh come on, George,” said Jos.
“My name is Georgina.”
“Georgina then. What’s eating you? Don’t you feel well?”
George threw the carrot she was peeling at him. It hit his spectacles and they fell onto the floor and broke and she sat on the floor beside them and cried. Blindly, Jos squatted down beside her and they both stared at the smashed lenses. Eventually, George stopped crying and started apologising.
Jos responds by telling her to shut up, although he revises his feelings about Georgy as Meredith proves herself a pretty useless wife and mother, and indeed eventually cedes her daughter to Georgy. As Jos and Georgy pick a name for the baby, Meredith goes “at a gallop” around the square outside:
She didn’t know why she hadn’t smacked both their smug faces. She should have put her foot down and stopped them getting the baby, instead of being so idle and short-sighted to see that it mattered … She didn’t care about the baby, she really didn’t, it was those two she hated. They behaved as though they were in some private world, all sugar and spice and all things nice. She despised them and their cosiness.
Her next thought is that she won’t be able to get her job back – she is a violinist in an orchestra – and the message about women’s choices between motherhood and work, rapaciousness and “niceness” is complete.
Often, too, the subject of men is more subtly managed; their existence, or rather women’s feelings for them, is a matter of discretion and delicacy, as if they might disrupt proceedings. It’s unsurprising that one of the masters of portraying these situation is Anita Brookner, in whose 1982 novel Look at Me, narrated by librarian Frances (who doesn’t like to be called Fanny; the issue of women and their names is clearly an abiding one), two friends simply skirt around the whole topic. “We have never discussed this,” writes Frances, of her friend Olivia’s dislike of another woman, Alix, and fondness for Alix’s husband Nick, “because on some matters reticence is preferable, particularly when feelings are liable to change. We are both rather old-fashioned, I suppose, and although our friendship is deep and sincere, we do not really subscribe to the women’s guerrilla movement. I think we like to maintain a certain loyalty to the men who have, or have had, our love and affection; we regard ourselves in some way as being concerned with their honour. Ridiculous, really, when you come to think of it. I have learned that there is no reciprocity in these matters.”
Here we see women as the protectors of men, and male honour; and as the victims of their betrayal. In Look at Me, Frances is “taken up” by Nick and Alix, and given access to a far more glamorous and racy life; there are, naturally, consequences, and an insight into what it is to be proprietorially befriended by another woman. Female friendship does not always imply one’s best interests being served, and can lead into extremely dark waters, as in Moshfegh’s Eileen. Here, a familiar story of faltering self-confidence and the allure of poise and polish comes into play, as the novel’s eponymous narrator meets Rebecca Saint John:
Perhaps only young women of my same conniving and tragic nature will understand that there could be something in such an exchange as mine with Rebecca that day which could unite two people in conspiracy. After years of secrecy and shame, in this one moment with her, all my frustrations were condoned and my body, my very being, was justified. Such solidarity and awe I felt, you’d think I’d never had a friend before.
Narratives that detail such transformations are compelling. This is perhaps why Cline’s The Girls has captured the imagination of so many readers. Beyond the grisly allure of its subject matter – it is based on the young women who were part of Charles Manson’s “Family”, and who committed brutal murders in his name – it probes the nature of charisma not merely in a cult leader, but among a group of adolescent girls. Its narrator, Evie, is in freefall, and fed up with it; her parents are divorcing, she’s being shipped off to a boarding school, and her current best friend is simply not cutting the mustard any more. Evie’s obeisance to Suzanne, the leader of the “girls”, is made gripping by the way that she sloughs off her childhood friend, Connie, and especially Connie’s inept mimicry of adult female behaviour: “I remember noticing for the first time how loud she was, her voice hard with silly aggressiveness. Connie with her whines and feints, the grating laugh that sounded, and was, practised. A space opened up between us as soon as I started noticing these things, to catalogue her shortcomings the way a boy would. I regret how ungenerous I was. As if by putting distance between us, I could cure myself of the same disease.”
Suzanne, briefly, “cures” Evie of a certain type of femininity, although not of arranging her life around the expectations of a man; in this case, one whose apparent toxicity – he is, at bottom, weak and vain – finds its expression through the manipulation of women. Connie, incidentally, gets her own back.
But The Girls is not as much about friends as bad influences; it is about a surrender to the enablement of transgressive behaviour, while simultaneously being able to pretend that it is at a distance. “I can’t account for my own savagery,” thinks Elaine, the narrator of Margaret Atwood’s powerful exploration of group dynamics and bullying, Cat’s Eye (1989). She spends much of her life trying to understand how Cordelia, her tormentor, accrues so much power. When she reflects on her own daughters, she remembers wishing that they had been sons. “I must have been afraid of hating them,” she thinks, and “I didn’t want to pass anything on to them, anything of mine they would be better without.” Her capitulation to Cordelia’s will is one of those things; her fear of resembling her another. “There I am in her mirror eyes,” she notices, as Cordelia puts sunglasses on, “in duplicate and monochrome, and a great deal smaller than life size.”
The erotic runs through many of these novels, more or less overtly; in Hot Milkthe narrator Sofie (also known as Sophia and Zoffie) begins a romantic and sexual relationship with Ingrid, whom she has at first mistaken for a man and, indeed, tried to eject from a women-only bathroom, and who embroiders a blouse for her. At first, Sofie believes that it reads “Beloved”; later, she realises it is “Beheaded”. The erotic has become mythological, and the everyday – a blouse, a jellyfish sting, a barking dog – irrevocably portentous. It is a cunning way to situate and examine desire; one that also runs through the work of Ali Smith, who – like Levy – is alive to the thrilling possibilities of the dangerous and ambiguous stranger, often a woman, who pitches up out of nowhere.
Friendship, in literature as in life, is a dizzyingly various prospect; and it tells us things about ourselves that we may not want to know. Female friendship, with its additional charge of possible subversion – a world free from male control – is densely suggestive, whether it appears to be (the girls and women in Muriel Spark’s The Abbess of Crewe or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) or whether it masquerades as something more straightforward. It encompasses love, fear, dislike, insecurity, dependency, affection, sexuality, jealousy, altruism, cruelty, sameness and difference; it raises knotty questions of the individual’s ability to disrupt gender norms as well as her often unconscious adherence to them. No wonder writers of fiction are inspired by its boundless potentiality.
‘Frantumaglia’ will be released Nov. 1 by Europa Editions, the mysterious Italian author’s U.S. publisher
By JENNIFER MALONEY |
Ferrante fans, here’s something the whet your appetites: the cover of her next book.
On Nov. 1, Elena Ferrante’s U.S. publisher, Europa Editions, will publish “Frantumaglia,”a collection of interviews and letters by the mysterious Italian author, whose true identity remains unknown.
On the same day, Europa will publish Ferrante’s first children’s book. Called “The Beach at Night,” the spooky, fable-like, illustrated story explores a theme that runs through much of the author’s work: a lost doll.
ANN GOLDSTEIN WAS THE FIRST live, bona fide translator I ever encountered, but when we met, at The New Yorker magazine nearly 30 years ago, she had not yet become a translator; in fact, she had only been studying Italian for two years. She was a copyeditor then (a job she still holds today). In 1992, she did her first Italian translation almost by accident, to help a friend. The piece — a chapter from a collection of essays by Aldo Buzzi — was published inThe New Yorker in 1992. She has not stopped translating since, producing dozens of books while running The New Yorker’s copy desk. In the last five years, Ms. Goldstein has achieved a nearly unheard of distinction, becoming a household word for her English translations of Elena Ferrante’s best-selling Neapolitan Quartet — four enthralling, politically and emotionally charged novels about the intertwined ambitions and fates of two women who met as girls in Naples, after World War II. More than a million and a half copies of Goldstein’s English versions of the Ferrante series have sold in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Early this year, The Wall Street Journal published a profile of her, headlined: “Ann Goldstein: A Star Italian Translator.” It was a funny apotheosis for this understated woman, who is never one to toot her own tromba. In our conversation, the two of us retraced her journey to translation, and revisited some of the literary milestones she has encountered along the way.
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LIESL SCHILLINGER: You really caught a wave with Elena Ferrante. Michael Hofmann told me he felt guilty for getting more attention than some translators, because he is also known for his poetry and criticism. What is it like to have received so much attention for your translations, so quickly?
ANN GOLDSTEIN: It’s completely weird; it’s so unusual. But, I think it should be good for all translators, not just me. I think it brings attention to the fact that books have translators, and that seems to me like a good thing.
Were you surprised by “Ferrante Fever,” as it’s called?
Needless to say, I was a little surprised — not surprised because I don’t think the books are good, which I do — but because many good books don’t get a lot of attention. With the Ferrante books, it’s not even the attention, it’s that they have so many readers.
I’m always surprised when someone points out as a flaw the fact that my stories contain no possibility of transcendence. Here I’d like to move on to a statement of principle: since the age of fifteen, I haven’t believed in the kingdom of any God, in Heaven or on Earth—in fact, wherever you place it, it seems dangerous to me. On the other hand, I share the opinion that most of the concepts we work with have a theological origin. Theology helps us understand the origins of the dregs we even now resort to. As for the rest, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m comforted by stories that emerge through horror to a turning point, stories in which someone is redeemed as confirmation that peace and happiness are possible, or that one can return to a private or public Eden. But I tried to write a story like that, long ago, and I discovered that I didn’t believe in it. I’m drawn, rather, to images of crisis, to seals that are broken. When shapes lose their contours, we see what most terrifies us, as in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” and Clarice Lispector’s extraordinary “Passion According to G.H.” You don’t go beyond that; you have to take a step back and, to survive, reënter some good fiction. I don’t believe, however, that every fiction we orchestrate is good. I cling to those that are painful, those that arise from a profound crisis of all our illusions. I love unreal things when they show signs of firsthand knowledge of the terror, and hence an awareness that they are unreal, that they will not hold up for long against the collisions. Human beings are extremely violent animals, and the violence they are always ready to use in order to impose their own eternal, salvific life vest, while shattering those of others, is frightening.
Elena Ferrante in conversation with novelist Nicola Lagioia. English translation by Ann Goldstein. The full exchange between Lagioia and Ferrante will be published inFrantumaglia: An Author’s Journey Told Through Letters, Interviews, and Occasional Writings this fall. Read a longer (and fascinating) excerpt at The New Yorker.
The following is an excerpt from an e-mail correspondence, which took place last year, between the Italian novelists Elena Ferrante and Nicola Lagioia, whose English-language début, “Ferocity,” will be published in the spring of 2017, by Europa Editions. The full correspondence will appear in Elena Ferrante’s “Frantumaglia: An Author’s Journey Told Through Letters, Interviews, and Occasional Writings,” translated by Ann Goldstein, to be published in November.
Nicola Lagioia: One of the most powerful aspects of “My Brilliant Friend” is the way in which the interdependence of the characters is rendered. Each time Lila vanishes from the horizon of Elena’s experiences, she nevertheless continues to act in her friend, and presumably the opposite is also true. Reading your novel is comforting because this is what occurs in real life. The people who are truly important to us, the people we’ve allowed to break us open inside, do not stop questioning us, obsessing us, pursuing us, and, if necessary, guiding us, even if they die, or grow distant, or if we’ve quarrelled. This interdependence extends throughout the entire world of the two friends—to Nino, Rino, Stefano Carracci, the Solara brothers, Carmela, Enzo Scanno, Gigliola, Marisa, Pasquale, Antonio, even Professor Galiani. To escape is impossible; they constantly reappear in one another’s lives. When you think of what such bonds are made of, they might seem to be a curse—but shouldn’t they also be considered a blessing? In some cases I confess I have envied these characters.
Elena Ferrante: Where do I start? In my childhood, my adolescence. Some of the poor Neapolitan neighborhoods were crowded, yes, and rowdy. To gather oneself, so to speak, was physically impossible. One learned very early to have the greatest concentration amid the greatest disruption. The idea that every “I” is largely made up of others and by the others wasn’t theoretical; it was a reality. To be alive meant to collide continually with the existence of others and to be collided with, the results being at times good-natured, at others aggressive, then again good-natured. The dead were brought into quarrels; people weren’t content to attack and insult the living—they naturally abused aunts, cousins, grandparents, and great-grandparents who were no longer in the world.
Of course, today I have small quiet places where I can gather myself—but I still feel that the idea is slightly ridiculous. I’ve described women at moments when they are absolutely alone. But in their heads there is never silence or even focus. The most absolute solitude, at least in my experience, and not just narrative experience, is always, to paraphrase the title of a very good book by Hrabal, too loud. To the writer, no person is ever definitively relegated to silence, even if we long ago broke off relations with that person—out of anger, by chance, or because the person died. I can’t even think without the voices of others, much less write. And I’m not talking only about relatives, female friends, enemies. I’m talking about others, men and women who today exist only in images: in television or newspaper images, sometimes heartrending, sometimes offensive in their opulence. And I’m talking about the past, about what we generally call tradition; I’m talking about all those others who were once in the world and who have acted or who now act through us. Our entire body, like it or not, enacts a stunning resurrection of the dead just as we advance toward our own death. We are, as you say, interconnected. And we should teach ourselves to look deeply at this interconnection—I call it a tangle, or, rather, frantumaglia—to give ourselves adequate tools to describe it. In the most absolute tranquility or in the midst of tumultuous events, in safety or danger, in innocence or corruption, we are a crowd of others. And this crowd is certainly a blessing for literature.
Maybe capturing the fluidity of existences on the page means avoiding stories that are too rigidly defined. The long story of Elena Greco is marked everywhere by instability, maybe even more than the stories of Delia, Olga, or Leda, the protagonists of my earlier books. What Elena lays out on the page, at first with apparent assurance, becomes increasingly less controlled. In “My Brilliant Friend,” I wanted everything to take shape and then lose its shape. In her effort to tell the story of Lila, Elena is compelled to tell the story of all the others, including herself, encounters and clashes that leave very varied impressions. The others, in the broad meaning of the term, as I said, continually collide with us and we collide with them. Our singularity, our uniqueness, our identity are continually dying. When at the end of a long day we feel shattered, “in pieces,” there’s nothing more literally true.
Lagioia: If it’s true, as I’ve read in more than one article, that “My Brilliant Friend” presents no possibilities for transcendence (at least in the way transcendence is rendered in most twentieth-century literature), what do we make of Lina’s smarginature, her episodes of dissolving boundaries—that is to say, those moments when the world goes off its axis, appearing in its unbearable nakedness, a chaotic and shapeless mass, “a sticky, jumbled reality” without meaning? They are revelatory instants, and the revelations are consistently terrible.
Ferrante: I’m always surprised when someone points out as a flaw the fact that my stories contain no possibility of transcendence. Here I’d like to move on to a statement of principle: since the age of fifteen, I haven’t believed in the kingdom of any God, in Heaven or on Earth—in fact, wherever you place it, it seems dangerous to me. On the other hand, I share the opinion that most of the concepts we work with have a theological origin. Theology helps us understand the origins of the dregs we even now resort to. As for the rest, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m comforted by stories that emerge through horror to a turning point, stories in which someone is redeemed as confirmation that peace and happiness are possible, or that one can return to a private or public Eden. But I tried to write a story like that, long ago, and I discovered that I didn’t believe in it. I’m drawn, rather, to images of crisis, to seals that are broken. When shapes lose their contours, we see what most terrifies us, as in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” and Clarice Lispector’s extraordinary “Passion According to G.H.” You don’t go beyond that; you have to take a step back and, to survive, reënter some good fiction. I don’t believe, however, that every fiction we orchestrate is good. I cling to those that are painful, those that arise from a profound crisis of all our illusions. I love unreal things when they show signs of firsthand knowledge of the terror, and hence an awareness that they are unreal, that they will not hold up for long against the collisions. Human beings are extremely violent animals, and the violence they are always ready to use in order to impose their own eternal, salvific life vest, while shattering those of others, is frightening.
Lagioia: For Lila and Elena, getting an education is the only really worthy way to escape the condition of inferiority. Despite the many troubles they confront in the course of their lives, rarely do the two friends lose faith in the power of learning. What do you think of Italy today, full of university graduates who are adrift? It’s true that some of these youths don’t have the almost desperate relationship with education that Lila and Elena do, and that for the next generations (for their daughters Dede and Elsa, for example) there might be other tools with which to cross the shadow line. And yet, all in all, education strikes me as a means of emancipation unlike any other.
Ferrante: First of all, I would not reduce education to a mere tool of emancipation. Education has been considered essential mainly to social mobility. In post-Second World War Italy, education cemented old hierarchies, but it also allowed for a modest assimilation of the deserving, so that to some extent those who remained at the bottom could say to themselves, “I ended up here because I didn’t want to study.” Lenù’s story demonstrates this use of education for upward mobility. But there are also signs of dysfunction: some characters study and still they stumble. In other words, there was an ideology of education that no longer functions today. Its failure has become obvious: the directionless graduates are dramatic evidence that the long crisis in the legitimization of social hierarchy based on the credentials of an education has come to a head.
But the story also demonstrates another way of understanding education: for Lila, deprived of the opportunity to complete her education—at a time when this was crucial especially for women, and for poor women—and projecting onto Lenuccia her own ambitions of sociocultural ascent, education becomes the manifestation of a permanent anxiety about intelligence, a necessity imposed by the relentlessly chaotic circumstances of life, a tool of daily struggle. While Lena, in short, is the tormented omega of the old system, Lila embodies the crisis and, in a certain sense, a possible future. How will the crisis be resolved in our own tumultuous world? I’m not sure—we’ll have to see. Will the contradictions of the educational system become increasingly evident, signalling its decline? Will education be refined and accessible without any connection to the ways we earn a living? Will we have more cultured diligence and less intelligence? Let’s say that in general I’m captivated by those who produce ideas, rather than by those who comment on them. I’d feel better in a world of imaginative creators of grand ideas—even if this seems to me, admittedly, a formidable goal.
Lagioia: Someone who is truly rooted in life doesn’t write novels. The relationship between Elena and Lila seems to me archetypal, in the sense that many friendships and rivalries function according to this dynamic: it is, if you will, the dynamic that binds artists to their muses, although the muse in this particular case is anything but ethereal. On the contrary, she is earthly to the core, committed to confronting life, to clashing with it wholeheartedly. It’s Lila who feels the things of the world in a more visceral way. And yet, for that very reason, she cannot bear witness in the way Elena can. Although Elena fears that sooner or later her friend will manage to write a marvellous book, a book capable of objectively restoring the balance between them, that can’t happen.
That is one of the paradoxes that seem to bind Elena to Lila. How can one try to undo it, or live with it? To bear witness on behalf of someone who will not do so herself might seem either a generous act or one of enormous arrogance. Or again—and this is the most painful hypothesis—it becomes a weapon to render the people we love harmless, even if it means that we crush them. What relationship do you have with writing from this point of view?
Ferrante: Writing is an act of pride. I’ve always known that, and so for a long time I hid the fact that I was writing, especially from the people I loved. I was afraid of exposing myself and of others’ disapproval. Jane Austen organized herself so that she could immediately hide her pages if someone came into the room where she had taken refuge. It’s a reaction I’m familiar with: you’re ashamed of your presumptuousness, because there is nothing that can justify it, not even success. However I state it, the fact remains that I have assumed the right to imprison others in what I seem to see, feel, think, imagine, and know. Is it a task? A mission? A vocation? Who called on me, who assigned me that task and that mission? A god? A people? A social class? A party? The culture industry? The lowly, the disinherited, the lost causes? The entire human race? The elusive subject that is women? My mother, my female friends? No—by now it’s blindingly obvious that I alone authorized myself. I assigned myself, for motives that are obscure even to me, the job of describing what I know of my era, that is—in its simplest form—what happened under my nose, that is to say the life, the dreams, the fantasies, the languages of a narrow group of people and events, within a restricted space, in an unimportant language made even less important by the use I make of it. One tends to say: let’s not overdo it, it’s only a job. It may be that things are like that now. Things change, and the verbal vestments in which we wrap them change. But pride remains. I remain, I who spend a large part of my day reading and writing, because I have assigned myself the task of describing. And I cannot soothe myself by saying: it’s a job. When did I ever consider writing a job? I’ve never written to earn a living. I write to bear witness to the fact that I have lived and have sought a yardstick for myself and for others, since those others couldn’t or didn’t know how or didn’t want to do it. What is this if not pride? And what does it imply if not “You don’t know how to see me and see yourselves, but I see myself and I see you”? No, there is no way around it. The only possibility is to learn to put the “I” into perspective, to pour it into the work and then go away, to consider writing something that separates from us the moment it’s complete: one of the many collateral effects of an active life.
In late April, Authors Guild president Roxana Robinson participated in a program exploring the Italian literary sensation Elena Ferrante at the Greene Space in New York City. Robinson joined Ann Goldstein, translator of Ferrante and an editor atThe New Yorker, and the author Judith Thurman for a wide-ranging conversation on the Ferrante phenomenon, touching on the panelists’ own experiences with Ferrante’s work as well as her place in the twenty-first century literary landscape.
A recording of the event, which was co-presented with the PEN World Voices Festival, has now been posted to YouTube.
Take a look here.
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Yes, we have Ferrante Fever! So we’re eagerly awaiting this one, a collection of her non-fiction. We’re looking forward to reading about her perspectives on motherhood and feminism, as well as her choice to remain anonymous (Elena Ferante is a pseudonym).
Ferrante fans, here’s something the whet your appetites: the cover of her next book.
