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A review by arirang
Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey by Elena Ferrante
4.0
"You say it's necessary to do interviews, at least, and that's fine, you're right. Tell Fofi to send me the questions, I'll answer. In these ten years I hope I've grown up.
In my own defence, however, I will say only this: in the games with newspapers one always ends up lying and at the root of the lie is the need to offer oneself to the public in the best form, with thoughts suitable to the role, with the makeup we imagine is suitable."
Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey starts with the much-quoted letter that the author known as [a:Elena Ferrante|44085|Elena Ferrante|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/f_50x66-6a03a5c12233c941481992b82eea8d23.png] wrote to her publishers in 1991, at the time her first book was written:
"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 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."
And it ends with a, I suspect deliberately provocative, "About the Author" section, which simply lists her published books followed by several blank pages.
However, as the opening quote, from a similar letter but written 10 years late at the time of her 2nd novel, suggests, Ferrante did ultimately soften her stance. Increasingly she answered questions from journalists on her books, and indeed questions on her anonymity, although any requests for biographical detail were curtly dismissed, quoting [a:Italo Calvino|155517|Italo Calvino|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1474566352p2/155517.jpg]'s “Ask me what you want to know, but I won’t tell you the truth, of that you can be sure.”
Many of her replies were lengthy expositions on her works, not really tailor-made for newspaper publication, often not even sent to the journalist. In one case she manages to answer five brief, albeit open-ended, questions from a magazine with a 70 page analysis of her first two books.
And it is this piece, printed in this volume, that gives rise both to the title of this book and indeed its very origin as she accepts (or rather doesn't refuse) her publisher's suggestion to publish the piece and similar correspondence as a book, describing it not so much as a stand-alone work but rather an appendix to her novels, "a sort of slightly dense afterword."
The book we have in English is this original book updated for the publication of Ferrante's later novels, right up to her latest, in English and Italian, the Neapolitan Quartet (which incidentally she regards as a single novel).
"Frantumuglia" is a term her mother used to describe "contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart ... a jumble of fragments", much like the condition experienced by Lila in My Beautiful Friend. But Ferrante increasingly used the term in interviews to describe the origin of her own writing, "fragments of memory. ... bits and pieces whose origin is difficult to pinpoint, and which make a noise in your head, sometimes causing discomfort. ... splinters of a possible narrative" from which she pieces together a story.
Ferrante's manifesto of anonymity does raise some rather challenging issues.
Crucially, and as many of her interviewers point out, far from distracting attention from the author's identity, the sense of mystery created has actually served to focus attention on it: rare is the review (including, regrettably, mine) of a Ferrante novel that doesn't at least mention the topic. And that in turn begs the question of whether the whole concept isn't actually designed to drum up publicity.
She responds rather aggressively to journalists raising this, pointing out that they raised the topic not her and claiming her readers (as opposed to journalists) don't care. But one of the longest and certainly the most revealing interview in the book [largely because it is a genuine two-way conversation rather than simply answers with no opportunity for the questioner to follow-up on points raised] is between Ferrante and her Italian publishers (*), and they also spend as much time discussing the issue of her anonymity as they do her works.
Indeed reading between the lines one does rather conclude that the author herself would genuinely prefer if no-one cared or wrote about her identity, whereas her publishers do, understandably, sense and to an extent exploit the commercial potential of the stance.
[* The Paris Review printed a shortened version of the same piece in their wonderful Art of Fiction series https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/elena-ferrante-art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante]
Ferrante's consistent stance is that the author of a book is not to be confused with the complete individual who wrote the books. There are parts of her in the novel but not all of her:
"I am not a supporter of the idea that the author is inessential. I would like only to decide what part of myself should be made public and what instead should remain private. I think that, in art, the life that counts is the life that remains miraculously alive in the works."
But interestingly she pushes back on the concept that the author itself can be absent from a novel, arguing that, in the Neopolitan books, "Elena" the author is different from "Elena" the narrator. She believes in the importance of "providing the reader with the elements that enable him to distinguish me from the narrating "I" ... The passionate reader deserves to be enabled to also extract the author's physiognomy from every word or grammatical violation or syntactical knot in the text, just has happens for characters, for a landscape, for a feeling, for a slow or agitated act...this seems to me much more than signing copies in a bookstore, defacing them with trite phrases."
Ferrante's anonymity has also led to many questions as to whether "Elena Ferrante" is more than just a pseudonym and actually a false front, that the limited biographical details she has acknowledged are false, that the pseudonym might disguise an already famous author, different people writing each book, or, most perniciously in Ferrante's eyes (and the one detail she insists in contradicting, since this would be a betrayal of her writing) that she may be a man.
As to the accusation that there may even be more than one writer using the pseudonym Ferrante, turns this back to support one of the very points her anonymity makes, that one has to work hard as a reader to detect the author if there is no picture on the cover:
The experts stare at the empty frame where the image of the author is supposed to be and they don’t have the technical tools, or, more simply, the true passion and sensitivity as readers, to fill that space with the works. So they forget that every individual work has its own story. Only the label of the name or a rigorous philological examination allows us to take for granted that the author of Dubliners is the same person who wrote Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The cultural education of any high school student should include the idea that a writer adapts depending on what he or she needs to express.
The other accusation sometimes levelled at Ferrante's novels is that they are little more than up-market chick-lit. This isn't helped by the branding and covers of the English editions:
This Frantamuglia very successfully refutes, mostly not by assertion but instead by the brilliance of Ferrante's writing on her own works, her themes, her influences, even unpublished sections from some of her works that explain her thought processes.
But she does admit to using tools to hook the reader while at the same time refusing the bounds of genre fiction:
I publish to be read. It’s the only thing that interests me about publication. So I employ all the strategies I know to capture the reader’s attention, stimulate curiosity, make the page as dense as possible and as easy as possible to turn.
But once I have the reader’s attention I feel it is my right to pull it in whichever direction I choose. I don’t think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn’t one. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones.
And as a final point that struck me, she both neatly skewers the type of political writing that, e.g. won the 2016 Booker Prize:
"But what of any real political effect? In general it seems to me disappointing: a rhetorically complicit nudge given to a public that is already convinced."
and, through her comments on Silvio Berlusconi in 2002, anticipates the events of 2016:
"The construction of his figure as a democratically elected economic-political-television Duce will remain a perfectible, repeatable model...(He has) practically demonstrated that the interests off an individual can be installed overnight, thanks to a business group (not a political party), on top of the political dissatisfaction of half of Italy, higher classes and lower classes, passed off as a heroic story of national salvation and, above all, without extinguishing democratic assurances."
(Albeit in 2002 she attributes this to people suspending credulity and treating everything they are told as true, whereas to me 2016 is the pay-truth age where no one believes anything and so a lie or an unsubstantiated assertion is as valid as the truth or an expert opinion. )
Overall a wonderful "slightly dense afterword" to Ferrante's impressive novels, but best read if one is already familiar with them to get the most from it.
In my own defence, however, I will say only this: in the games with newspapers one always ends up lying and at the root of the lie is the need to offer oneself to the public in the best form, with thoughts suitable to the role, with the makeup we imagine is suitable."
Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey starts with the much-quoted letter that the author known as [a:Elena Ferrante|44085|Elena Ferrante|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/f_50x66-6a03a5c12233c941481992b82eea8d23.png] wrote to her publishers in 1991, at the time her first book was written:
"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 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."
And it ends with a, I suspect deliberately provocative, "About the Author" section, which simply lists her published books followed by several blank pages.
However, as the opening quote, from a similar letter but written 10 years late at the time of her 2nd novel, suggests, Ferrante did ultimately soften her stance. Increasingly she answered questions from journalists on her books, and indeed questions on her anonymity, although any requests for biographical detail were curtly dismissed, quoting [a:Italo Calvino|155517|Italo Calvino|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1474566352p2/155517.jpg]'s “Ask me what you want to know, but I won’t tell you the truth, of that you can be sure.”
Many of her replies were lengthy expositions on her works, not really tailor-made for newspaper publication, often not even sent to the journalist. In one case she manages to answer five brief, albeit open-ended, questions from a magazine with a 70 page analysis of her first two books.
And it is this piece, printed in this volume, that gives rise both to the title of this book and indeed its very origin as she accepts (or rather doesn't refuse) her publisher's suggestion to publish the piece and similar correspondence as a book, describing it not so much as a stand-alone work but rather an appendix to her novels, "a sort of slightly dense afterword."
The book we have in English is this original book updated for the publication of Ferrante's later novels, right up to her latest, in English and Italian, the Neapolitan Quartet (which incidentally she regards as a single novel).
"Frantumuglia" is a term her mother used to describe "contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart ... a jumble of fragments", much like the condition experienced by Lila in My Beautiful Friend. But Ferrante increasingly used the term in interviews to describe the origin of her own writing, "fragments of memory. ... bits and pieces whose origin is difficult to pinpoint, and which make a noise in your head, sometimes causing discomfort. ... splinters of a possible narrative" from which she pieces together a story.
Ferrante's manifesto of anonymity does raise some rather challenging issues.
Crucially, and as many of her interviewers point out, far from distracting attention from the author's identity, the sense of mystery created has actually served to focus attention on it: rare is the review (including, regrettably, mine) of a Ferrante novel that doesn't at least mention the topic. And that in turn begs the question of whether the whole concept isn't actually designed to drum up publicity.
She responds rather aggressively to journalists raising this, pointing out that they raised the topic not her and claiming her readers (as opposed to journalists) don't care. But one of the longest and certainly the most revealing interview in the book [largely because it is a genuine two-way conversation rather than simply answers with no opportunity for the questioner to follow-up on points raised] is between Ferrante and her Italian publishers (*), and they also spend as much time discussing the issue of her anonymity as they do her works.
Indeed reading between the lines one does rather conclude that the author herself would genuinely prefer if no-one cared or wrote about her identity, whereas her publishers do, understandably, sense and to an extent exploit the commercial potential of the stance.
[* The Paris Review printed a shortened version of the same piece in their wonderful Art of Fiction series https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/elena-ferrante-art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante]
Ferrante's consistent stance is that the author of a book is not to be confused with the complete individual who wrote the books. There are parts of her in the novel but not all of her:
"I am not a supporter of the idea that the author is inessential. I would like only to decide what part of myself should be made public and what instead should remain private. I think that, in art, the life that counts is the life that remains miraculously alive in the works."
But interestingly she pushes back on the concept that the author itself can be absent from a novel, arguing that, in the Neopolitan books, "Elena" the author is different from "Elena" the narrator. She believes in the importance of "providing the reader with the elements that enable him to distinguish me from the narrating "I" ... The passionate reader deserves to be enabled to also extract the author's physiognomy from every word or grammatical violation or syntactical knot in the text, just has happens for characters, for a landscape, for a feeling, for a slow or agitated act...this seems to me much more than signing copies in a bookstore, defacing them with trite phrases."
Ferrante's anonymity has also led to many questions as to whether "Elena Ferrante" is more than just a pseudonym and actually a false front, that the limited biographical details she has acknowledged are false, that the pseudonym might disguise an already famous author, different people writing each book, or, most perniciously in Ferrante's eyes (and the one detail she insists in contradicting, since this would be a betrayal of her writing) that she may be a man.
As to the accusation that there may even be more than one writer using the pseudonym Ferrante, turns this back to support one of the very points her anonymity makes, that one has to work hard as a reader to detect the author if there is no picture on the cover:
The experts stare at the empty frame where the image of the author is supposed to be and they don’t have the technical tools, or, more simply, the true passion and sensitivity as readers, to fill that space with the works. So they forget that every individual work has its own story. Only the label of the name or a rigorous philological examination allows us to take for granted that the author of Dubliners is the same person who wrote Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The cultural education of any high school student should include the idea that a writer adapts depending on what he or she needs to express.
The other accusation sometimes levelled at Ferrante's novels is that they are little more than up-market chick-lit. This isn't helped by the branding and covers of the English editions:
This Frantamuglia very successfully refutes, mostly not by assertion but instead by the brilliance of Ferrante's writing on her own works, her themes, her influences, even unpublished sections from some of her works that explain her thought processes.
But she does admit to using tools to hook the reader while at the same time refusing the bounds of genre fiction:
I publish to be read. It’s the only thing that interests me about publication. So I employ all the strategies I know to capture the reader’s attention, stimulate curiosity, make the page as dense as possible and as easy as possible to turn.
But once I have the reader’s attention I feel it is my right to pull it in whichever direction I choose. I don’t think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn’t one. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones.
And as a final point that struck me, she both neatly skewers the type of political writing that, e.g. won the 2016 Booker Prize:
"But what of any real political effect? In general it seems to me disappointing: a rhetorically complicit nudge given to a public that is already convinced."
and, through her comments on Silvio Berlusconi in 2002, anticipates the events of 2016:
"The construction of his figure as a democratically elected economic-political-television Duce will remain a perfectible, repeatable model...(He has) practically demonstrated that the interests off an individual can be installed overnight, thanks to a business group (not a political party), on top of the political dissatisfaction of half of Italy, higher classes and lower classes, passed off as a heroic story of national salvation and, above all, without extinguishing democratic assurances."
(Albeit in 2002 she attributes this to people suspending credulity and treating everything they are told as true, whereas to me 2016 is the pay-truth age where no one believes anything and so a lie or an unsubstantiated assertion is as valid as the truth or an expert opinion. )
Overall a wonderful "slightly dense afterword" to Ferrante's impressive novels, but best read if one is already familiar with them to get the most from it.