Author of My Brilliant Friend explains her anonymity in Paris Review

Thu Jan 14 23:48:19 CST 2016

One more thing about the Neapolitan novels in the US is that they were published by Europa Publishing which, after My Brilliant Friend was such a hit,  put a great deal of talent behind hyping the whole set. 

Ferrante had wanted to publish the whole thing as one book - it was all ready to go -  but the Italian publishers said it was too long so she had to parcel it out and add to what was there to flesh out four individual books.  I kind of wish I’d waited to read them at one time because it would have been more as the author intended - but maybe not.  Each book had to be translated individually so it was out later - same thing happens with Eco’s books - a year delay for translating.  My Brilliant Friend got an award for translation, though - it’s quite nicely done - as far as I’d know. 

Becky    

> On Jan 14, 2016, at 7:18 PM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the Paris Review interview, Paul!  
> 
> I’ve read The Neapolitan Quartet (all of it- as they came out!) and I loved it.  The first book (My Brilliant Friend)  is probably best with the last book (The Story of the Lost Child)  being a close second.  
> 
> I think what Ferrante writes about is more personal than what Pynchon writes about.  I can’t say as I blame her not wanting her name in the press for all her old Naples neighbors to see - even if the Naples neighborhood today is nothing like what it was in the 1940s (for MBF).   Also what she said about Italian novelist recognition was interesting to me - that they have to be an academic first and then their novels might get noticed - that certainly says Umberto Eco (and others). 
> 
> And that idea mirrors the career of Elena in the Quartet where she becomes a famous writer but only through academia.  I wonder if Ferrante is or was an academic - I suspect so.  I suspect that the Quartet is comprised of the fragmented memories and reconstructed/re-imagined narrative of her life (I appreciated her answer to the narrator’s question in the interview.)  Imo, this will be a classic in women’s studies.  
> 
> I thought Pynchon avoided the press because of the change it might produce in the way he approached his writing.  He was writing for either whomever he imagined his readership to be, or strictly for himself.  He didn’t want to get hung up on writing for a specific readership as indicated by some reporter.  I can’t see him ever talking to an interviewer about the type of stuff Ferrante discussed with the Paris Review people.  (But then, he doesn’t write the same kind of fiction!)  American novelists are famous in their own right - in fact some readers love debut authors while others go for the old standards.  Our novelists are often teachers of creative writing somewhere and/or graduates of the Iowa program (not so much anymore?)  Our novelists are not usually the scholars that Eco -  or Tabucchi (languages-literature) or Barrico (philosophy) lol.   
> 
> 
> Becky 
> 
>> On Jan 14, 2016, at 10:56 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Isn't the complaint about the media yet another clever spin on the death or disappearance of the author? One that, in protesting preserves the author privilege while suppressing the real meaning of his death or disappearance? 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 12:40 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I like all this and think TRP might agree. look what publicity has
>> done for-to-Franzen, just for one example.
>> 
>> On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 11:06 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> "Elena Ferrante" is more Pynchonian than Pynchon.  Now considered leading
>>> Italian novelist of her era.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> INTERVIEWER
>>> 
>>> Many American reviews seem to make a direct connection between the work you
>>> do writing—its sincerity, its honesty—and your keeping out of the public
>>> eye. As if to say, the less one appears, the better one writes.
>>> 
>>> FERRANTE
>>> 
>>> Two decades are a long time, and the reasons for the decisions I made in
>>> 1990, when we first considered my need to avoid the rituals of publication,
>>> have changed. Back then, I was frightened at the thought of having to come
>>> out of my shell. Timidity prevailed. Later, I came to feel hostility toward
>>> the media, which doesn’t pay attention to books themselves and values a work
>>> according to the author’s reputation. It’s surprising, for example, how the
>>> most widely admired Italian writers and poets are also known as scholars or
>>> are employed in high-level editorial jobs or in other prestigious fields.
>>> It’s as if literature were not capable of demonstrating its seriousness
>>> simply through texts, but required “external” credentials. In a similar
>>> category—if we leave the university or the publisher’s office—are the
>>> literary contributions of politicians, journalists, singers, actors,
>>> directors, television producers, et cetera. Here, too, the works do not
>>> find in themselves authorization for their existence but need a pass that
>>> comes from work done in other fields. “I’m a success in this or that field,
>>> I’ve acquired an audience, and therefore I wrote and published a novel.”
>>> It’s not the book that counts, but the aura of its author. If the aura is
>>> already there, and the media reinforces it, the publishing world is happy to
>>> open its doors and the market is very happy to welcome you. If it’s not
>>> there but the book miraculously sells, the media invents the author, so the
>>> writer ends up selling not only his work but also himself, his image.
>>> 
>>> INTERVIEWER
>>> 
>>> You were saying that the reasons for staying in the shadows have changed a
>>> bit.
>>> 
>>> FERRANTE
>>> 
>>> I’m still very interested in testifying against the self-promotion
>>> obsessively imposed by the media. This demand for self-promotion
>>> diminishes the actual work of art, whatever that art may be, and it has
>>> become universal. The media simply can’t discuss a work of literature
>>> without pointing to some writer-hero. And yet there is no work of literature
>>> that is not the fruit of tradition, of many skills, of a sort of collective
>>> intelligence. We wrongfully diminish this collective intelligence when we
>>> insist on there being a single protagonist behind every work of art. The
>>> individual person is, of course, necessary, but I’m not talking about the
>>> individual—I’m talking about a manufactured image.
>>> 
>>> What has never lost importance for me, over these two and a half decades,
>>> is the creative space that absence opened up for me. Once I knew that the
>>> completed book would make its way in the world without me, once I knew that
>>> nothing of the concrete, physical me would ever appear beside the volume—as
>>> if the book were a little dog and I were its master—it made me see something
>>> new about writing. I felt as though I had released the words from myself.
>>> 
>>> http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante
>>> 
>>> 
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>> 
> 
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l