The Italian novelist who writes under the pseudonym Elena Ferrante and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, became an international phenomenon with My Brilliant Friend, the first of her Neapolitan novel quartet. Recently, well-known investigative journalist Claudio Gatti published a story in the New York Review of Books outing the author as German translator Anita Raja, who works at Edizioni E/O (Ferrante’s publishing house) and lives in Rome with her husband, the writer Domenico Starnone (who himself has been “accused” many times of being Elena Ferrante). Both refused to comment.
Yet the Italian literary circles did not hold back and reacted with unprecedented anger to the unmasking, especially because of the follow-the-money approach, usually reserved for corruption schemes by politicians or mafia members. Not to mention the accusation of sexism made against the reporter Gatti, whose investigative job for Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, in the past, had focused on completely different deals, like the Oil For Food scandal or Madoff fraud.
Gatti used the same techniques to report on the translator’s real estate and financial records, showing a dramatic increase in payments from Edizioni E/O to Raja since 2014. Gatti, who received the financial records of Edizione E/O (all the payment and revenue) from an anonymous source, said that the extraordinary increases of Raja’s 2015 revenues, up of 150 percent to Euro 7,615,203, is the smoking gun, the result of Ferrante’s sales.
In Italy the dispute is turning out to be less about the financial mystery and more about linguistic chauvinism: one of the proofs of the Ferrante-Raja hypothesis is that the translator acquired a luxury seven-room apartment in Rome, in her own name (in the Italian article said “da sola e non con il marito”, which means “alone and not with her husband”). Also, as feminist groups pointed out, Gatti underlines the male role in the story: “By contrast, the new financial information leads directly to Raja, while leaving open the possibility of some kind of unofficial collaboration with her husband, the writer Starnone”. Sandro Ferri, the co-owner of Edizione E/O, called the report “an invasion of privacy” asking to stop the siege: “It is disgusting to see a great Italian author, loved and celebrated in our country and across the world, treated like a criminal. What higher public interest could the investigation led by Claudio Gatti have served?” said in a statement.
Who’s afraid of Elena Ferrante? Reacting angrily to this revelation, Italian writers and admirers seem not to care about Ferrante identity. Gatti wrote that Anita Raja is the daughter of a German-born Jewish woman who escaped the Holocaust and was reunited with her family in Naples, where the woman met Raja’s father, a Neapolitan magistrate. Anita Raja has never attended the Normale University, the elite university in Pisa where Elena Ferrante studied in Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, but Gatti discovered that Viola Starnone, Raja and Starnone’s daughter, graduated there.
From George Eliot to Banksy, anonymity has a history, and Italian authors are now ready to protect Elena’s pen name. The (originally) anonymous Wu Ming group went to war on Twitter: “Instead of focusing on Elena Ferrante’s identity, wouldn’t (it) be better to use the intellect and the investigative capacity against the corruption?”. The awarded Michela Murgia said to Io Donna magazine: “Behind the Sole 24 Ore’s story I only can see a punishment. Successful people can’t have a private life. This can be called in different ways, but definitely not good journalism”.
While Erri De Luca explained to Adnkronos agency: “This sort of surveys the capital would do well to use them to flush out the dodgers instead of the authors”. The fierce backlash from the literary world reflects the readers’ feelings. They only believe what Elena Ferrante wrote in the Frantumaglia, quoting Italo Calvino: “Ask me what you want to know, but I won’t tell you the truth, of that you can be sure”.
The post Here’s why literary fans are angry about the Ferrante-Raja unmasking appeared first on VOGUE India.