Elena Ferrante Stays Out of the Picture

Love the fact that Ferrante gave so much input and control on the screenplay. Can’t wait to watch the series and probably gonna read those books again.

Since Merve Emre teaches English, I imagine Professor Emre attempting to interview the 16th century author behind the pseudonym "William Shakespeare." Authors use pen names for countless internal and external reasons, but they often prefer to remain "in the shadows." For more on the pen name Shakespeare-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsdVFkBZqfM

I can't for the life of me figure out Ferrante's popularity. I tried reading My Brilliant Friend. It was boring beyond belief. In general, I've found reading about children/teenagers growing up appeals to those who are teenagers/children, not adults. I did read one of her other books and I will say I will never, ever pick up another book by this author. It was filled with violence (including animal torture--a deal breaker for me). If I had known about that, instead of relying on "public opinion," to decide who is a "good" author, I would have passed on it. No thank you to the movie.

The Ferrante moment seems to have passed (and none too soon, in my view). Perhaps this show will revive it. I'll never understand why Ferrante's Neapolitan novels found such favor with English-speaking readers, especially given the tremendous riches, most of them undiscovered by readers outside Italy, of Italian literature from 1945 to about 1995.

I'm shocked to read that the director considered cutting the banquet scene from the show. From the previews it looks like it will be good, but how can you cut something so pivotal to the novel? The moment wen Elena realsed exactly what htey all are.

I have read and loved the Neapolitan saga, and read many of her earlier novels. Interesting that this story does not name the person discovered by the Italian journalist to be the author, yet the Times ran a long story on that story itself. The whole nom de plume grew tiring long ago. Most people who read her books know who she is, and few care. As she perhaps wants, the books are the thing.

Emre should have provided more accurate information about authorship. She reports in 2006, two physicists used stylometric analysis to compare Ferrante’s novels against a corpus of Italian literature and concluded that Ferrante was most likely the Italian novelist Domenico Starnone. However, 4 groups of analysts using different text analysis programs independently came to the conclusion that Starnone was the principal author of books attributed to Ferrante. Emre states that “Ten years later, the reporter Claudio Gatti used Edizioni E/O’s leaked financial statements to name someone else, a woman.” Emre does not note that the woman Gatti identified was Anita Raja, the wife of Domenico Starnone and that Gatti left open the possibility of collaboration between Raja and Starnone. When I first read about the identification of Starnone as the probable author, I was skeptical. I thought it was impossible that a man could have written this deeply felt account of female experience. I am no longer convinced this is the case and can no longer discount the evidence pointing to Starnone’s authorship. Ferrante’s publishers may fear that if a male is acknowledged as the co-author of Ferrante’s books, many readers will feel deceived, and book sales will plummet. My guess is that many readers will be intrigued by the collaboration of a man and woman on books that so powerfully explore gender roles. http://karenbojar.com/in-search-of-elena-ferrrante/

Emre should have included more up to date and accurate information regarding the authorship of Ferrante’s novels. She reports that in 2006, two physicists using stylometric analysis to compare Ferrante’s novels against a corpus of Italian literature concluded that Ferrante was most likely the novelist Domenico Starnone. However, four groups of analysts using different text analysis programs independently concluded that Starnone was the principal author of the books attributed to Ferrante. Emre then states that “Ten years later, the reporter Claudio Gatti used Edizioni E/O’s leaked financial statements to name someone else, a woman.” She fails to note that the woman Gatti identified was Anita Raja, the wife of Domenico Starnone and that Gatti left open the possibility of collaboration between Raja and Starnone When I first read about the identification of Starnone as the probable author (or co-author), I dismissed it out of hand. I thought it was impossible that a man could have written this deeply felt account of female experience. I am no longer convinced this is the case and can no longer discount the evidence pointing to Starnone’s authorship. Ferrante’s publishers may fear that if a man is acknowledged as the co-author of Ferrante’s books, many of Ferrante’s readers will feel deceived and book sales will plummet. My guess is that many readers will be intrigued by the collaboration of a man and woman on books that so powerfully explore gender roles.

By the nature of her questions, the author, Merve Emre, who has degrees from Harvard and Yale, asks Elena Ferrante to don the unfamiliar hat of an academic. This creates an asymmetrical situation, of which Ferrante is surely aware. I don't blame Ferrante then for being oblique, especially in light of the interviewer's inability to forward her own authentic I and instead proffer the I of a distanced theorist, who nevertheless is able to fabricate specious narratives about her own son.

I am very much looking forward to the television adaptation. Elena Ferrante's novels have a core truth about them, something so dangerous, provocative, and closely observed, that to me they read as [auto]biographical. Although the style, language, and settings are very different, the novels remind me of the novel "Anya", about the experiences of a girl in Nazi Poland, a story which was later determined to be largely based [transcribed] on the dictated experiences of a real person to the author (Susan Fromberg Schaeffer]. Ferrante's novels do what the best literature does: they make you feel as if you have lived/are living more than one life. They are spectacular art.

Feel like this justifies my decision not to get started on reading this series. Don't have time for these silly games. Elena Ferrante can go shack up with J.D. Salinger for all I care.

"Only by understanding that it is impossible to reduce anyone, no matter who, to a truth he would not have generated on his own...We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone." Edouard Gilssant, "For Opacity," 1995.

As much as you formulated questions to Ferrante as a means to an end of interviewing her, many of your questions were more about you, which, is perhaps why she didn’t respond to them. For example, you write that your two year old son has an obsession with Ferrante’s On the Beach at Night, and has two copies, one that he brings to school with him. Did he manage to procure on his own the other copy through his obsession? Again, you make it about yourself in labeling yourself the “subordinate” and write to her that you would be disappointed if your children don’t realize that you have your own separate life, apart from theirs. Ferrante did not answer to you about her influences because they varied according to her stage of life, but said she’d get back to you. She also gave a far reaching answer about whether a mother was rich or poor impacting her view of motherhood, an answer that again you made you feel rebuffed. Considering that you wanted to compel her to give you answers that were useful to you (in your own words) it’s no wonder why she became more distanced or as you put it, an imbalanced collaboration. It is no wonder why Ferrante usually declines interviews. It is pointless to try to pin down ambiguity by the master of it.

Elena Ferrante is clearly invested in cultivating and maintaining her mystique. But I wonder how much of Emre's frustration with Ferrante during the interview process might be explained by poor translation. Ann Goldstein's translation of the books was syntactically clumsy and failed to capture the sweep and poetry of the original Italian. (This is also true of other works she has translated from Italian to English.) The sheer narrative force of the stories kept me going when the awkward, stilted sentence structure in the English edition was so maddening and distracting that I wanted to give up.

Read all four books in Italian and was incredibly sad to finish. I doled our the final pages. The wedding banquet in “My Brilliant Friend” is focal to the novel. It is such telling writing and characterization. It made me cry, and seemed unbearably poignant though objectively I couldn’t see a reason to be so moved. I’m looking forward to watching, and I’m glad Ferrante insisted it remain.

I am not going to comment on the intricacies of directing and acting in a film. Frankly, I would sound foolish! But I will say this: Just the mere fact that "My Brilliant Friend" will be made into a movie for the small screen thrills me. I read all four of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels which followed the turbulent but oh-so-rich and poignant lives of Lenu and Lila. I was mesmerized. The elusive Ms Ferrante's writing is exquisite, her story-telling reaching a pinnacle of perfection. I say kudos to Costanzo for undertaking a work of literary art. I do not think he can go wrong considering his source. And I will say now, "Please, sir, continue your mission to bring these novels to the screen from "My Brilliant Friend" to that final glorious "The Story of the Lost Child."

Interesting. As a film writer who's worked with many directors, some quite famous, adaptation is a challenge for both writer and director. A smart screenwriter learns early never to be reverential about their own material. But sometimes a director hijacks the script and uses it to say what they want to and couldn't. Other times he or she serves it well and brings out better things in it. But unless they're famous like Ms. Ferrante, the writer is always lower on the totem pole. If the director doesn't like you, it's your parking space that's gone the next day, not the director's. Over the years it's become obvious to me that much of this results from a basic difference in the personality of a writer versus that of a director. They are naturally, and probably necessarily, worlds apart. Unlike the more reticent writer, the modern director must be a salesperson as well as artist.

For those of us who were swept away by the Neapolitan Quartet as readers, who filled in the spaces that Ferrante left for our own conjectures and analogies, we anticipate a filmed version of this great story with some dread, a fear, perhaps, that the memories we have constructed of her characters will be somehow lessened, or worse, will cancel out our memories altogether.