The suffering of Delia, Olga, Leda is the result of disappointment. What they expected from life—they are women who sought to break with the tradition of their mothers and their grandmothers—does not arrive. Old ghosts arrive instead, the same ones with whom the women of the past had to reckon. The difference is that these women don’t submit to them passively. Instead, they fight, and they cope. They don’t win, but they simply come to an agreement with their own expectations and find new equilibriums. I feel them not as women who are suffering but as women who are struggling.
I am simply in love with your writing. I am not at all curious about you as a person, because I know about you the only thing that interests me: what resonates within us through the words in your stories.
I know that you’re a woman because in your pages a woman feels, suffers, and is tormented. A man would be able at most to understand those pages, but not to write them: not even that chameleon Tolstoy, who, in fact, didn’t do a bad job with Anna Karenina. I would like to know: what do you read, what do you like to read?
Do you know Paula Fox, the author of Desperate Characters? She is a writer I like as much as I like you. In her stories there is an analogous, terrible, pleasurable suspense. She has been translated into Italian, very well, by a man. So, at most, you could be a man of that type, trapped in the atmosphere of a book by a woman that he has translated, somewhat Zelig-like.
Gratefully yours,
Cristina
Thank you for your encouraging words. Above all I was struck by your phrase “what resonates within us.” I also like books for what resonates within us. While I was writing The Lost Daughter, I was reading a novel entitled Olivia, published by Einaudi in 1959 and translated by Carlo Fruttero. The book was published anonymously in 1949, by the Hogarth Press, in London. I think its pages have a fine resonance and I recommend it to you. As for Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, although I’m grateful for the comparison, you are too generous. Desperate Characters is a book that I love for its narrative intensity, but it has a richness of meaning that I feel unfortunately far from achieving myself.
I read The Days of Abandonment, and I want to say that you are a woman, because one feels exactly like that when one is abandoned by those heartless beings, men. On the other hand, you could be a man, because you must also be someone who is aware of the harm you do (I’m thinking of the great Tolstoy of The Kreutzer Sonata). Congratulations, in any case. Reveal, if you will, the mystery of your identity, or, if not, well, art is superior in any case.
Yours,
Mariateresa G.
Thank you for reading The Days of Abandonment. I don’t think that art, as you say, can disregard artifice.
I think, rather, that one who writes ends up, whether he wants to or not, entirely in his writing. The author is always there, in the text, which therefore contains everything needed to solve the mysteries that matter. It’s pointless to consider the ones that don’t.
Dear Friends of Fahrenheit,
I’m writing to point out something rather unusual concerning the main character, Leda, in Elena Ferrante’s latest book, The Lost Daughter (which I haven’t read yet, but which will soon be given to me as a gift). So, I live in Naples, my name is Leda, I have a degree in English (I teach and translate), I’ve been divorced for several years, and I have two teenage children. I’m curious: is the mysterious Elena (who, according to myth, is Leda’s daughter) possibly someone who knows me?
With best wishes and admiration,
Leda
Dear Leda, what can I tell you? Those who write stories hope that readers will find reason to identify with their characters, and not only with their vital statistics. When you’ve read the book, write and tell me if your affinities with my Leda extend beyond her name. I count on it, given that you are a reader who promises to give a certain gratification. In a few words in parenthesis, you made an observation that is important for me concerning the Leda-Elena link.
I did not choose the name Leda randomly. Leda—as high-school students and painters know better than anyone—is the girl with whom Zeus unites in the form of a swan. But if interested readers of Fahrenheit check, just to entertain themselves, in the third book of the Library, by Apollodorus, they will discover that, in a version of the myth that is less well known, Leda is in the middle of a complicated, modern question of maternity.
This is the story: Zeus, having taken the form of a swan, united not with Leda but with Nemesis, who, in order to escape from him, changed herself into a goose. “As a result of the union,” Apollodorus summarizes, “Nemesis laid an egg that a shepherd found in the woods and brought to Leda as a gift. Leda placed it in an urn and, in due time, Elena was born and Leda reared her as her daughter.” This Leda and this Elena, her daughter-non-daughter, gave me the names for the two characters in The Lost Daughter. If you read it, you’ll see.
Dear author,
The mystery that surrounds you doesn’t help me get a sense of you. I need the visual.
I would need to see you. Be sure whether you are a man or a woman. Establish an idea of your age. Deduce from your gaze what might have been your life style, in what social class to put you. I know that Carlo Emilio Gadda comes from a bourgeois family, that he was dominated by his mother and oppressed by the authoritarian character of his father. It’s very important to have an overall sense of the personality of a writer. When I read something that fascinates me, I am immediately interested in the substance of the personality that has attracted my attention. The virtual disturbs me. I appreciate your writing but not the darkness that surrounds you. Darkness is always darkness.
Respectfully yours.
I thank you for your appreciation. I have to say, however, that, from my point of view, each reader, if he or she loves to read, must also love the virtual. What does writing describe, if not the outline of a virtual world? As for the question of darkness, what is better than reading in a room that is dark except for the light of a single reading lamp? Or what is better than the darkness of a theater or a cinema? The personality of a novelist exists utterly in the virtual realm of his or her books. Look there and you will find eyes, sex, lifestyle, social class, and the id.
Of Elena Ferrante’s books I have read Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment, and some essays and interviews. Of the two novels, which are different in ideational structure and technical composition, I really loved The Days of Abandonment, for its angular, sharp writing.
To strip down language means, for Ferrante, to strip down concepts. In her books, however, “pared to the bone” is equivalent not to a simplification but to what results from a thorough introspective analysis, which leads one to reflect on the basic questions: solitude, the elucidation of suffering, love. In the process of this fierce, inexhaustible search for meaning, the writing carves states of mind and feelings, displaying their contradictions and ambiguities.
Some questions: What does Elena Ferrante read? What is her relationship with the classics, Greek tragedy in particular? What does she think of the relationship between reading and school?
Thanks,
Roberta C.
I am grateful for your kind words. I was a passionate reader, and as a girl I wrote a lot about the classical world, for my own pleasure and also for school. In the tragedians, especially Sophocles, I always find something, even a few words that kindle my imagination. As for the relation of school with reading, I know little or nothing. From my observation post as a mother, I can say that the sensibility of the teacher is very important. A teacher who doesn’t love reading communicates this deficiency even if he presents himself to his students as a passionate reader.
Dear Elena Ferrante, I’m a passionate reader of your stories, which I find to be extraordinary explorations of our inner complexity. I’m curious about one small thing: is the name you chose to sign your books an homage to Elsa Morante? I confess that even if you reject this hypo
thesis, I’d like to go on believing it.
Warm regards and best wishes for the future,
Carla A.
I love Elsa Morante’s books very much, and, if it pleases you, by all means hold on to your hypothesis. Names and surnames are labels. My great-grandmother, whose name I bear and who has been dead so long that she is now a fictional character, will not be offended.
Dear author, Elena Ferrante,
I haven’t read your books. From the films, which I’ve seen and liked not only for their power but also for the problems they raise, I imagined that your writing is important, readable, and powerful. Rarely have I seen such profound analyses of the feelings and the inner life of women. Our inner suffering is usually dismissed with an offensive phrase: hysteria. On what provokes the hysteria, absolute silence. Thank you for illuminating our subsoil. I’m sure you will help us to grow and to be respected. I recognize myself in what you bring to the surface. I, too, when my children (a male of forty-eight, a female of forty-two) left to follow their own paths, began to live and to appreciate the blue of the sky. The same thing happened when I realized that my love for my husband had no reason to exist. Like Olga, I, too, after suffering and plunging into the abyss of despair, took the first steps toward self-esteem. I’m a little sorry that you have decided not to reveal who you are. Someone has suggested that behind your anonymity there is a man, Goffredo Fofi. I’m firmly convinced that when people can look each other in the eye everything becomes more tangible. However, my admiration for the subjects that you deal with will not diminish, whatever your physical form. Now that Fahrenheit has drawn my attention to you, I will read your books. Ultimately, that’s what counts.
The body is all we have and it shouldn’t be underestimated. The films you’ve seen are, precisely, literally, a “giving body” to what is in the writing of the books. I’m convinced, however, that potentially a page has more body than a film. We have to activate all our physical resources as writers and readers to make it function. Writing and reading are great investments of physicality. In writing and reading, in composing signs and deciphering them, there is an involvement of the body that compares only with writing, performing, and listening to music.
Dear Fahrenheit,
I was blown away by the novel Troubling Love when it came out. On the contrary, I was bitterly disappointed by The Days of Abandonment, so much so that I suspected, given the mystery surrounding the author, that behind the same pseudonym there was another, less brilliant and less original mind. A negligible book with a predictable story, linguistically flat, stylistically unoriginal. I didn’t want to buy the new book that has just come out under the name Elena Ferrante. But I was curious. I also saw the film Troubling Love, directed by Mario Martone, and rarely have I seen such stylistic consonance in a film adaptation of a novel, a sensibility so closely shared by two different artists. Might it be that the original Elena Ferrante is in reality Martone?
Best wishes,
Stella
Dear Stella, it is the sensibility of readers, tastes, and an occasional common place that establish difference, distance, and dissimilarity between the various books that one writes in the course of a lifetime. Without wanting to confuse wool with silk, I put it to you: why not ask if the original Verga is the same who wrote The House by the Medlar-Tree, if the author of The House by the Medlar-Tree is the same who wrote Mastro Don Gesualdo? The minute you remove the label “Verga” from those books, you will see how confusing it gets. To satisfy your curiosity, I can only assure you of one thing: judge the three books as you wish, but, for better or worse, all three are mine.
Questions for Ferrante: What books about abandonment did you read before writing The Days of? Why do you hide?
Thanks,
Carlotta
Dear Carlotta, none, if you mean works of nonfiction. But over the years I’ve read works of literature about many abandoned women, from Ariadne to Medea, from Dido to de Beauvoir’s Woman Destroyed. Only after the publication of my book, very late, did I find in my hands a difficult but interesting text by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. But right now I can’t remember the exact title or the publisher.
Thank you, Elena. With your books, especially the latest, you have been able, in these thankless times, to clarify, to fill, the empty spaces in the lives of us women, mothers, daughters, workers, even if only for a moment, making us feel less alone. My partner, a man, deeply loved your book as well; it gave us pause for reflection, once again, on aspects of existence that are confusing or, at times, unspeakable.
Elisabetta
Dear Elisabetta, thank you for the verb “to fill”; it’s a beautiful word when it’s used to describe an effect of reading. A book for me must attempt to channel living, magmatic material that cannot easily be reduced to words or to the confessional genre, which is essential for our existence.
Dear Elena Ferrante,
I just read in la Repubblica that the media attention concerning your identity disturbs you in that it distracts from your books. But don’t you think that it is precisely this mystery that aids their success? Don’t you think that if you (like everyone else) were available to talk about them, to show yourself, the “Ferrante phenomenon” would be deflated?
Cristiano A.
Dear Cristiano, this is how I see it: I fear that this annoying insistence on “the mystery” has little, if any, effect on the books, and contributes nothing at all to their success. At most, it gives notoriety to the name of the person who wrote them. A reader, in order to enter a book, must establish a trusting relationship with the text. Media attention, which is based completely on giving voice and body to the star of the moment, has accustomed readers to the idea that the producer of the work counts more than the work. As if to say: I will read you because I like you, I have faith in you, you are my small god. Avoiding this mechanism means, in fact, refusing the current ways of creating trust and trying to reestablish a relationship between the reader and the text alone. These matters aside, I don’t feel that I need to communicate in any way other than through my writing. Not appearing is useful not for gaining readers, as you say, but for writing freely.
What does Elena Ferrante think about social questions like euthanasia? And, more generally, doesn’t she think that for an intellectual (hence also for a writer) it’s important (if not in fact a duty) to participate in the public debate on the great subjects of civic life?
Roberta
Dear Roberta, in my opinion, when life becomes pure suffering or, still worse, the negation of all that we consider to be human life, choosing to end life—a powerful expression of generosity, if taken literally—is a fundamental right. I should say, however, that to express myself like that, in a few conventional words on a very delicate issue, seems to me frivolous.
I have done so on this occasion but will not do so again. It is surely necessary to participate in public life, but not by resorting to pat phrases, today on one subject, tomorrow on another.
All your books, including the last, are characterized by the theme of abandonment, detachment, separation. Is it a personal wound? Or do you think that the incapacity to stay together, to live a shared life, is a compelling theme, representative of our time?
Dario M.
Dear Dario, I cling to the idea that we have to write about what has marked us deeply, but that we have to seek in our stories the temperature capable of igniting the reader. A book succeeds and endures if the story of our most incurable wounds captures a little of what used to be called, bombastically, the spirit of the time.
Dear Elena Ferrante, we were encouraged to avoid asking questions about your identity, but the temptation to do just that is strong. I will work around the problem by asking which of your three books is the most autobiographical. In which of your characters (perhaps Leda, from your most recent, beautiful book?) do you see yourself most?
Alberta
Dear Alberta, I feel that Delia, Olga, Leda, who are fictional characters, are very different women. But I am close to all three, in the sense that I share with them an intense relationship that is real. I believe that in fiction one pretends much less than one does in reality. In fiction we say and recognize things about ourselves, which, for the sake of propriety, we ignore or don’t talk about in reality.
Elena Ferrante, I don’t know how old you are, or where you live. But may I ask you, in your experience, what is happening to my (our?) city, Naples? What is the source of this explosion of violence? And how can one stop this decline?
Alice S.
In Naples nothing more and nothing less is happening than what has happened for decades: an increasingly vast and well articulated intertwining of the illegal and the legal. The new fact isn’t the explosion of violence but how the city, with its ancient problems, is being traversed by the world and is spreading through the world.
Dear Elena Ferrante, what a great opportunity—to write to you and listen to your answers on the radio—is being offered to us by your publisher. I will take advantage of it immediately, because there is an invisible thread that connects us through a shared narrative project that you address with words and I with images. The suspended molecules, which give artists the possibility of perception, must have alighted on us, at least as far as certain themes are concerned, in the same way.
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