The writer’s identity

For those of us who puzzled over the extraordinary power of the Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, an exploration of a friendship over time in four novels, her new avatar is as fascinating as it is intriguing. Ferrante now writes a weekend column in The Guardian. She’s only a few columns old, and each one weighs in at just around 500 words — but already the column is an addiction.

The guessing game

Ferrante has been writing fiction since the early 1990s, though her novels have been made available in English translation only in the past few years. And, as is well known, Ferrante is a pseudonym, with no official confirmation so far of who she really is. Or whether Ferrante is in fact a woman. Or whether Ferrante is the name of a collective. Folks have done philological analysis to find the ‘real’ Ferrante, and suspects have been identified. It had even been suggested that Ann Goldstein, a former New Yorker staffer who translates into English Ferrante’s books and now her columns, was actually Ferrante. Two years ago, an Italian journalist obtained the financial details of Anita Raja, a well-known translator living in Rome, and claimed that the timeline of her income/spending spikes coincided with that of Ferrante’s publications. Nonetheless, speculation continues unabated — old rumours persist that Raja’s husband, the writer Domenico Starnone (the English translation of whose novel Lacci appeared in English translation last year as Ties ), is in fact Ferrante.

It’ll go on and on, even if the real Ferrante stands up, as such speculation keeps us near the edge of that important question: how does a novelist’s life story influence her fiction? Or, does having one’s life story made public inhibit a writer’s fiction? Back in 2002, in an interview that appeared in the newspaper L’Unita , Ferrante was asked: “Why did you choose not to become a public personage?” The answer: “From a somewhat neurotic desire for intangibility. The labour of writing touches every part of the body. When the book is finished, it’s as if you had been rudely searched, and you desire only to regain integrity, to return to being the person you usually are, in occupations, in thoughts, in language, in relationships.” It’s a gripping argument.

Columns of clues?

I went back to that interview, included in Frantumaglia , a collection of Ferrante’s interviews and writings, because in the new avatar as a weekend columnist, Ferrante is sharing more of herself: her views on being Italian, on writing a diary, on her first love. Each column so far is an iteration of this writer’s brilliance: in less than 500 words, a whole universe is opened to the reader. But I wonder, will Ferrante eventually answer these questions about her ‘real’ self? Is the move to column-writing a reaction to being outed? Is she (or he, or they) teasing us by giving us writing that expands the reader’s imagination while playing with autobiographical clues? Yet, the main question is for readers to answer: when reading these remarkable columns, should we in any way be placing them against Ferrante’s huge body of fiction? Put another way, does our reading of columns by favourite novelists vary from writer to writer, so that for some their biographical details hover over their writing and not for others?

Being free

In contrast to Ferrante’s sparse revelations about her real self, Zadie Smith’s essays assume background knowledge about the cartwheels she’s performed while evolving as a novelist. Since the time this Jamaican-British writer sent out fragments of White Teeth into the world while still at university, and invited comparisons with Salman Rushdie, she has continued to lay deserving claim to being among the best writers of her generation. In an outstanding collection of essays just out, Feel Free , she also betrays her long-standing assumption that her growth as a writer and thinker is being lived out in full public view.

Introducing her essays on life, literature, politics and culture, Smith shares a comment from a friend: “But of course your writing so far has been a fifteen-year psychodrama.” She goes on to work out her reaction to this stinging comment: “Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two.” So, as she writes about Brexit, Generation Facebook, the dark dawn of the age of Donald Trump, Justin Bieber, the Boboli Gardens in Florence, or even as she reviews books, there is a sense of Zadie Smith, someone being true to this “malleable” self, guiding the reader along. No wonder it seems as if she’s always been around, even as she continues to adapt her prose and tenor to the demands of every new work of fiction, from White Teeth , to On Beauty , to most recently Swing Time .

But do we really know her as well as we assume we do?