“I believe that books, once written, do not need their authors.” Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante it is not the first nor will it be the last writer sign with pseudonym, but without a doubt, hiding your identity when you are famous contributes to being more so because the riddle makes readers want to know who writes the stories that catch them. Questions arise linked to their gender or nationality. Claudio Gatti, an Italian investigative journalist, did them and in 2016 put a face on it and biography tracking his financial movements.
Today we know that his real name is Anita from Raja, nevertheless, the magic of anonymity is in force because his privacy continues to be protected alongside his international success since he does not attend public events and only gives interviews by email. The truth is that many of her critics and readers are not interested in knowing more about the life of this Italian writer who has been translated into many languages and who counts her followers in the thousands.
I respect his position, and from there, I try to answer how and what Ferrante writes about: his narrative joins those of other authors whose stories are autobiographical, such as JM Coetzee or Leo Tolstoy. One might think that there is nothing new in recounting one’s own life and that in any novel the characters undergo structural transformations and that, furthermore, there are many narratives that range from childhood to adult life, but that broad temporality is not enough to classify it, but it is the way it is counted. These two authors do so uniquely because they have the virtue of revealing the scars that childhood and youth leave on adults. Coetzee uses the sieve of time and dialogue to reinterpret the past even though he writes in the present and Tolstoy resorts to interior monologue. Both achieve that the steps of a human being, each one in his time, captivate when they become literature. Their faces tell us what is happening to them. Ferrante does the same in his book The Tetralogy of Naples published in 2011 and which HBO turned into a series with the name of The Brilliant Friend, the title of the first book in the saga.
In its first chapters, it recounts the lives of two women (Lila and Lenú) between 1943 and 1966. Their existence takes place in a slum in post-war Naples. Some characters that accompany them are the violence within their family life and the one that is reproduced in the society of their time. Their gazes articulate the vital experience showing what happens to them every day as friends, girls, adolescents and mothers. “The challenge for those who write is to fill the distance between what you live and what you tell, it is about physically feeling the impact of the narrative…”, says the author.
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She achieves this by showing the actions of her protagonists without describing them and building complex characters to whom things do not stop happening. The chapters are short, the prose fluid, and the language simple. Ferrante knows how to develop her characters because she presents her evolution through time and makes us see her transformations from childhood to adulthood. Some critics define the literature of the Italian writer as literature of characters. It is an unmissable and emotional story with which there is to be found in writing or through the four seasons of the HBO series.
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