Who Is — Or Was — Elena Ferrante?

The literary world experienced overnight palpitations as word spread that the Italian writer Elena Ferrante, whose quartet of Neapolitan novels command a cult following and whose anonymity is part and parcel of her mystique, had died. The only problem, to paraphrase Mark Twain, is that the rumors of her demise were exaggerated. Like much else for the famously pseudonymous Ms. Ferrante, the report of her demise was not as simple as it seemed. Yahoo News and MSN both shared a news bulletin from the Independent informing of the passing of the authorial icon. The source was a Twitter account ascribed to her Italian publisher, Sandro Ferri. Mr. Ferri founded Edizione e/o, the publishing house whose work Ms. Ferrante has come to define. After word went out, the Press Gazette reported that the account posted an update that read, “This account is a hoax created by Italian journalist Tommasso De Benedetti.” The journalist Alex Shepherd subsequently tweeted that the American arm of Edizione e/o told him, “As far as I know, she’s fine.” The Independent rapidly deleted the article, followed by Yahoo and MSN. It is not Mr. De Benedetti’s first time adding fuel to the misinformation fire. In a 2012 interview with the Guardian, he observed that “Twitter works well for deaths.” He would know, having previously promulgated fraudulent tidings of the deaths of Pope Francis, Fidel Castro, and director Pedro Almodóvar.Mr. De Benedetti’s names his purpose as exploration of “how weak the media was in Italy.” In 2010, he published a question-and-answer session with Philip Roth — himself a master of blurring the line between fact and fiction — that included the author of “Portnoy’s Complaint” calling President Obama “nasty, vacillating and mired in the mechanics of power.”That never happened: Mr. Obama awarded Roth a National Humanities Medal that same year, and the author was a stalwart supporter of the president. In 2008, Mr. Obama told the Atlantic, “I always joke that my intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers,” specifying “Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris.” With fake interviews with Eli Wiesel, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Dalai Lama to his credit, Mr. De Benedetti is well on his way to his goal of being “Italy’s champion of the lie.” He suggested to the New Yorker’s Judith Thurman that Roth might be interested in writing a prologue to a book of his fabrications. That did not happen. In raising the specter of Ms. Ferrante’s death, Mr. De Benedetti tapped into one of the world’s most compelling literary mysteries. Since the publication of her first book in 1992, this unlikely literary star has refused a public persona. In a world where exposure is the coin of the realm and authors hawk books by dint of their personalities, she (if she is – or was — a she) remained hidden. Even as Ms. Ferrante’s books, which largely center on the turbulent lives of women in cities like Rome and Naples, captured a widening circle of readers and found life as a series on HBO, her identity remained a closely guarded secret, fueling a cottage industry of conjecture. While there are no known photographs of Ms. Ferrante, she is not a recluse after the mode of Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger. She conducts interviews via emails mediated by Edizione e/o, and her collection “Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey” contained glimmers of the autobiographical. It was billed as “a vibrant and intimate self-portrait of a writer at work.” A breakthrough in efforts to detect the person behind the phenomenon seemingly transpired in 2010, when the New York Review of Books scrutinized Ezizione’s e/o tax filings and identified translator Anita Raja as the real Ferrante. Others have argued that Mrs. Raja’s husband, the author Domenico Starone, is the author of modern classics like “My Brilliant Friend” and “Days of Abandonment.”Canvassing Ms. Ferrante’s interviews for the New Yorker, the literary critic James Wood goes only so far as to conjecture “that she grew up in Naples, and has lived for periods outside Italy. She has a classics degree; she has referred to being a mother. One could also infer from her fiction and from her interviews that she is not now married.”In a 2015 interview with the Paris Review, Ms. Ferrante explained how anonymity unlocked her creativity. Once she “knew that the completed book would make its way in the world without me” and that “nothing of the concrete, physical me would ever appear beside the volume,” she saw “something new about writing. I felt as though I had released the words from myself.”

Who Is — Or Was — Elena Ferrante?

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