An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante, Whoever You Are | Hacker News Reader

An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante, Whoever You Are

theatlantic.com

55 pointshowrude83 comments

I don't blame any writer for wanting to be anonymous. In today's world, your race, gender, sexual orientation, age, hair color, clothing style, political affiliation, birthplace, and any other discernible group identity will be used to analyze, market, and categorize your work into the appropriate tribalist-identity.

To quote from Ferrante's Wikipedia page:

Ferrante holds that "books, once they are written, have no need of their authors." She has repeatedly argued that anonymity is a precondition for her work and that keeping her true name out of the spotlight is key to her writing process.

Some people just want to write a book...and have it be read as a book, not a sociopolitical statement. Call it the "craftsman ethos", if you like.

"... will be used to analyze, market, and categorize your work into the appropriate tribalist-identity."

And destroy you should you write something that others don't like. Privacy is becoming an invaluable good whose loss can't be undone.

Who has been destroyed in this fashion?

To pick an example, as a kid I read Ender's Game Because it was SF and had a cool cover. Now, because of the odious nature of the author's personal politics, I don't read his books.

This is entirely his own fault, but if he was just another name on a book I would still be buying his novels.

To pick another example, there stuff like this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_55f1...

In neither case is the person's tribal identity used against them for writing things that others don't like. Orson Scott Card holds a professorship. He just published a book this year. A large corporation made a mass market film out of his book, well after he had been writing things that others didn't like.

The controversy with the poet seems like a different issue, but even so -- Michael Derrick Hudson seems to be in exactly the same place before Sherman Alexie assumed he was a Chinese woman 3 years ago.

Maybe OSC isn't a good example of an author being destroyed, but it IS a good example of being unable to separate the person from their work.

If you really need examples of how a public identity can impact how your work is viewed, see every famous person who has been named in the #MeToo movement.

(Please don't attack me for that statement. I'm implying neither support nor opposition to #MeToo in this post. That's not the point.)

So in the case of Ender's Game, I first read it without any knowledge of who OSC was or what his views were. And I came away from reading it as being about the underdog, about how complicated power and morality can be, about trying to do the right thing. I thought it was a wonderfully complex story because almost every character sees themselves as trying to do the right thing, yet are seen as villains by others.

Then I read about OSC and think: Did I miss the point? Did he? How can the person who wrote this wonderful story not see that they are in turn bullying others? It complicates the whole relationship to the story.

Of course, you may argue that I'm the one who is mistaken. That's fine. But we have to at least agree that the more we know about the artist the more we think about their art differently, and vice versa.

I’d say this is your fault - OSC is the same being as when you picked up the first Ender’s book.

I mean, given what you said, should I even read your opinion if I don’t know who you are or what you stand for

There are numerous examples of kids bullied up to the point they committed suicide. Sometimes it starts at school or in the neighborhood and later moves online but there were also people victimized just by writing something the dominant pack found worth of being bullied for.

The only thing that has really changed is that now more combinations of ``race'', gender, sexual orientation, age etc are heard, and that the canonical tuple is being criticised.

Whereas in the past, all books(+) were written by white guys, plus a few women writing under male pseudonyms; and this situation was called "not political". Writing books about non-straight sexual orientation was simply banned - or, up to the famous Lady Chatterly trial, any sex at all. The last police raid on queer fiction in the UK was on "Gays the word" in 1984. I believe there are still incidents in the US and other places where angry parents try to get books banned from school libraries.

(+) to a first approximation, in the canon of western literary fiction, up to about the 1960s-70s

> Some people just want to write a book...and have it be read as a book, not a sociopolitical statement. Call it the "craftsman ethos", if you like.

I've read My Brilliant Friend. I liked it a lot (I'll probably read the other three someday), and I'm not curious about the identity of the writer.

At the same time, Elena Ferrante gives interviews. It's one thing to write novels pseudonymously and have them published. It's another to give interviews - when you do that, you're taking on the role of public intellectual, and you can't really blame people for being curious about who you are.

I wouldn't be surprised if giving the occasional interview is something the author is doing to keep their publisher (or their publisher's marketing department) happy.

I don't think there's a problem with fictional works' authors being unknown or anonymous. The problem lies in nonfiction works that seek to directly convey any kind of knowledge or wisdom that is difficult to judge and evaluate independently on its own merits (with would cover just about everything outside the hard sciences). There is value in knowing the identity and character of an author, as well as the fact that they associated their personal reputation with the book they wrote.

For example, If I look for a book on developing physical fitness, I want to know who the author is and how fit or disciplined they are. If I read a book about history, I want to know how much the author has studied their topic, whether through formal scholarship or not. If I read a biography, I'd like to know if it's written by someone who personally knew their subject, how close or far removed the author was in time and space, and the kind of scholarship that the author is known for.

Identity and reputation matter when evaluating sources of knowledge in topics that you don't have the time to learn and master yourself.

Plea to authority & ad hominem, agree & disagree, respectively

You've listed the names of various fallacies. Logical fallacies. But what logic are you saying is fallacious in the parent comment? The commenter has their own set of biases and hueristics for choosing what to spend their limited time in.

Unless they follow it up with, "and for these reasons, these are the correct books to read" then there is no fallacy.

My point is that identity is a bad measure. If you like their identity, that's plea to authority. If you don't, that's ad hominem. So rather than going off of the value of the content, we're going off of whether you agree or not. This is the thinking that gets people stuck in echo chambers. Better to optimize your time by seeking reviews which might hint at whether the content could be interesting for you or not

Plea to authority is a fallacy when it is an inappropriate plea to authority. Asking that someone who writes a history book actually be an authority on history is not a fallacy.

When a work is popular and heavily critiqued the authority of the author is no longer necessary. Surely the volume of critical analysis provides you sufficient information that you no longer need such a noisy signal as the author's identity.

Argument from fallacy is a fallacy

Fallacies in argumentation may nevertheless be useful rules in managing limited time. That are fallacies because they do not price the conclusion, but that doesn't mean that they are without value as mechanisms for making decisions based on lose associations that do not need to be 100% correct to be valuable.

    "After all, as one of the most famous writers in the
    world today, you are a legitimate subject for inquiry, 
    whether you welcome it or not."

Either I am completely out of touch, or this statement is not true.

It's probably the former. One of the mentioned novels titles sounds vaguely familiar, but I have never ever heard of Elena Ferrante.

I only read this letter because I wondered why an open letter to someone I'd never heard of was posted to HN.

* [edit] Having said that, I completely agree with and respect her right to remain anonymous, whether she is influential through her writing or not. I also completely agree with the assertion that a book, or indeed any work of art or performance, exists totally independently of it's author once published or performed.

She is definitely one of the most famous writers today.

You knowing about her isn't necessary to making the statement true.

I consider myself a reasonably well-read person. I read often and fast so I manage to get through a decent number of books, mostly novels, each year. I don't stick to any particular genres and can sensibly discuss anything from Shakespeare to Harry Potter.

I think I might get on with this author because I don't think about the authors of the books I read much at all. I have next to no interest in their personal lives or their circumstance -- only their stories. I remember the names of authors who impress me, but that's about it.

In any case I know about Her(Him?) now, so I guess I'll see if she's any good.

I'm pretty well-read, although not really in the "general literary" genre. And I also only heard about her a few months ago.

That said, the person who introduced her to me made it quite clear that Elena Ferrante is extremely well known, and was shocked that I hadn't heard of her. And I've seen then somewhat confirmed this - she is indeed pretty famous (e.g. this article).

So I understand the boat you're in... let's just consider ourselves today's lucky 10,000 :)

(And no, I haven't read her book yet, but I'm planning to).

Sounds like marketing to me, nothing more.

from the article: "global superstar"

I guess the bar has been lowered past the floor now.

She's a legitimate global superstar in fiction writing. Her books are popular enough to move the percentage of total book sales represented by translated fiction in English-speaking markets (she` writes in Italian). Strangely enough, her approach is often considered a kind of anti-marketing: no book tours, few interviews, strangely downscale cover art - people, mostly women, just really love her writing.

I guessed I stepped on the wrong narrative because just questioning this author's superstardom has gotten me to -4 on a mostly male site where most people can't even downvote. I have no opinion on this author, but can we please stop pushing everything like it is the second coming of christ just because women like it?

As I said, marketing.

I didn't downvote you, but those who did probably decided your response was not particularly well-informed. Men might dominate HN, but women are over-represented as consumers of fiction (and nonfiction), in both print and ebook format-in the UK market, for example, they buy over 2/3rds of fiction books. So simply being popular with women is enough to be a literary phenomenon.

While I don't disagree with your reasoning, I haven't read this author. However another user describes this author as "what Paulo Coelho was back in the 1990s, but adapted to the #metoo and gender politics momentum."

Now when I saw the heavy handedness of my comment's downvoting, I was surprised. Having further looked into this, I now find the root of the rot of modern discourse: the censorship of gender politics. So I stand by all my comments in this thread and I consider your well reasoned market analysis entirely immaterial to this discussion.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I don't think Elena Ferrante has anything to do with #metoo or gender politics. The author/s claims to have been born in the 40s, and started writing in the 90s. As far as I understand, she writes relatively non-political literary fiction set in a particular historical milieu in Naples that is sensitive to the intimate lives of women. She is not allegorical or self-help-y like Coelho. She just writes in a way that speaks to a very broad audience of women.

I imagine you were downvoted because you posted shallow dismissals and flamebait, both of which break the site guidelines. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them when posting here.

I didn't downvote, but it did take me only a couple of Wikipedia clicks to bring up the article on Neapolitan Novels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neapolitan_Novels). Per the article "the series has sold 10 million copies in 40 countries".

It also apparently had enough clout to get an HBO / RAI TV series produced out of it, which will possibly up the recognition factor for her name and her works considerably depending on the success.

This is not super super stardom level (the top living novelists have sold half a billion novels -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction_a...) but that's still an impressive number, I would say it is within the top tier.

(A fun comparison to another HBO show: When Game of Thrones started, A Song of Ice and Fire had sold 15 million copies worldwide -- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=A_Song_of_Ice_and... . In a similar ballpark, in other words.)

It's not a gender politics thing. You didn't just "question" her, you directly insulted her--"marketing to me, nothing more ... the bar has been lowered past the floor now." You'd have gotten the same downvotes if you'd launched a stream of invective at a similarly prominent male author.

> I have no opinion on this author, but can we please stop pushing everything like it is the second coming of christ just because women like it?

Look, I think you're seeing things that aren't there. Your first comment probably got downvoted because it's wrong - you claimed it's "only marketing", but apparently there are good reasons to think she really is superstardom-level popular (or close to it, at least, for an author that is).

Your further comments seem to keep attributing the downvoting to "the censorship of gender politics". But seriously, you are the only one bringing gender politics into this! Like I said I haven't read her books, she wasn't described to me as some #metoo movement hero or anything. Maybe she is and maybe she isn't, but that probably has nothing to do with why you were downvoted!

Stop seeing demons that aren't there.

>I'm pretty well-read, although not really in the "general literary" genre. And I also only heard about her a few months ago.

Same thing here. I think she(/he?) is what Paulo Coelho was back in the 1990s, but adapted to the #metoo and gender politics momentum. Hence why half of the article is really, really curious about the author's gender.

She was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2016 -- not one of the most influential writers, but one of the most influential people.

So it seems fair to say that she is one of the most famous writers in the world. That you haven't heard of her probably says more about you than it does about her.

> That you haven't heard of her probably says more about you than it does about her

Sure. It says I'm out-of-touch -- and doubly so when it comes to whomever Time Magazine thinks is influential.

Given where Time Magazine is today, the sad fact may be that Time is no longer influential enough to decide who's influential anymore... :(

I've never heard of Elena Ferrante either. I read quite a lot but most of my tastes could probably easily be derided as 'genre fiction'.

I would absolutely argue she has a right to her privacy and anonymity, if that's what she wants.

Why is there such a complaint? Anonymity is a privilege of the author, isn't it? There are authors who remain anonymous even to this day, one I know is B. Traven, the author of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The precise authorship of individual articles in the Federalist papers is unknown. Also, I believe, if you really want to go that far back, the author of Ecclesiastes is not identified.

And then there are known but reclusive authors. J. D. Salinger, and Cormac McCarthy are modern hermits.

Authors are entitled to their privacy. Why should we pry?

They pry because breaking the anonymity is a scoop that they just can't resist. It's human nature to be curious, to be curious about something that people don't want you to know brings eyeballs and media and eyeballs go together like cows and manure.

Salinger has certainly got this reclusive business down to a t - nobody's seen or heard anything from him for a good 8 years now.

It’s easier to avoid appearing in public when you’re dead.

Tell that to Carrie fisher

Thomas Pynchon is the poster child for this. Well, not exactly the poster child, but you know what i mean.

An interesting read, though I find the constant cries of sexism somewhat annoying, as they don't really seem to add any substance to the text other than legitimizing the authors subjective impressions, which, as far as I am concearned, don't need any lagitimization in the first place.

The problem is that doubts about sexist and other -ists and -isms have become weaponised in our culture today. it doesn't even matter WHEN you said something or whether you apologised for them as kevin hart's case has shown. his case is even more egregious since he was obviously appealing to the comedic social context of the time.

better start caring before someone uses your lack of care against you

edit: downvotes without rebuttals on an comment like this are a data point in themselves i think

Why are people being so antagonistic in this thread? Personally, I'm ignorant about this author. If you know their work, could you let me know what I'm missing?

I'm wandering the same. I have read this open letter and I cannot understand what the letter about. What author tries to tell? Why he have wrote this letter? Unclear message with unclear motives... My guess based on this, that the letter is exploded emotional instability caused by books of Elena Ferrante.

But, I'm not sure: if I cannot understand something, it doesn't mean that it is nonsense. Seems the only way to crack this and to understand what happens is to stop being ignorant about Elena Ferrante and read some of her books. Doesn't seem to be a fun.

And same here. Such intriguing title, but can't really understand what the article is trying to do -- other than resonate on what the author has written about in his/her books.

It's not spelled out, but along the way she writes about various clues that (my interpretation) the books might be some sort of collaboration between a prominent Italian author and his wife. And who knows, maybe others?

But never mind the essay. For what it's worth, I liked the first book in the series and got bogged down in the second. It's an interesting glimpse of a particular time and place in Italy.

I'm only watching the TV series on HBO. It's about two girls growing up in post WW2 Italy, and it feels like it's filling in the part missing in the Godfather movie series where the women's lives should be. At least from the TV show there are sympathetic portrayals of complicated characters, from recaps I've read the book series is enormously popular among women, and most of Italy is watching the live broadcast, and it's caused crowding in places in Italy mentioned in the books due to people going on My Brilliant Friend location themed tours ala Game of Thrones in Croatia or Lord of the Rings in New Zealand.

The article writer implies the books are a joint project between a man and his wife. I think part of the controversy is the trolling opportunity - some people might think it would be trollish to suggest the author is a man or men's rights activists would relish it being a man. This brings the controversy to the level of the internal Google Damore memo.

The Neapolitan Novels were quite well recieved. Eventhough they are widely loved, it never felt like the story was simplified in order to reach a large audience. Ferrante wove together the culture and politics of Naples over the decades with the intimate personal lives of the characters. I look forward to revisiting these books when I'm older, since I'm sure my perspective on main character’s various life stages will change as my own life changes (I'm 28 now).

> After all, as one of the most famous writers in the world today, you are a legitimate subject for inquiry, whether you welcome it or not.

No she isn't. She doesn't owe jack shit to you or anyone else. The sense of entitlement in this piece is really off putting. Read her books or don't. That's it. For once accept the work as it is and don't try to interpret it against the background of the authors views, opinions or worse: her race, gender and whatever else millenials come up next.

While I think Elena would agree with you (having said "a book, once written, has no more need for it's author" though I'm probably paraphrasing), she isn't trying to stay out of the public eye.

Despite refusing book tours and interviews, she has done many interviews-by-email. She has a regular column in The Guardian, which frequently discusses exactly these issues of gender and authorship.

I think if you want to stay anonymous but keep your public platform, you're welcome to try, but it won't be easy. And I think it isn't wrong to try to understand the people with platforms making public statements and influencing large and important discussions.

What was that George Burns joke?

Sincerity is everything, learn to fake that and you've got it made.

So is this an extension, destroy the value of sincerity/authenticity instead?

The letter seems like little more than a pretty intense bout of literary critic navel-gazing.

This country has a tradition of semi-anonymous writing. (See the federalist papers) I think with AI semantic analysis, the ability of writers to remain anonymous will be threatened. Software will out anonymous writers.

For non-fiction, this is important. (Is it worthwhile to know that a book about public Health Care is authored by a pharma exec?) Can the same case be made for fiction? Or is the damage of not getting art too big to dispense with the pretense of anonymity?

Authorship is always both an individual and a collective act of creativity. We've millenia of shared culture poured into us. Similarly the interplay between the feminine and the masculine voice: Each can only exists in contrast to the other, and we all have elements of both voices within.

"Et nous sommes encor tout mêlés l’un à l’autre"

I’ve never seen anything in an “open letter” format that didn’t sound like it was written by an asshole.

There are some good open letters by shareholder activists, especially if you understand the broader context: Pensioners enjoying meager dividends while management getting fat paychecks.

Yes, but those people have an investment to protect. This article reads as an extended attempt to bully a writer who values her privacy into surrendering it to please people who have no real right to know anything beyond what she has already revealed. It's such a vile attack that I couldn't finish reading it. "Asshole" doesn't begin to cover it.

Ah well. If the absolutely not politised Time magazine has placed her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, then the guy you replied to is a dork. No questions asked! ;P

Look at the other people on the list this year. Donald Trump. Cardi B. Hugh Jackman. Satya Nadella. Sean Hannity. Jacinda Ardern. Elon Musk. Oprah Winfrey.

You can argue about the exact selection of people. You can say that Time is 'politicised'. But this is clearly a list of people who are very well known.

It's not embarrassing to admit that you had a blind spot about a particular author, musician or politician. But it is a bit silly to then go on to claim that since you haven't heard about them, they can't be that famous after all.

That's a list of eight names, of which I only recognize four (Trump, Jackman, Musk and Winfrey).

I think the problem is that the world is much more fragmented than we assume it is.

You've probably heard of Satya Nadella on HN, he's the CEO of Microsoft

I probably read a few stories that must have included his name, but somehow it never registered.

I live in the EU, which is quite Americanized by any standard, and I'd bet nobody around me would recognize the name of Sean Hannity (or Nikki Haley, another name on the 2016 list). That list just seems hopelessly parochial to me.

It's a list of influential people, not most famous. Knowing who they are I'd say you could reasonably put both on such list.

What's Nikki Haley's influence on the world?

Being the US representative to the UN, I imagine she helped delay action on climate change and things like that.

She's only been the ambassador to the UN since 2017, yet she appears in the 2016 list.

Man, Trump really makes the years seem longer...

I live in the EU too and the only name that anybody would recognise there is Donald Trump because they spend all day on the telly telling us how evil he is. Also Hugh Jackman if you like his movies.

I live in the EU and know the cancer that Sean Hannity is. The global village is reality.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18646781 and marked it off-topic.

Elena Ferrante does not exist.

neither does "lostjohnny."

Her books are not even hers.

Elena Ferrante is a product, we should not speak about the influence of the author(s) of the books, but about the influence the marketing department has.

Every famous author is a "product", it doesn't make them any less real.

JK Rowling has a much bigger marketing machine around her, for instance, but it would be wrong to claim that she, or her books, aren't worth mentioning in a discussion about Harry Potter, only Bloomsbury and Warner Bros.

That's where the confusion kicks in.

I'm sure in good faith you believe Elena Ferrante is a woman, but we don't even know if the books have been written by a single person or if each book has a single author...

It's an interesting marketing phenomenon nonetheless, but we are not looking, IMHO, at someone writing under a pseudonym for personal reasons.

We are looking at the absence as a marketing tool, that amplifies the curiosity around the product.

It would be like talking about Hawthorne Abendsen as a real author.

It’s interesting to think about whether it really matters. The text is the same either way. If you judge a book on the words on the page, it doesn’t matter much how they came to be there, so criticising ‘her’ work on different factors seems irrelevant.

That's my point.

We should talk about the books and not about anything else.

My first answer was to someone who wrote, and I quote

> I don't blame any writer for wanting to be anonymous. In today's world, your race, gender, sexual orientation, age, hair color, clothing style, political affiliation, birthplace, and any other discernible group identity will be used to analyze, market, and categorize your work into the appropriate tribalist-identity.

There's no evidence that this is the case, in fact the evidence point to the exact opposite direction.

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