From "Frantumaglia: Bits and Pieces of Uncertain Origin," by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2016. 8. “Only when we feel the story in each of its mo- ments or places are we able to tell it properly.”15

My Brilliant Friend is very different from the pre- ceding novels of Elena Ferrante. It is a wonderful Bil- dungsroman, in fact two, in fact more than two. The no- vel of a generation of friend-enemies. To interview Elena Ferrante we must have recourse to the mediation of the publishers, Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola. Therefore, questions by e-mail, answers by e-mail.

Elena Ferrante, how did you complete the passage from a type of psychological-family novel (Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment) to a novel that, like this, pro- 15 From an interview with Paolo di Stefano that appeared in La Lettura, the book pages of the Italian national daily Corriere della Sera, November 19, 2011.

58 mises to be multipart (the first of a trilogy or quadrilogy), and which is at the same time both centrifugal and centri- petal in plot and in style? I don’t feel this novel as so different from the pre- ceding ones. Many years ago, it occurred to me to tell the story of an old person who intends to disappear—whi- ch doesn’t mean die—without leaving any trace of his or her existence. I was fascinated by the idea of a story that showed how difficult it is to erase oneself, literally, from the face of the earth. Then the story became complicated. I introduced a childhood friend who would bear inflexi- ble witness to every event, large or small, in the life of the other. Finally I realized that what interested me was to dig into the lives of two women, full of affinities and yet divergent. In the end that’s what I did. Of course, it’s a complex project, the story covers sixty years. But Lila and Elena are created from the same clay as the other novels. 59 The two friends whose childhood you recount— Elena Greco, the first-person narrator, and her friend and enemy Lila Cerullo—are similar and different. They con- stantly overlap just when they seem to grow distant. A novel about friendship and about how an encounter can determine a life? But also how attraction to a bad example helps to develop an identity? One who imposes one’s personality usually, in doing so, makes the other opaque. The stronger, richer personality obscures the weaker, in life and perhaps even more in novels. But in the relationship between Elena and Lila it happens that Elena, the subordinate, gets from her very subordination a sort of brilliance that disorients, that dazzles Lila. It’s a movement that’s hard to describe, but for that reason it interested me. Let’s say: the many events in the lives of Lila and Elena will demonstrate how the one draws strength from the other. But be careful: 60 not only in the sense of helping each other but also in the sense of ransacking, of stealing feeling and intelligence, taking energy away from each other.

How did memory and the passing of time, distance (temporal and perhaps spatial), function in the elaboration of the book? I think that “putting distance” between experience and story is a bit of a cliché. The problem, for the writer, is often the opposite: overcoming the distance; feeling physically the pressure of the material to be narrated; ap- proaching the past of people we have loved, of lives as we have observed them, as they were told to us. A story, to take shape, has to pass through many filters. Often we begin to write too soon and the pages are cold. Only when we feel the story in each of its moments or places (and at times this takes years) are we able to tell it pro- perly. 61 My Brilliant Friend is also a novel about the violen- ce of the family and of society. The novel recounts how one succeeds (or succeeded) in growing up amid violence and / or in spite of violence? Of course, one grows up warding off blows, retur- ning them, even agreeing to receive them with stoic ge- nerosity. In the case of My Brilliant Friend, the world the girls grow up in has features that are visibly violent and others that are secretly violent. I am interested above all in the latter, even though the former are also present.

There is a wonderful description of Lila in the book: “She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.” And later: “The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me…. It was completely cleansed of the dross of speech.” Is it a statement of your own style? 62 Let’s say that, among the many means we use to give a narrative order to the world, I prefer one where the writing is clear, honest, and where the facts—the facts of ordinary life—are extraordinarily gripping when read.

There is a more sociological thread: Italy in the years of the boom, the dream of prosperity that has to reckon with ancient resistances. Yes, and that thread will continue up until the pre- sent day. But I reduced the historical background to a minimum. I prefer that everything be inscribed in the ex- ternal and internal movements of the characters. Lila, for example, already at the age of seven or eight, wants to become rich, and drags Elena along, convinces her that wealth is an urgent goal. How this purpose works inside the two friends, how it changes, directs them, or confuses them, interests me more than traditional sociology.

63 You seldom yield to dialectal color: you use it in a few cases, but usually you prefer the formula “he/she said in dialect.” Have you never been tempted to make use of a more expressionistic coloring? As a child, as an adolescent, the dialect of Naples frightened me. I would rather have it echo, for a moment, in Italian, but as if threatening it.

Are the next volumes finished? Yes, in a very provisional state.

An obvious but obligatory question: how much au- tobiography is there in the story of Elena? And how much is there of your own literary passions in Elena’s reading? If by autobiography you mean drawing on one’s own experience to feed an invented story, almost all of it. If, however, you are asking if I’m telling my personal story, none of it. As for books, yes, I almost always cite 64 texts I love, characters who molded me. Dido, for exam- ple, the Queen of Carthage, was a fundamental female figure of my adolescence.

Is the alliterative play of Elena Ferrante-Elsa Mo- rante (a passion of yours) coincidental? Is the relationship Ferrante-Ferri (your publishers) merely imaginary? Yes, absolutely.

Have you never repented of your decision to be anonymous? In the end, reviews tend to dwell more on the mystery of Ferrante than on the qualities of your books. In other words, are the results the opposite of what you hoped for, that is, in emphasizing your hypothetical personality? No, no regrets. To my way of seeing, digging up the personality of the writer from the stories he offers, from the characters he puts onstage, from the landscapes, objects, from interviews like this—always and only, in 65 short, from the tonality of his writing—is nothing other than a good way of reading. What you call emphasizing, if it is based on the works, on the energy of the words, is an honest emphasis. The media emphasis, the predo- minance of the icon of the author over his work, is very different. In that case the book functions like some pop star’s sweaty T-shirt, which, without the aura of the star, becomes completely insignificant. It’s this sort of empha- sis that I don’t like.

Does the suspicion that your work is the product of several hands bother you? It seems a useful example for the conversation we’re having. We’re accustomed to extracting from the author the coherence of the works, not the coherence of an author from the works. A particular woman or man has written the books, and this is enough to make us con- sider them elements of a journey. We’ll speak glibly of his 66 beginnings, of successful books and others that are less successful. We’ll say that he found his way immediately, that he experimented with different genres and styles, we’ll trace recurring themes, circumstances, an evolution or an involution. Let’s say instead that we have available House of Liars and Aracoeli, but not a writer named Elsa Morante. We are so unused to starting from the works, from looking in them for consistency or disparity, that we are immediately confused. Habituated to the supremacy of the author, when there is no author, or he is removed, we end up seeing different hands not only in the passage from one book to the next but even from one page to the next.

In short, may we know who you are?

Elena Ferrante. I’ve published six books in twenty years. Isn’t that sufficient?

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