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An Open Letter to Elena Ferrante, Whoever You Are
- DarkWiiPlayer 8y agoAn 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.
- kkarakk 8y agoThe 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
- fipple 8y agoI’ve never seen anything in an “open letter” format that didn’t sound like it was written by an asshole.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nroets 8y agoThere are some good open letters by shareholder activists, especially if you understand the broader context: Pensioners enjoying meager dividends while management getting fat paychecks.
- sverige 8y agoYes, 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.
- satori99 8y ago"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.
- soneca 8y agoShe is definitely one of the most famous writers today. You knowing about her isn't necessary to making the statement true.
- satori99 8y agoI 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.
- BigChiefSmokem 8y agoI just saw her claim to fame and none of her literature I would consider mainstream nor famous. The lot of you are wrong to tell the rest of us what is and isn’t famous. Condescending and thinking yoursef somehow better than one who doesn’t agree with you doesn’t make you a better hacker.
- 8y ago
- vahji 8y agoAh 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
- avvt4avaw 8y agoLook 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.
- Scarblac 8y agoThat'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.
- wlesieutre 8y agoYou've probably heard of Satya Nadella on HN, he's the CEO of Microsoft
- Scarblac 8y agoI probably read a few stories that must have included his name, but somehow it never registered.
- icebraining 8y agoI 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.
- keiferski 8y agoI 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.
- squarefoot 8y ago"... 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.
- fishtank 8y agoWho has been destroyed in this fashion?
- c0nfused 8y agoTo 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_55f1a255e4b002d5c0785287/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_55f1...
- fishtank 8y agoIn 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.
- lostjohnny 8y agoElena Ferrante does not exist.
- krapp 8y agoneither does "lostjohnny."
- lostjohnny 8y agoHer 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.
- krapp 8y agoEvery 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.
- lostjohnny 8y agoThat'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.
- Veen 8y agoIt’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.
- sn41 8y agoWhy 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?
- jacquesm 8y agoThey 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.
- superflyguy 8y agoSalinger has certainly got this reclusive business down to a t - nobody's seen or heard anything from him for a good 8 years now.
- Veen 8y agoIt’s easier to avoid appearing in public when you’re dead.
- xkcd-sucks 8y agoTell that to Carrie fisher
- twic 8y agoThomas Pynchon is the poster child for this. Well, not exactly the poster child, but you know what i mean.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- victor9000 8y agoWhy 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?
- ordu 8y agoI'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.
- kreetx 8y agoAnd 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.
- skybrian 8y agoIt'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.
- stevenwoo 8y agoI'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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wkearney99 8y agoWhat 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.
- tomchristie 8y agoAuthorship 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"
- mathattack 8y agoThis 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?
- dna_polymerase 8y ago> 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.
- CptFribble 8y agoWhile 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.