Literature : the identity of Elena Ferrante finally revealed ? – The Point

What are the “months of investigation” which are published simultaneously by Mediapart, the daily Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and in English by The New York Review of Books. Claudio Gatti, an investigative journalist Italian, focused on the identity of Elena Ferrante. Behind this pseudonym, a writer, an Italian who wants to keep his anonymity, since the publication of his first novel in 1992. Elena Ferrante has gained world renown with the publication of his tetralogy neapolitan Girlfriend is prodigious. The first two volumes, The Girlfriend prodigious and The New Name were published in France, where they have won a huge success.

For years, his reputation growing, the speculations are multiplying around the identity of Elena Ferrante who has chosen this pseudonym as a tribute to the writer-Italian Elsa Morante. She responds to interviews by mail and published a book in 2003, Frantumaglia, the career of a writer, in which she describes herself as a Neapolitan with three sisters and whose mother was a seamstress while warning : “I do not hate the lies, in real life I find them to be rather healthy, and occasionally I use it to protect myself from the outside.”

financial Flows

Claudio Gatti could have found the end of the story. It has investigated the financial flows around Edizioni e/o, the publisher of Elena Ferrante, an investigation that led to the translator roman Anita Raja, an employee of the same publishing house. The revenues of the publishing house increased from 65% in 2014, when the books become best-sellers in English, and by 150% in 2015. Increases as Claudio Gatti has been found on the payslips Anita Raja.

The journalist was to consult the public data on the ownership of real estate in Italy and realized that at the same time, Anita Raja had acquired two apartments are expensive in Rome and a country house in Tuscany, purchases that appear to him to be incompatible with “the translator’s work, occupation, known to be somewhat profitable”. These sums correspond for him to the copyright of books. Contacted by Claudio Gatti, co-owner of Edizioni e/o have just regretted : “We are very bored of this invasion of our private lives, our own and that of Elena Ferrante.”