http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/opinion/italys-open-literary-secret.html 2016-10-05 13:10:42 Italy’s Open Literary Secret We all knew Elena Ferrante’s real identity. So why are we angry, now the world knows, too? === MILAN — We didn’t have to wait for the latest revelations: Quite a few Italians already suspected that the pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante was indeed Anita Raja, a translator at Edizioni E/O, Ms. Ferrante’s publisher. Rumors had already been swirling when, in February 2015, a gossip website called The case is strong, and assuming it holds up — Ms. Raja has yet to confirm or deny anything — it seems that Ms. Ferrante’s international best sellers about growing up in working-class Naples were written by a gentle, gray-haired translator, the daughter of a Polish Jewish mother who was a survivor of the Holocaust. Not that we cared. The books, which made Ms. Ferrante a household name, are good — excellent, actually; who cares who wrote them? And the literary hide-and-seek was fun. So if everyone knew Ms. Ferrante’s real identity, why are so many Italians angry with Claudio Gatti, the journalist who In the last couple of years, those who have sought to unmask Ms. Ferrante have tried the usual strategies. Mostly, they’ve compared literary styles or biographies. The Instead, Mr. Gatti, a respected investigative journalist, spent months poring over public records, having been commissioned by Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s leading financial newspaper. He dug into the publisher’s accounts and Italy’s “catasto,” or real estate register. Eventually he noticed that the income of a quiet, relatively unknown translator, Ms. Raja, had grown significantly from 2010 to 2015. He also found out that she and her husband, the Neapolitan writer Domenico Starnone, had recently acquired expensive property in Rome and Tuscany. As usual, “follow the money” turned out to be an effective strategy. The reaction may not be what Mr. Gatti was looking for. The New Yorker Fellow Italian writers have also spoken up in defense of Anita Raja/Elena Ferrante. This is, indeed, surprising: In Italy such explosive success, measured in millions of copies, is seldom forgiven by one’s colleagues. Writers such Alessandro Baricco and Susanna Tamaro, in the 1990s, were snubbed by their fellow literati when their books started to sell like hot cakes. Only That someone would even spend time on the question of Ms. Ferrante’s identity struck many as absurd, even insulting. Michela Murgia, a novelist from Sardinia, said: “It’s not journalism. It’s cats rummaging in garbage cans” (a pun, perhaps, on Mr. Gatti’s surname, which means “cats” in Italian). Erri De Luca, a novelist, translator and poet from Naples, said: “Who cares who is Elena Ferrante? These investigations should concentrate on tax evaders, not authors.” Sandro Ferri, Ms. Ferrante’s publisher, summed up the prevailing mood in the Italian book world: “Enough. Stop besieging her. Now they’re even looking at her bank accounts. They’re treating her like a ‘camorrista’” (a Neapolitan mobster). Not everybody agrees. Luca Sofri, a blogger and editor of Il Post, a news website, is on Mr. Gatti’s side. “To write about the identity of Elena Ferrante is not so different from writing about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie,” he argued. “If today someone wrote that Philip Roth’s first books were actually written by his cousin, the fuss would be enormous, wouldn’t it?” Mr. Gatti himself insisted: “Nothing I’ve written belittles the quality of Ferrante’s books, nor will it prevent the author from writing more, and her fans from loving them. But they know, at last, who really delivered them, her story and cultural milieu.” He said he had been struck by the “extraordinary passion” of the public’s reaction: “I’d have loved to see the same passion for some other investigations of mine — on human trafficking from Africa to Europe, or on bribes paid by Western companies from Algeria to Nigeria.” And of course, it wasn’t really a secret at all. Gossip magazines and ccktail parties were filled with rumors about Ms. Raja that, even at the time, most folks knew were probably accurate. If nothing else, the anger isn’t about revealing a secret per se; it’s about shouting it to a global audience. Ms. Ferrante’s identity may have been an open secret, but it was our secret, just as Ms. Ferrante and her wonderfully successful books were ours. There are many things we Italians hide from the world, some far less innocent than a writer’s real name. Why let those starry-eyed foreigners in on this one?