by John Powers

Some writers you read and move on, but every now and then you read one whose work knocks you back against the wall. This happened to me with the great Italian novelist Elena Ferrante.

I first encountered her through her scalding 2002 novel, The Days Of Abandonment, whose narrator, Olga, may be the scariest jilted wife since Medea. What makes Olga scary is not what she does, but what she thinks and feels, and her ferocious precision in describing everything from lousy sexual encounters to her not-altogether-maternal feelings about her children.

Hooked, I quickly devoured Ferrante's other available novels — Troubling Love and The Lost Daughter. They, too, spoke with such personal directness I felt sure they must be confessional. Yet when I tried to confirm this, I soon discovered that Elena Ferrante is a pen name and that she's as publicity-shy as J.D. Salinger, leading some male commentators in Italy to claim, predictably enough, that she's actually a man. Me, I was left wondering how Ferrante came to write with such fearless power.

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Source: http://knau.org