​World famous author Elena Ferrante was not on my radar until an editor put The Days of Abandonment into my hands and said:

“No-one knows who she is. Except her publisher.”
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Really?

At home I opened Ferrante’s novel and was swept up in the story of Olga, and a voice that I had never before encountered in literature, not like this, not so pure, nor raw, nor so comprehensive. From its pages unspooled a kind of female darkness, a rage, startling in its consistency and in its near-flawless execution. And though I’d never read anything quite like it, the voice was familiar; it was the voice of friends weeping in cafes; of wives screaming in helpless fury at philandering husbands, the hurt and outrage of a woman passed over and sinking into invisibility.  Olga’s emotions are so extreme they teeter on madness and they’re laced with poison too - the vengefulness of the woman scorned. That phrase is of course familiar; we all know that there’s something true about it, but it’s another thing to see it fully realised on the page, page after page, till you find yourself hoping that Olga can pull herself together.

I saw immediately how anonymity might make such writing possible, indeed, might even be its foundation stone. It is, as Virginia Woolf said, a refuge for female writers:

            “Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled 
             possesses them.”

Ferrante's stayed anonymous for  seven novels, including the bestselling Neapolitan quartet, and has managed to avoid the personal aspect of marketing that most creators have to participate in, for worse or better. A recent article by Konrad Marshall in The Age's Good Weekend  touched on my own ambivalence about this:

            “Today we are all brands. We define our philosophy by what we                          retweet. We refine our image with the perfect selfie…We curate our                  reality through the comments, shares and likes we bestow on                              Facebook…”

 All this endless, self-conscious curating! Self-consciousness - and its close friend, self-censorship, and its flip side, self-doubt - these can so easily block creativity. We are not brands, though our works might be. Branding is a shortcut between reader and writer, between audience and  artist, part of the public transaction; one has to switch gears, cleanly, between one and the other. But sometimes it’s not quite possible. Author Nikki Gemmell found she could not write her 2003 novel, The Bride Stripped Bare, until she permitted herself to publish anonymously. She’d read Woolf’s statement that for most of history “Anonymous was a woman.”

            “And with that simple sentence, my recalcitrant novel was unlocked.”

(She was unmasked before her book even went to print, to her great distress.)

Elena Ferrante told her publishers at the start of her career that if books had something to say, they would sooner or later find readers:

            “I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern               that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an                     intense life of their own.”

Twenty years later Ferrante remained, till last week, a celebrated writer who’d managed to keep her veil, engaging with her readers purely through her art, as Saul Bellow and many others also have preferred, or would prefer, if they had the choice. Yes! What luxury, what joy, to communicate purely through an artistic language of one’s own devising! And while as a reader I'm fascinated by biography, it seems to me as a writer that to communicate only through art should be possible. And  so I felt, as did many, protective of her secrecy.

Years ago, I drew a simple cartoon: an angel, labelled ‘Art’ stood in the path of a huge truck labelled ‘Commerce,’ and I thought of it last week when I read that Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project, had been warned that his new novel might damage the Rosie brand. What? A writer has success and then is stranded in the straitjacket of his brand? While profitable for some, profit can never be art’s motive. We are in perilous danger here of losing sight of what art is.

To behold a free woman who uses a veil at will is powerful experience, according to Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run With Wolves.  Estés describes seeing, when she was eight, her cousin preparing for her wedding. When she put on the veil, she became remote, immortal:
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         “She was only of herself, contained and powerful, and just out of reach             in a right way.”
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This was part of Ferrante’s achievement. 

But Ferrante, it would seem,  is no longer out of reach.

 Investigative journalist Claudio Gatti claimed last week that Elena Ferrante was an Italian translator, based mostly on financial evidence.  Citing Ferrante’s quote that she would use lies ‘to shield my person’ when necessary, Gatti claims that the author has:
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               “in a way relinquished her right to disappear behind her books and                    let them live and grow while their author remained unknown.”

There was a mystery, said Gatti, and he went after it. And perhaps this is what's so objectionable about the whole affair.  A journalist is hunting and uncovering one kind of truth, while a novelist may be working to reveal  something more ephemeral. In this particular case, the journalist has destroyed the protective condition  the novelist finds necessary explore these emotional truths. Milan Kundera writes in The Art of the Novel  that novels are a form of inquiry  into different aspects of existence; such as the tedium of everyday life in Flaubert's Madame Bovary. But maybe this kind of novelistic intelligence is less graspable in our cultural landscape, as Kundera suggests:


           "Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you                         think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to             hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the                     question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it’s either Anna or                 Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us                about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems                   cumbersome and useless.” ​


Pseudonyms are fragile, (and sometimes constructed to deceive, as in our own history of Helen Darville, Wanda Koolmatrie, Elizabeth Durack and the infamous Ern Malley hoax) and so maybe Ferrante’s unmasking was inevitable.  Our age doesn’t permit mysteries. If anyone veils anything, it’s ripped off. Half the time it’s ourselves , giving up our details to corporations for delicious new apps, posting our own images, obeying magazine articles urging us to turn ourselves into brands. In France, burqas are literally banned. There's a rumour that Pokemon Go is really about mapping every last secret space on the planet. And when it comes to artists, one of our central preoccupations seems to be matching the biography to the work. Ah yes, we say, this author writes about poverty so beautifully because she grew up with a single mother. And so on. We seek evidence for brilliance in the material realm, in facts, rather than in the imagination.

But what has transpired this week is that many readers, and other writers, are just as invested in her anonymity as Ferrante herself. It was part of her contract with the world. 

Ferrante was that rarest of things; a celebrated artist who was anonymous. The tearing away of her veil is not just a loss for her, but for all creators everywhere.
 
 
 
 

Late summer, 2014, I wandered into an antique shop and came out with a handful of postcards, some of them over one hundred years old. I was intrigued by the muted palettes, their dry texture and faintly bookish smell, and the scratchy copperplate handwriting on the reverse of the cards, often with no message, just a name, as though the postcard said it all. The images were pretty and sweet and kitsch, and strangely appealing. Ephemeral relics of a different people, a different sensibility, a different world. I spread them out on my desk, wondering why I'd bought them. 

A week later, I heard there was a call-out for submissions for a new anthology of love stories by the Melbourne publishing house, Inkerman and Blunt. And  a character presented herself: a woman called Mallory who buys vintage postcards for her boyfriend for Valentine's day, but really, they are for her, because she's longing for something, she doesn't know quite what it is  -- she's in her thirties with a child and she's never been  'in love' before, in that mad and powerful way that sometimes grips us so intensely it seems to wipe out every other thought and feeling. And then a man she knows slightly takes her hand to demonstrate an old folk dance, and it happens, only she is committed elsewhere....

As a Valentine's Day present, you can read the story below.

You can buy a copy of Australian Love Stories at a reduced Valentine's Day price: here ​

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''The World to Come, edited by Patrick West and Om Prakash Dwivedi, is a collection of 21 short stories written by authors from across the globe. It features a diverse set of themes that range from love to the apocalypse. The stories are incredibly creative and thought-provoking, and offer a glimpse into people’s differing perspectives on what the future holds for the human race.''

 Read the rest of this review: here

Watch the trailer: here

Buy the book: here

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The First Fold 

When the decahedral box defeats me, I look through the box-making instruction book for something easier. I’d planned to make this decahedral box for my geometry tutor, to reflect our multiple dimensions. I’d fill it with chocolates, to thank him for mysterious words like vertex. Using models made from dowel, he pulls triangles from squares and reflects squares into triangles. I could kiss his feet from awe. You don’t obey these strange compulsions. Resisting impulse is what makes us or unmakes us, depending on your philosophy.

Pinwheels are lovely for storing teabags. Use Japanese rice papers; gold cranes on aqua lakes, a repeat of violet fans on a translucent parchment ground, red dragons, that sort of thing.

 Try for a smooth curved line when making cylindrical boxes for bottles and neckties, and remember to push the end of the pleats into the first fold. (Ah, the first fold. The first container is the womb, where we make our first folds. The second container is the life. We make our lives outside the womb. We enfold ourselves like babushka dolls. We enfold. And we unfold. And then we fold up, into the final box known as the coffin.)
 
The paper blossom is suitable for presenting candy. The folds make an eight pointed star and look like a celestial diagram. Fold forward along broken lines. Suck slender straws of striped sweetness straight from the blossom.
 
A book-style box has many uses.   Choose vintage orange, put lettering in a sixties font, or move on to making steampunk boxes from leather and brass. Design your own book covers! The artist still matters!
 
None of my boxes will ever be finished because my folded curves are inexact, and unrepeatable. I lack patience, I am sanguine, I am as rubbish at making paper boxes as I am at learning geometry.
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Containment, boundary, structure, shape: these make something out of tangible and intangible things. I also want to say, who cares about the packaging? It’s what’s inside that counts.

Congratulations to Charlotte!

Charlotte got all the quiz questions right, and made her Dad send them in just in time for the deadline... well done Charlotte, and I hope you enjoy the art work by xoum's talented cover designer, Roy Chen! I  think it's a beautiful image of Irina and Durrell embarking on an adventure, riding through the snow on their way to the Crystal Sea....

"Irina's elation grew. She embraced her father, said goodbye, then climbed onto Durrell's back and pushed her gloved hands into his fur. Astride the mighty wolf, she gave King Harmon such a radiant smile that he had to smile in return. Irina put her head down and the pair sped off, leaving tracks in the white snow, Amicus flying high above." 

​                                                       p 67 Irina and The White Wolf.

I remember vividly writing about Irina's first encounter with Raizel, the old wise-woman of the South.  As  in many fairytales, the crone is there at the beginning,  when Irina is a baby... but I really felt Raizel's power when Irina meets her in the forest. Running through my mind was the word 'interest' -- Raizel has a deep and profound interest in Irina. The wolf-girl is being looked on by wise and ancient eyes,  and she is both warmed by it, and in awe of it. To hold the interest of someone older, who poseses a profound intelligence, can be quite an experience:


      "There, behind the hare, was an old crone. Her skin was as withered as a
      fallen apple...and she wore a floor length wrap made of furs, and held a           basket of stones over one arm. Her eyes were partly obscured by the folds       of her eyelids, and they gleamed darkly, like wet stones in a river. 
                 The crone was studying Irina with such concentration that it                      seemed to pour from her in waves, wrapping Irina warmly and firmly.             Irina had never seen the woman before, and yet she felt she had always           known her.
                  Instinctively, barely conscious of what she was doing, Irina knelt."
                                                                               
                                                                                  p118, Irina The Wolf Queen.


Have you ever had this kind of experience, this feeling of interest from an older person, a teacher, a mentor,  or grandparent perhaps, someone who helped you grow into who you are?

 "...she was in the grip of a plan, possibly an insane one. She'd spent nights fantasising about painting an icon of Mary some place it where it coudn't be ignored. And now here she was, walking along the railway tracks as night deepened.... An act of rebellion, a drop of beauty, a site of defiance...
         'Hey, what are you doing?' came a voice from the dark.
         She yelped and lurched sideways, knocking over her paints. A Maglite moved across her face..." 

All of us who love to read have those spine-tingling moments where something extraordinary is expressed. One of my favourites is from Remembering Babylon, by David Malouf, when a character called Janet is swarmed by bees:

"Suddenly there was the sound of a wind getting up in the grove, though she did not feel the touch of it, and before she could complete the breath she had taken, or expel it in a cry, the swarm was on her, thickening so fast about her that it was as if night had fallen, just like that, in a single cloud. She just had time to see her hands covered with plushy, alive fur gloves before her whole body crusted over and she was  blazingly gathered into the single sound they made, the single mind.
           Her own mind closed in on her. She lost all sense of where her feet might be, or her dreamy wrists, or whether she was still standing, as she had been a moment before, in the shadowy grove, or had been lifted from the face of the earth...
          ... You are our bride, her new and separate mind told her as it drummed and swayed above the earth. Ah, so that is it! They have smelled her sticky blood flow! They think it is honey. It is."


In a story I'm currently working on, a character gets stung to death by bees, and I  remembered and re-read this exquisite piece of Malouf's prose.

What's one of your favourite moments from a book?