Domenico Starnone

Domenico Starnone (born 15 February 1943) is an Italian writer, screenwriter, and journalist. He is a prolific book author, having penned at least 22 works since 1987, at least four of which have been translated from Italian into English, including Prima esecuzione (2007, as First Execution, 2009) and Confidenza (2019, as Trust, 2019). His novel Via Gemito won the Premio Strega in 2001, and movies by Gabriele Salvatores, Riccardo Milani, and Daniele Luchetti have been based on Starnone books.

In reports dating to at least 2006 (by Luigi Galella), and more recent scholarly work appearing in 2017 (by Arjuna Tuzzi and Michele A. Cortelazzo of the University of Padova), work focused on textual similarities between authors, Starnone has been proposed to be the Italian author writing under the pen name, Elena Ferrante, a role also suggested for his wife, Anita Raja, based on a financial analysis. Ferrante has, via published interviews, dismissed the allegation, stating "My identity, my sex can be found in my writing" and suggesting that the attention to the question was more illustrative of the character of contemporary Italians than anything else. Starnone, for his part, in the press and in his books, strenuously denies his being the author behind Ferrante's works, arguing other obvious contextual reasons for the analysed textual similarities.

Early life and education

Domenico Starnone was born on 15 February 1943 in Saviano, near Naples.

Career

Starnone spent a period working as a high school teacher. He also worked for several newspapers and satirical magazines, including L'Unità, Il Manifesto, Tango, and Cuore, usually presenting episodes from his life as a teacher. He has also worked as a screenwriter.

As novelist

Starnone is a prolific book author, having penned at least 22 works since 1987, at least four of which have been translated from Italian into English—Prima esecuzione (2007) as First Execution (2009), Lacci (2014) as Ties (2017), Scherzetto (2016) as Trick (2018), and Confidenza (2019) as Trust or Secrets (2019). His novel Via Gemito won the Premio Strega in 2001. The movies La scuola and The Ties (both by Daniele Luchetti), Auguri Professore (by Riccardo Milani) and Denti (by Gabriele Salvatores) are all based on Starnone books.

Investigations linking Starnone and his family to Elena Ferrante

As early as 2006, Luigi Galella had published the view that a computer analysis looking for similarity in textual style supported the conclusion that Domenico Starnone was the author using the pen name Elena Ferrante (author of many works including L'amore molesto and I giorni dell'abbandono). In 2016, Italian journalist Claudio Gatti published the claim that Starnone's wife, Anita Raja, had a history of financial benefits that correlated with the publication and sale of books written by Elena Ferrante, leading Gatti to conclude that it was Raja that was, in fact, Ferrante. In a collection of interviews published in 2016, the Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey, Ferrante has spoken up to address the speculations, writing with regard to her chosen anonymity and Starnone's being "tired of everyone asking if he's Ferrante", that

he's [Starnone's] right and I feel guilty. But I hold him in great esteem and I'm certain that he understands my motivations. My identity, my sex can be found in my writing. Everything that has sprouted up around that is yet more evidence of the character of Italians in the first years of the twenty-first century."

In 2017, Arjuna Tuzzi and Michele A. Cortelazzo of the University of Padova in Italy published the results of their research comparing the use of the Italian language by Elena Ferrante in the 7 published novels of that author in comparison with a corpus of 150 novels from published in Italian over the preceding 30 years, a corpus that included novels by 39 authors:

(i) associated with Campania, as culturally and linguistically representative of Ferrante's Naples,

(ii) suggested by other investigators to be "the true identity" of Ferrante,

(iii) publicly successful in Italy as judged by literary prizes awarded or numbers of copies sold, and/or

(iv) achieving critical respect for their literary value;

intentionally omitted from the corpus were Anita Raja's translations (as well as other works both satisfying and failing to satisfy these criteria). The attempt by Tuzzi and Cortelazzo to "identify the similarities and differences between [Ferrante's] work and those of other authors" proceeded using methods of principal components analysis to map content between the two sets of works using "word tokens" from each, and then a quantitative linguistics method to establish "intertextual distance" based on the work of Cyril Labbé, to measure similarity between the novels in each set. These scholars conclude this primary research work, stating

Amongst the authors included, Domenico Starnone, who has been previously identified by other investigations as the possible hand behind this pen name, is the author who has written novels most similar to those of Ferrante and which, over time, [have] become progressively more similar... in graphical representations of the measures of similarity, the novels of these two authors are almost inextricably intertwined... Of the thirty-nine authors that have been taken into consideration, Starnone is the only author who demonstrates clear-cut and consistent similarities with Ferrante.

However, in qualifying the results of their research—qualifications only represented here in part—Tuzzi and Cortelazzo note among other unanswered questions that the Ferrante works might be "...the fruit of a clear sit-down project, a meeting of minds—and hands—that consequentially resulted in writing that is unique to drafting and editing methods", noting also that

There is... the possibility that the author who hides behind the pen name Elena Ferrante has never been identified or taken into consideration, either in our research or in that of other scholars. It is also possible their only creative act has been the writing of the novels signed by Elena Ferrante; if he or she is a writer who has never written other novels under their real name, then we would be lacking the textual data necessary for comparison against the work produced by Elena Ferrante. In this case, it would be practically impossible to identify the author.

Starnone, for his part, has "strenuously denied all... hypotheses that implicate him as the... hand behind... Elena Ferrante", doing so in his interactions with the press and in his books, arguing that the two sets of novels (his and Ferrante's) display the alleged similarities because of their common Neopolitan contexts, common periods in history, and similar types of families and their experiences. Thus, the alleged associations by Gatti and Tuzzi and Cortelazzo of Ferrante with Raja alone, Starnone alone, or Raja and Starnone together, from these financial and linguistic investigations—as of 2023, both from single primary sources and neither yet substantiated by others—is suggestive, but remains to be further investigated.

Personal life

Starnone is married to literary translator Anita Raja.

Selected bibliography

• Ex cattedra (1987)
• Il salto con le aste (1989)
• Segni d'oro (1990)
• Fuori registro (1991)
• Sottobanco (1992)
• Eccesso di zelo (1993)
• Denti (1994)
• Appunti sulla maleducazione di un insegnante volenteroso (1995)
• La retta via (1996)
• Via Gemito (The House on Via Gemito, 2000)
• La collega Passamaglia (2001)
• Alice allo Strega (2002)
• Labilità (2005)
• Ex cattedra e altre storie di scuola (2007)
• Prima esecuzione (2007)
• Spavento (2009)
• Fare scene. Una storia di cinema (2010)
• Autobiografia erotica di Aristide Gambìa (2011)
• Lacci (Ties, 2014)
• Scherzetto (Trick, 2016)
• Le false resurrezioni (2018)
• Confidenza (Trust, 2019)

English editions

• First Execution, translated by Antony Shugaar (2009) ISBN 9781933372662
• Ties, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri (2017) ISBN 9781609453855
• Trick, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri (2018) ISBN 9781609454449
• Trust (also as Secrets), translated by Jhumpa Lahiri (2019) ISBN 9781609457037
• The House on Via Gemito, translated by Oonagh Stransky (2023) ISBN 9781609459239