Is it possible to sell millions and millions of books over a span of more than thirty years and still manage to keep the secret about the pseudonym invented to sign her novels? Put like that, it seems like an impossible feat, especially in times dominated by the invasiveness of social media, which leave little room for mysteries. Instead, the incredible record survives and belongs to Elena Ferrante, who has managed to resist all these years the attacks that have been brought to her from many fronts. Literary critics, university professors, journalists have mobilized. They have tried them all, but to this day, despite the deadly blows inflicted, under which the mystery has often seemed to falter, Elena Ferrante remains a pseudonym. To this long succession of "attacks" another one is now added, just made by journalist Lino Zaccaria, who went to read simultaneously, intensively, all the works of Ferrante and Domenico Starnone, who has always been the greatest suspect of "Ferrante authorship", and drew from them corpulent clues that end up corroborating, perhaps, definitively, the conjecture that behind Elena Ferrante is precisely the established Neapolitan-Roman writer. In the book "Elena Ferrante, who is she?" (Edizioni Graus) - presented yesterday in Naples - Zaccaria does not betray his pedigree as a journalist, and this volume, after all, as he himself moreover admits, is a mighty journalistic investigation, which takes its starting point from a long and articulate summary of everything published so far on the Ferrante-controversy.
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