Mr. Gatti cites the publication of Ms. Ferrante’s latest book, “Frantumaglia” (meaning “a jumble of fragments”) — a collection described by its publisher as “consisting of over 20 years of letters, essays, reflections, and interviews” — as a reason for his determination to try to uncover her identity. He points to her admission, in its pages, that she sometimes resorts to lies “when necessary to shield my person, feelings, pressures.” And he proceeds to argue that there are significant discrepancies between some of the autobiographical details Ms. Ferrante dispenses in “Frantumaglia” (like growing up in Naples, the daughter of a dressmaker) and the known biographical facts about a Rome-based translator named Anita Raja, who he thinks is behind the famous pseudonym.

This hardly justifies Mr. Gatti’s relentless efforts to expose the author, but the publication of “Frantumaglia” turns out to be a hugely misguided endeavor on the part of both Ms. Ferrante and her publishers. It’s a padded, often self-indulgent volume that undermines her stated belief that “books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.” In fact, this book is a 384-page repudiation of her assertion that the text is “a self-sufficient body, which has in itself, in its makeup, all the questions and all the answers.”

“Frantumaglia” contains dozens of other questions and answers, in interviews and letters in which Ms. Ferrante talks about her work, explicating her writing process, models for particular characters, and recurring themes in her novels. There are discussions about the emotional lives of her heroines (most notably, Delia in “Troubling Love”; Olga in “Days of Abandonment”; and Elena and Lila in the Neapolitan quartet), and her thoughts on feminism and Italian politics. Some observations about novels she loved (“Madame Bovary”) and authors she admires (Elsa Morante), as well as excised passages from her novels, do shed light on her writing and will be pored over by both fans and scholars.

But the sheer volume of interviews here, the author’s often self-dramatizing discussions of her life (or that of the character of the so-called Elena Ferrante), and the very decision to assemble this book seem to fly in the face of her declaration that writing should have “an autonomous space, far from the demands of the media and the marketplace.” In some of her letters, Ms. Ferrante sounds as if she were playing a cat-and-mouse game with the press, at once coy and passive-aggressive. She writes in one unsent letter (probably from 1995) to a journalist: “Why, although you read my book a year ago, although you admire it as you say, did you get the idea of communicating with me only now, after learning that a film is being made from ‘Troubling Love’?” Does a book, she asks, become “important for the cultural pages only because a film is being made from it?”

Elsewhere, she sounds pretentious and self-important: “When one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it.”