Books Briefly Noted
JUNE 9, 2008
THE LOST DAUGHTER
By Elena Ferrante
Translated by Ann Goldstein
In this brutally frank novel of maternal ambivalence, the narrator, a forty-seven-year-old divorcée summering alone on the Ionian coast, becomes obsessed with a beautiful young mother who seems ill at ease with her husband’s rowdy, slightly menacing Neapolitan clan. When this woman’s daughter loses her doll, the older woman commits a small crime that she can’t explain even to herself. Although much of the drama takes place in her head, Ferrante’s gift for psychological horror renders it immediate and visceral, as when the narrator recalls the “animal opacity” with which she first longed for a child, before she was devoured by pregnancy.