The Community Bookstore in Park Slope is not the sort of place you might imagine a West Side Story–style rumble to break out, and yet fans of the wildly successful epic meta-fiction novels of Elena Ferrante, author of the Neapolitan series, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle, have on more than one occasion nearly come to blows. Not surprisingly, fans of Ferrante’s innovative, swiftly moving, ruthlessly true-to-life tale of female friendship are quicker to the punch than fans of Knausgaard’s languorously paced, nostalgic, navel-gazing domestic drama. Allegedly, glasses have been smashed, goatees set ablaze, and fountain pens unsheathed with the promise that, “I will shank you.”
Passions run high when you’re talking about Ferrante and her work, particularly her sensational, highly addictive Neapolitan novels, which paint a portrait of a consuming female friendship against the backdrop of social and political upheaval in Italy from the 1950s to the present day. My Brilliant Friend,The Story of a New Name, and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay have made Ferrante, an enigmatic figure who writes under a pseudonym, and is widely regarded as the best contemporary novelist you’ve never heard of, a worldwide sensation. With the highly anticipated publication of the fourth and final book, The Story of the Lost Child, out this September, Ferrante fans are in a white-hot lather—and they should be.
Inexorable seismic changes—in society and in the lives of two female friends—mark the final volume of Ferrante’s Neapolitan series.
Elena and Lila, the emotionally entwined duo at the center of Ferrante’s (ThoseWho Leave and Those Who Stay, 2014, etc.) unsentimental examination of women’s lives and relationships, advance through middle age and early old age (perhaps) in this calamitous denouement to their saga. The more fortunate Elena, an author who struggles to assert herself in the misogynistic world of 1970s and ’80s Italy, is drawn back to Naples and its internecine bloodshed; Lila, who has stayed in the city of their youth, is at odds with its controlling families. Elena’s “escape” and attempts at personal and familial fulfillment, on her own terms, hint at the changing roles of women in that era, but it’s Lila’s daily struggle in a Camorra-controlled neighborhood that illuminates the deep fractures within contemporary Italian society. The paths to self-determination taken by the lifelong friends merge and separate periodically as the demands of child-rearing, work, and community exert their forces. The far-reaching effects of a horrific blow to Lila’s carefully maintained equilibrium resonate through much of the story and echo Ferrante’s trademark themes of betrayal and loss. While avid devotees of the Neapolitan series will be gratified by the return of several characters from earlier installments, the need to cover ground in the final volume results in a telescoped delivery of some plot points. Elena’s narrative, once again, never wavers in tone and confidently carries readers through the course of two lives, but the shadowy circumstances of those lives will invite rereading and reinterpretation.
The enigmatic Ferrante, whose identity remains the subject of international literary gossip, has created a mythic portrait of a female friendship in the chthonian world of postwar Naples.
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