The Story of the Lost Child

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Publishers Weekly

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Twelve-Year-Old Sofia Abramsky-Sze Reviews Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

Twelve-year-old Sofia Abramsky-Sze, a friend of a PW staffer who reads more than most adults, recently picked up the first book of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend. She was done with the fourth book in the series, The Story of the Lost Child, only a few weeks later. PW talked to Sofia about Ferrante’s books, and how they compare with other books she’s read recently.

Why did you read Ferrante? How did you first come across the novels?

I started reading Elena Ferrante this past summer. The main reason? I am a very avid reader and I always run out of books, so I was bored. I picked up the first one, My Brilliant Friend, and started to leaf through it. Another reason is that the first book features a bride on the cover. Well, I am a hopeless romantic at heart, often devouring teen tales of love, so I couldn’t resist. Finally, my father told me they were good and he said I should read the Ferrante novels.

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The Portland Mercury

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Debating the Mysterious Allure of Elena Ferrante

Neapolitan Novels: Beyond All Reason

by and

THE FOURTH AND FINAL volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, The Story of the Lost Child, was published earlier this month to a great deal of excitement among those lucky enough to have already experienced the perplexing joy that comes from reading Ferrante. Over more than 1,500 pages, best friends (and, at times, bitter rivals) Elena and Lila navigate six turbulent decades in Naples, a city as fiery and unpredictable as the famous volcano looming to its east. Now that their stories are over, two Ferrante fans sat down on the first day of fall to talk about what makes these books so unusual, and so addictive.

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The Orange County Register

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This week’s bestsellers at SoCal independent bookstores

Sept. 30, 2015

TRADE PAPERBACK FICTION

1. My Brilliant Friend. Elena Ferrante. (Europa Editions)

2. The Martian. Andy Weir. (Broadway)

3. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Elena Ferrante. (Europa Editions)

4. The Alchemist (25th Anniversary Edition). Paulo Coelho. (HarperOne)

5. The Story of the Lost Child. Elena Ferrante. (Europa Editions)

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Guernica

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The Author Is Purely a Name

By Elena Ferrante
October 1, 2015

Fragments on writing, publishing, and being an anonymous worldwide phenomenon.

Elena Ferrante—a pen name; the writer’s identity is unknown—was born in Naples. She is the bestselling author of The Days of Abandonment, which the New York Times described as “stunning,” Troubling Love, and The Lost Daughter. Her Neapolitan novel series has been hailed by critics as “a masterpiece” and “the first true literary classic of the 21st century.”

The following text appeared in a collection of interviews and letters that were published in Italy as La frantumaglia by edizioni e/o. In these writings, the author discusses her unwavering decision to remain out of the public eye, her thoughts on the art of writing, and the authors and books she admires. The full collection will be published in English by Europa Editions as Fragments: On Writing, Reading, and Absence in January 2016.

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The Spectator

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A book that rattles like a pressure-cooker with anger, outrage, frustration and spleen

The final instalment of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, The Story of the Lost Child, combines a striking approach to narrative with being a real page-turner

Tim Martin

‘You understand, Lenú, what happens to people: we have too much stuff inside and it swells us, breaks us.’ The line comes from the third of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, but it offers a fair summary of a sequence that concludes in this fourth volume. Set in Italy between the 1950s and the present, and documenting the turbulent friendship between two women from the same working-class quarter of Naples, these books by a still-unidentified pseudonymous writer rattle like pressure-cookers with anger, outrage, frustration, jealousy and spleen. With every new instalment, their Paperchase-pastel covers (book four features a dreadful illustration of two little girls dressed like fairies) seem more and more like the work of a designer crossing some event horizon of fabulous irony.

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Brooklyn Magazine

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The Story of the Lost Author: Reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

In her “Art of Fiction” interview with the Paris Review, Italian novelist Elena Ferrantementions a very good essay in The Guardian by Meghan O’Rourke about, well, Elena Ferrante. And why wouldn’t Ferrante (or any author) read essays about herself? They must—I imagine—be especially amusing for all their speculation surrounding her identity; “Ferrante” after all is a pen name. Reading several of them at once is like watching a futile game of twenty questions: Ferrante has the answer, and her critics have wasted all their turns asking the wrong questions. (Victory, of a kind.) But when I read this particular aside in the Paris Review I froze, and I’ve been frozen for quite a while since.

Writers read their reviews, and every critic has to come to some kind of terms with this fact. (Those terms can be easy and unapologetic, but I suspect just as often they aren’t.) Telling a person what you really think of their work can be pretty scary, and, especially as a woman, the pressure to be nice is real. (See: the works of Elena Ferrante.) I thought I had settled my terms with this work, but that was before I read this snippet from Ferrante’s Paris Review interview, which was when I realized that Elena Ferrante might (might) read this.

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LA Reviews of Books

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Maybe Connect by Jedediah Purdy

October 4th, 2015

EVERYONE I KNOW is reading, or means to read, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Elena Ferrante. These authors have very little in common, by the way such things are typically measured: they share neither genre, style, gender, race, nor nationality. What they do share is the sense of personal urgency, the hunger, they’ve created in readers. What does this response say about these writers, seemingly so different, and about all of us who have brought them together in our book bags, in mind and feeling? How have they arrested and occupied our attention?

Coates’s Between the World and Me appeals to readers’ desperation to see more clearly, feel more definitely, in a time of terrible racial violence. It resonates, too, with our doubts that justice is near, or possible, or even something much of the country wants. Ferrante’s novels — particularly her Neapolitan series, the final volume of which was just published — touch a nearer and quieter desperation. As Joanna Biggs wrote in a brilliant review essay, everyone she knows seems to have tumbled from Ferrante’s pages to some intense recollection of their own formative friendships and losses, their own most private and defining confusion and pain.

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The Daily Beast

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Searching Naples for Elena Ferrante

Strolling the streets of Naples, a fan of Ferrante’s magisterial quartet of novels about the lifelong friendship of two women discovers how the city itself is a major character.
In August, like most tourists to Naples, I was there en route to somewhere else. But as I had four days to spend in the city, I decided that since I was engrossed in reading the final volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, The Story of the Lost Child, I would turn the stopover into my own informal Ferrante fangirl tour. It was 90 degrees out and the sun shone uncompromisingly, but I laced up my sneakers, packed a water bottle, and left my husband and air-conditioned hotel room behind.

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The Guardian

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We don’t know Elena Ferrante – and that’s exactly why her success is so wonderful

by Deborah Orr
I have a theory about the friendship at the centre of this remarkable set of novels, though it may well be nonsense. That’s the beauty of the writer’s anonymity: it helps us find what we want to

The rise of Elena Ferrante is tremendously pleasing, even from a purely practical point of view. Ferrante is famous for two things: her novels, andfor not existing. Writing under a pen-name, scrupulously guarding her identity, eschewing literary public relations, the Italian writer has managed, in these days of hype, to find a massive global audience without flogging her physical self as an integral aspect of publication at all. Splendid.

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The Brooklin Rail

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The Quotidian Ephemera of Women’s Lives

by Madeline Gressel

Elena Ferrante
The Story of the Lost Child
(Europa Editions, 2015)

I began reading Elena Ferrante’s so-called “Neapolitan Novels” after a very close friend recommended them to me on the highest possible terms. The friendship that is at the heart of the novels, she told me, reminded her of our own friendship. At the time I began reading, I was angry with this particular friend for continuing to live as roommates with an ex-boyfriend of mine. I knew that their relationship was platonic, and yet—against all evidence—I convinced myself again and again that they were sexually involved. I did not lower myself to tell her my feelings directly, but she knew how I felt, and there was tension between us. In short: life.

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n+1

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A conversation about Elena Ferrante between Dayna Tortorici, Joan Acocella, and Ann Goldstein.

WHENEVER I HEAR someone speculate about the true identity of Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous Italian novelist of international fame, a private joke unspools in my head. Who is she? the headlines ask.Don’t you know? I whisper. In my joke I’m sitting opposite someone important. The person promises not to tell, so I say:

She’s Lidia Neri.

She’s Pia Ciccione.

She’s Francesca Pelligrina. Domenica Augello. Different names, every time, but the reaction is the same: a momentary light in the listener’s eyes that fades to bored disappointment. An Italian woman from Naples, whose name you wouldn’t know. Who did you expect?

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Swide

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#FerranteFever! 5 reasons everybody is crazy about Elena Ferrante

The world has gone mad for Elena Ferrante, the mysterious Italian writer who penned the saga My Brilliant Friend. Here are 5 reasons for her success and 5 reasons to learn to love her too.

She is the publishing phenomenon of the moment, and not only in Italy. The latest literary creation by Elena Ferrante tells the story of friendship between two women, an “everyday saga” formed by four long episodes in four books (My Brilliant Friend, Story of a New name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child) published between 2011 and 2014 that have become a real international literary event. Translated into many languages, critics and journalists have enthused about her all over the world, The Guardian and Time have written about her, James Franco has posted photos of her books on Instagram, Twitter has #FerranteFever since this summer and a TV series is in production that will surely not go unnoticed. While it goes without saying that the main cause of Elena Ferrante’s success is her writing and her extraordinary skill as a storyteller, this explosion of approval and admirers is also based on other aspects linked to the (absent) figure of Ferrante and the aura of mystery surrounding her and her books. Here are 5 reasons why it is worth knowing this enigmatic author, who was mentioned in the journal Foreign Policy in 2014 on the list of the hundred most read thinkers in the world.

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Flavorwire

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10 Funny, Tortured, and Melancholy Literary Quotes About Female Friendship

If “Ferrante Fever” has taught us anything, it’s that the hunger for good literature about female friendship isn’t a hunger for treacly, happy-ever-after stories about gals who stick together through thick and thin. No, readers want stories that show the jealousy, regret, companionship, discovery, love, humor, and hate that make our lifelong friendships such rich fodder for books from the best YA to the most troubling literary fiction.

Here are some of our favorite passages about female friendship from literature, from the silly to the sublime to the sad — with lots of Ferrante included, of course.

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Don’t Read Too Fast

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Elena Ferrante, or Naples, Part Two

by dontreadtoofast on October 8, 2015

A panel discussion was held at Lutyens and Rubenstein on the eve of the release of the final novel in Ferrante’s Naples tetralogy. The panel was made up of Cathy Rentzenbrink, Jonathan Gibbs, Susanna Gross and Tessa Hadley – all writers and critics, but more importantly, ardent Ferrante fans. Although none of them were especially keen on speaking in front of an audience, when it comes to this author none of them could bear the alternative prospect of sitting in the audience and watching another panel get it wrong. Such is the fervour for Ferrante.

For those who have not yet been introduced, the books chart the course of a friendship over several decades. The two women – Elena and Lila – are co-dependent rivals and know each other better than anyone. The novels open with Elena writing their story down as Lila has disappeared. Her aim to recapture what may soon be forgotten becomes, we realize, memoir as as an aggressive, defiant act. Elena is punishing Lila by colonizing their story. She seems to own it by providing the only side, however, in telling the full version of events, there are moments when she clearly hands the reader’s sympathy over to Lila by recounting her own actions. There is little objectivity, but at the same time, there is little bias.

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Quartz

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Turning authors into celebrities is bad for reading

Today the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich 8 million Swedish kronor (approximately $970,000 US) in recognition of a lifetime of excellence. The 67-year-old author ofVoices From Chernobyl and War’s Unwomanly Face was praised by the Swedish Academy “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

 Prizes like the Nobel inspire much ado—in the weeks leading up to the announcement, people give their best guesses as to who will win, look back on past “snubbed” winners, and even place bets as if spectators at a Derby.
Hours before the scheduled announcement this morning, a tweetclaiming to be from the real Alexievich thanked the Swedish Academy for her prize. The account has since been revealed to be a hoax, but not before the message was retweeted hundreds of times as prize-speculators wondered if Alexievich had let the secret out hours too soon.

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