Local bestsellers
PAPERBACK
FICTION
1. The Martian By Andy Weir BROADWAY
2. The Story of the Lost Child By Elena Ferrante EUROPA EDITIONS
3. My Brilliant Friend By Elena Ferrante EUROPA EDITIONS
The Story of the Lost Child
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Philly
‘The Story of the Lost Child’: Triumphant finale to Elena Ferrante’s ‘Neapolitan Novels’
Reviewed by Katherine Hill
Individual lives lend themselves well to book-length fiction. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a long life, like a novel, and even the most typical lives feature a staggering number of turns. But it takes a transcendent imagination to write a life that reads as if it actually happened, in our own world, and not too long ago. We’re lucky to have one such imagination working now, that of Italian novelist Elena Ferrante.
Her ferociously addictive Neapolitan quartet – My Brilliant Friend (English translation, 2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and now the final volume, The Story of the Lost Child – takes on not one fictional life, but two: Elena “Lenù” Greco and Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo, formidable women born in Naples in 1944.
English PEN
PEN Atlas Q&A: Aleksandar Hemon
Who are your favourite writers in translation?
When I was growing up, nearly everything I read was in translation. I read some writers writing in Serbo-Croatian but they were forced upon me by the school system and I resisted them, a knee-jerk reaction resisting the authorities who wanted us to understand how great the prescribed writers were. I admire some of them now. But when I was younger nearly everything I read was in translation and in a small place, a small literary market as Bosnia or Yugoslavia was before the war, many books were translated. Having said that, I still read a lot in translation. Danilo Kiš, whom I’d read in Serbo-Croatian, I returned to him in translation; there’s a strange shift in the angle of light, as it were, cast upon a book if read in translation as opposed to the original language. Most recently I’ve been enjoying Elena Ferrante, and not enjoying Knausgaard, but I spend a lot of time reading books in translation.
European Literary Network
Rosie’s Reviews: THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD by Elena Ferrante
I believe that we will still be talking about ‘Elena Ferrante’ in decades to come – in the same way we still discuss Balzac or Dickens; in the same way that Karl Ove Knausgaard and Hilary Mantelare today part of our literary furniture. Elena Ferrante is a ground-breaking writer. She uses a pseudonym and we may never know her real identity, or gender, but we will always have her brilliant books. And how could she not be a woman? To write with such urgent, forensic, visceral intimacy about the minds, lives and bodies of women; to describe women with such raw honesty testifies to her female gender – and to her sensational achievement as a writer. Added to this she is Italian. Sitting here in Italy, her country and my second home, writing this review of a novel about two Italian women set in Italy, I can only express gratitude to Ferrante for helping me to better understand this magnificent but mercurial land. At times I felt so unsettled by her insights that I had to put the novel down.
The Story of the Lost Child is the fourth and final novel in the Neapolitan series. The first, My Brilliant Friend, was published in English in 2011; all four translated faultlessly, fluently and fabulously by Ann Goldstein. You must read all four for the full story: the first novel begins in the present day with Lila’s disappearance aged 66; the final novel ends ‘today’ with the mystery possibly solved. So, why not just write one novel? They are indeed very long, sometimes flabby, rambling and melodramatic but each word rings true, each page turns swiftly and the prose is often so luminous and lyrical that I wouldn’t miss a word. And would you really want to buy a 2000 page novel, or deprive Ferrante of the nail-biting cliff-hangers concluding each novel?
The Harvard Crimson
Ferrante’s Fourth Dazzles
By CHARLOTTE L.R. ANRIG, CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Brooklyn Magazine
Best of Brooklyn: Books & Media
Best Book to Weep to on the Subway: The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
ABC
Elena Ferrante
Ann Goldstein is an editor at The New Yorker, and the translator of Italian writer Elena Ferrante whose four-volume novel centring around female friendship and set in Naples has become a global hit.
The final instalment in the series called The Story of the Lost Child has now been published and has cemented Ferrante’s reputation as one of the world’s leading contemporary novelists.
Boston Globe
‘The Story of the Lost Child’ by Elena Ferrante
By John Freeman GLOBE CORRESPONDENT
The trend of serialized literary novels comes and goes, but it seems to be having a particularly robust resurgence over the past 15 years, from the Gilead books of Marilynne Robinson to the Melrose novels of Edward St. Aubyn, and the autobiographical sagas of Karl Knausgaard.
It seems certain now that Elena Ferrante will be queen of the new mega-novelists. For the past four years she has been publishing one volume every fall about Elena Greco, a woman raised in Naples in the late 1950s, when the modern state of Italy was new and the opportunities a woman could expect very few.
The Guardian
Elena Ferrante’s Ischia: an Italian island paradise
Few works of fiction have captured the sultry grittiness of southern Italy like Elena Ferrante’s wildly successful Neapolitan quartet, which concluded this month with the English translation of The Story of the Lost Child. Ferrante’s 1950s Naples is a chaotic mire of sweat and stymied ambition – a place her characters all struggle to escape. But with a hop across the Gulf of Naples, Ferrante transports readers to paradise.
A one-hour ferry ride from the city, Ischia is a 17-square-mile island of parched tufa and bougainvillea that has hardly changed since the languid summers when Ferrante’s teenage protagonists – fleeing Naples’ stultifying heat and poverty – discover their respective sexualities on the thermal beach at Maronti. Even today, the majority of visitors to Ischia are Italians; many, like Ferrante’s Elena and Lila, are Neapolitans from across the bay, often returning to the same guesthouses and rental apartments every year, each summer a chance to catch up with old friends.
New Republic
Elena Ferrante’s Unruly Bodies
Worry, exhaustion, menstruation: Ferrante writes about all the subjects we’re scared of
In My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, a pubescent Elena Greco worries that she will lose her friend Lila, and finds that “that idea brought on a weary exhaustion.” Soon after, she gets her period for the first time. The juxtaposition—worry, exhaustion, menstruation—is not definitive, but it is suggestive. In culture, the female body is fraught ground: as women, we can be uncomfortable talking about our bodies, in part because when we do, we’re often heard incorrectly, incompletely, or not at all. “I feel like a traitor admitting that PMS lays me flat,” wrote novelist Diana Spechler in May of this year for The New York Times’s Opinionator blog. At Slate, Laura Bennett recently bemoaned the proliferation of confessional essays, in which women wrote intimately about their bodies and bodily functions. The female body remains a thing to be hidden and tamed, rather than listened to or written about.
Ferrante’s attention to the female body has been one of the great pleasures of her Neopolitan series, which concluded with the publication, in September, of The Story of the Lost Child. Chronicling, with thrilling intensity, a life-long friendship between two women, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, born in an impoverished Neopolitan neighborhood at midcentury, Ferrante lets the bodies of her female characters not only function but also speak. Elena and Lila bleed; they get pregnant, and gain weight, and nurse babies, and do their hair. And Ferrante’s attention extends past the—traditionally female—domestic or romantic spheres. “All the characters,” Lidija Haas noted in the Times Literary Supplement, “but the women first of all, feel in their bodies … the constant blows of the system in which they live.” Ferrante’s women experience abandonment, injustice, emotion, on their very skin—and this is treated not as weakness, but plainly as fact.
San Jose Mercury News
Northern California best-sellers, week ending Sept. 20.
By Bay Area News Group
DATA FROM THE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS ASSOCIATION FOR THE WEEK ENDING SEPT. 20.
TRADE FICTION
1. The Martian by Andy Weir
2. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
3. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
Reading Group Guides
Back to the Books!
Carol Fitzgerald, September 2015
Last week was one of the three weeks of the year where we do not update our websites. It gives both me and Tom, our Editorial Director, a chance to slip away on vacation. I spent most of the week in the shade of a tree poolside, reading. That is when I was not in the pool floating and reading. The lovely part of a staycation like this is that there is no packing, and I can wander through my book piles and select titles on a whim, instead of pre-thinking what I would like to read. Lovely!
Among my reading were more than a dozen Young Adult (YA) fiction titles. Though I often love these books, my day-to-day reading skews more adult, so this is my idea of perfect vacation reading. I found myself thinking of how these books could make for wonderful book group discussions as they are issue-oriented, or could be a culled group of suggestions for those of you who want to explore the world of YA, but are unsure of what to read. I share more about many of them later in this opening letter.
Book Reporter
The Story of the Lost Child: The Fourth and Final Neapolitan Novel
It is difficult to think of any contemporary novel that matches Elena Ferrante’s epic bildungsroman in terms of scope. The complete series, which runs now to well over 1,500 pages, is reminiscent of the vast novel of the 19th century, the “sea of words” in Bellow’s memorable phrase, in which entire lives play themselves out before us. Reading THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD, one encounters details from the previous books, events and characters from decades earlier in the narrative that you have all but forgotten, and the memory of them stirs dimly in your recollection, like episodes from your own life that lie dormant until they are brought up nostalgically over drinks with an old friend or an old lover. It is an uncanny feeling.
If discussions of Elena Ferrante that do not touch upon the mystery of her identity happen anywhere, I have not heard them. The obsession with her identity makes me think of something I was once told by a croupier. There are two types of high rollers. The first likes to have lots of people in the room to witness him throwing his money around, well-dressed strangers to cheer on cue, and to soak up the complimentary drinks. The second likes to be alone with the dealer, no spectators, sliding their chips across the table in silence. “But even with the second type of guy” the croupier said, “they like people outside to know they’re in there by themselves.” A similar irony attends to Ferrante’s anonymity. Her refusal to come out of the shadows has meant that theories of who the author behind these extraordinary books might be (woman or man? individual or group?) have taken on more rather than less prominence in relation to how the books are understood.
The Georgia Straight
Elena Ferrante makes a fierce return with The Story of the Lost Child
The Story of the Lost Child By Elena Ferrante. Europa, 480 pp, softcover
“Hotly anticipated” might be an understatement when it comes to the final book in enigmatic Italian author Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy.
Her snowballing popularity during the publication of the previous three translations was amplified by her unwavering decision to remain anonymous. (Elena Ferrante is a pen name.)
The resulting think pieces—some of which even claim Ferrante, widely heralded as Italy’s most important contemporary author, is really a man—have only added to her mystique. In the lead-up to her new book’s release, bookstores across the continent braced for launch parties and a popular Twitter hashtag emerged to unite her fans’ more viral sentiments: #ferrantefever. (The only known cure is more Ferrante.) Continue reading
The Indianapolis Public Library
Lila and Elena – The fourth and final novel about these two Italian girls has arrived.
September 16, 2015 by Reader’s Connection
My 12-Weeks-of-Christmas list isn’t supposed to start until October, but I’m jumping the gun. Has anyone on your gift list read Elena Ferrante’s first three Neapolitan Novels? The final book in the series, The Story of the Lost Child, was released on September 1st; and if your friend doesn’t run out and buy it, here’s your shot at the perfect present.
The four novels are: