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The Story of the Lost Child
By Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein
Like the three books that precede it in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, this brilliant conclusion offers a clamorous exploration of female friendship set against a backdrop of poverty, ambition & violence.
The Story of the Lost Child, by Elena Ferrante
You must have been sleeping all year if you evaded news of Ferrante. For years Ferrante’s fiction had been published to great acclaim and sold in significant quantities, especially in Italy, but globally 2015 can be called the Year of Ferrante. Lost Child, the concluding volume in the Naples quartet, came out in English translation late in the year, but by then Ferrante fever had already built up, and conversations can still be heard about which of the four books about friends Elena and Lila one should begin with. Believe it or not, many recommend starting with the second, looping back to the first, and then to the third and fourth! There is still a mystery about who Ferrante is, whether “she” is in fact a woman, and there has been much analysis about what it means to be able to remain anonymous in our hyper-wired and networked age. And sportingly, in the interviews she occasionally does, she takes the inevitable question about her “identity”, without of course giving anything away.
1. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante (Europa, $18)
Elena Ferrante’s latest work completes a quartet of novels that just might rank as “the greatest achievement of fiction in the postwar era,” said Charles Finch at theChicago Tribune. The Italian author, who writes under a pen name, has brought such honesty and insight to her portrayal of a profound, decades-long friendship between two women from a Naples slum that the experience of reading the books can be “something close to spiritual.” In this concluding volume, Elena, who narrates, returns to Naples as a successful writer but finds herself again assuming the role of sidekick to brilliant, undereducated Lila, said Maureen Corrigan at NPR. The friends raise their children together, but the rivalry between them never dies, and after Elena breaks a vow and writes a novel about Lila, Lila breaks off contact and vanishes. The book’s conclusion “masterfully returns to the opening moments of the first novel,” revealing depths we couldn’t initially imagine. “Brava, Elena Ferrante, whoever you are.”
A dissent: Compared with the earlier books, the three-decade-long story in this finale feels “more roughly sketched,” said Claire Messud at theFinancial Times.
2015 wasn’t a spectacular reading year for me but I’ve still managed to pick ten good books from the forty-five that I read. It’s still a varied list with two non-fiction novels, two fantasy books, three modern classics and one thriller. I’m writing this post right now on my phone whilst at a beach without a laptop and with a crappy internet connection so please forgive the brief descriptions of each book. Here’s my top ten of 2015 in no particular order.
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
The final novel in the Neapolitan series. It’s as brilliant as the previous ones but sadder and more harrowing.
By Kurt Wenzel
“The Story of the Lost Child”
By Elena Ferrante
The fourth and final installment of Ms. Ferrante’s Neapolitan cycle. The books follow two women — the brilliant, inward-looking Elena and her larger-than-life friend Lila — as they try to escape their violent, provincial upbringing in Naples. In this volume, Elena returns to Naples to be with the man she has always loved and tries to renew her friendship with Lila.
Like the previous three installments, “The Story of the Lost Child” offers little in the way of plot. Instead, Ms. Ferrante offers lifelike portraits of two of the most flawed and fascinating women in contemporary literature, along with a comprehensive look at a country painfully trying to drag itself from cloying tradition into modernity. (Europa Editions, $18)
‘The Story of the Lost Child’ is the fourth and final novel by Elena Ferrante in her series of Neapolitan novels translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. While the third volume Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay ended with Elena and Nino seemingly walking off into the sunset, it will come as no surprise to readers that it isn’t long before all is not well in their relationship. Having returned to Naples to be with Nino, Elena is reunited with Lila and becomes embroiled in the politics and violence of their neighbourhood once again.
2015 was the year Elena Ferrante’s consistently excellent series about the friendship and rivalry between childhood friends Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo really took off in the English-speaking world mostly through word-of-mouth recommendations. Even though it’s very rare for me to read consecutive books by the same author, I read ‘The Story of the Lost Child’ immediately after finishing ‘Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay’, such is the power of the Neapolitan novels.
1. “The Story of the Lost Child,” by Elena Ferrante: Ferrante brings her Neapolitan quartet to a poignant, provocative close in “The Story of the Lost Child.” While the book lacks some of the vivacity and bombast of others in the series, it provides a worthy conclusion to a breathtakingly original, 60-year saga of a “splendid, shadowy friendship” between the sober and studious Elena Greco, and her “terrible, dazzling” friend Lila Cerullo. Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels are often described as stories of female friendship. It’s an accurate but anemic depiction of the passionate, fantastically fraught, relationship between the two.
Abby Comstock-Gay
WWB Campus Associate Editor
I’ve thought long and hard to say something that is not Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child (Europa Editions), since it has gotten so much attention this year and there is a lot more great translated work out there, but this last part of the tetralogy was truly my most memorable literary experience this year. Within the story of Lenu, Ferrante—through the translation of Ann Goldstein—says so much about feminism, politics, friendship, self-doubt, while at the same time painting a picture of a time and a place that is both specifically local and undeniably universal.
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet – My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child (Text, 11/15) – was for me, as evidently for many, the outstanding literary event of the year: a powerful story of female friendship rooted in the poverty of postwar Naples, and subtly overshadowed, as the years pass, by loss, mystery, and moral ambiguity.
Italy produces few international bestsellers, but in recent years four volumes by an anonymous Italian author have become a fictional juggernaut that no one saw coming. The author is Elena Ferrante, but it’s a pseudonym because she is someone who wishes to remain totally private and succeeds beautifully. Her “Neapolitan Novels” start with “My Brilliant Friend” (2011), followed by “The Story of a New Name” and “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.” The fourth book, published this year, “The Story of the Lost Child,” brings this remarkable epic to a close. The books are high drama — set in an exceptionally vivid world and focusing on the lifelong attachment of two women over a 60-year period.
Lila and Elena inhabit an operatic universe of violence, jealousy, love triangles and political upheaval; they are unforgettable characters in the grand tradition of the 19th-century novel. Growing up in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood in Naples, Elena is the hard-working, conscientious one, who wins a place at a good school; she escapes to a new life in Florence, and becomes the writer who confides this story in intense, analytical detail. Her best friend Lila is the charismatic, fierce, impulsive one who stays at home: a “terrible, dazzling girl” who fascinates everyone in the neighborhood. She drops out of school, marries young and badly.
The novel, taking place from the late 70s to present day, opens when Elena’s circumstances change. She’s lived away from Naples for a long time, but Lila persuades her it’s time to come home. The two become neighbors as well as friends. Proximity and shared experiences make them closer as adults than they ever have been, until tragedy strikes Lila, changing her so utterly that Elena can’t help her.
The novel’s top layer is packed with the usual events of ordinary lives: babies, teenagers, estranged husbands, philandering lovers, troubled siblings, dying parents. This domesticity takes place in a community in which murder is chillingly commonplace, during an era of Italian history known for political instability and corruption. There’s even an earthquake, recounted with terrifying eye-witness immediacy.
The teeming surfaces of the Neapolitan novels — and this one particularly — effectively conceal its depths, but once you find them, they shimmer and move. Shift your focus, and the friendship becomes less the story’s center and more of a premise and framework for Elena to review her life. Another shift and you see how much of the novel’s significant action is contrived but balanced; even the earthquake’s literal seismic shift has metaphoric weight.
So much happens in “The Story of the Lost Child” that it’s almost a shock when it wraps up the various strands to return to the cycle’s opening events. This clever, haunting storytelling has earned the quartet of books and its author a cultish following. Ferrante slowly beguiles her readers — if she hooks you, your reward is an expansive, multi-dimensional testament of friendship and social history, a heady blend of personal and political, intimate and epic. From a literary perspective, Ferrante’s approach is masterly. She uses the melodrama of soap opera to tell a fantastically good story, all the while sneaking in piercing observations, like a file baked into a cake. Whoever Elena Ferrante is, she is often called “a 21st-century Dickens.” Well-deserved praise indeed.
I don’t know anything about how anyone chooses the best books of the year. It’s not like any of us have read every book published and it’s not like there’s any objective way to rank books, so what makes something best? I don’t know. Maybe everyone else does. I’m a favorites person.
These are my fourteen favorite books of 2015, in no particular order.
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
I read the last page seven times in a row. Not only did I not want the series to end, but that last page was so perfect, so stunning, so exactly what I needed.
Jane Ciabattari picks the novels, memoirs and short story collections that deserved a place on your shelf this year.
Ferrante’s wrenching novel, the final volume of her Neapolitan quartet, plays out against a backdrop of political tumult and social upheaval but sticks brilliantly to its focus: the bond between two women, Lila and Elena, whose ambition and charisma at times unite them and at times bitterly divide them.
Juliet Mabey
Publisher, Oneworld
I wish I’d published: The book that brought out the green-eyed monster in me (and every editor will know what I mean) is most definitely Mary Beard’s history of ancient Rome, SPQR – it’s exactly the sort of brilliantly researched, authoritatively written and accessible non-fiction that we particularly love to publish. A very close second would be Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels (the fourth and final one was published this year). It is terrific to see translated literary fiction achieve this level of success, and hopefully it will encourage readers to explore other writers from around the world – and booksellers to support them.
Lennie Goodings
Publisher, Virago
I wish I’d published: The extraordinary, delicious, maddening, mysterious Elena Ferrante. I have the fourth one, The Story of the Lost Child, to devour over Christmas.
Alexandra Pringle
Editor in chief, Bloomsbury
I wish I’d published: I will have to join the legion of other publishers who I am sure will say Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. Jhumpa Lahiri told me about her a few years ago and I read them passionately, obsessively, longingly.
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2015); My Brilliant Friend (2012); The Story of a New Name (2013); Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay(2014).
Several of us in the Verso team received our diagnosis this summer from a certified medical doctor who scrutinized our exhausted faces, distracted eyes and dramatic swings of emotion: “I’m sorry. You have come down with a severe case of Ferrante fever. The worst will pass but the hunger will never fade.” This fever of addiction stole sleep, stoked obsession and caused dangerous and foolish behaviour, such as crossing the road whilst reading—but it also brought new and old friends together in a happy haze of intoxication. Thus, here are some snippets from my brilliant friends that illustrate our year of reading Ferrante:
“The clandestine clubbishness that envelopes women who’ve read and immersed themselves in the texts shows how little female desire, anger and vulnerability is accurately and confidently explored in literature and culture. Finding other readers leads to a torrent of questions: which character are you? Did the final page destroy you? What happened with the shoes?”—Dawn Foster
“Are Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels even books? I began to doubt it when I talked about them with other people – mostly women. We returned to life too quickly as we spoke: who was your Lila, the childhood friend who effortlessly dazzled everyone? […] The usual distance between fiction and life collapses when you read Ferrante. She knows it too: writing the Neapolitan quartet, she has said, was like ‘having the chance to live my life over again’.
“It would be enough to have books in which we recognise the truth of women’s lives in all its darkness, but the Neapolitan quartet also has an almost deranging narrative pleasure, delivered in a style that’s more of an admission that the author cares too much about the truth to bother with style. The publication of the fourth and final volume is a terrible moment.”—Joanna Biggs