The Story of the Lost Child

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Book Chase

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The Elena Ferrante Series Reviewed (The Story of the Lost Child)

I recently completed The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth (and final) book in what has become known as the purposely mysterious Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Series.  The books explore the decades long friendship between two Italian women who met as children in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Naples.  My Brilliant Friend, first published in 2012, seemed to come from nowhere as it became a 2015 bestseller in, I suppose, anticipation of the publication later in the year of the fourth book in the series, The Story of the Lost Child.  Between these two came 2013’sThe Story of a New Name and 2014’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.

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New York Magazine / The Cut

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‘I’M HAVING A FRIENDSHIP AFFAIR’

A look at the intensely obsessive, deeply meaningful, occasionally undermining, marriage-threatening, slightly pathological platonic intimacy that can happen between women.

By

(…) As girls and young women, we are allowed our friendships. We are afforded our close, intimate, intense relationships with one another. It is accepted and expected of us. On television, in novels, in every corner of popular culture, we are inundated by examples of women enmeshed in joyful, painful, complicated, stormy relationships with each other: the girls of Girls, the women of Sex and the City, the novels of Elena Ferrante. In The Story of a New Name, Lena thinks of her tortured, lifelong friendship with Lila: “It was as if, because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other; even our physical aspect, it seemed to me, shared in that swing.” A friend tells me the image of Strawberry Shortcake and Blueberry Muffin locked arm-in-arm is seared deeply into her brain. Others: Think of Thelma and Louise, Hannah and her sisters,Truth & Beauty, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, the Golden Girls. According to the Times, celebrity female BFFs are the new power couples.

Material Witness

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Five Books Of 2015

I’ve fallen short of my book-a-week target for 2015 by about 10 books, but what’s missing in quantity has been more than made up for in quality.

Picking five favourites has therefore been so difficult – particularly as four could be by the same author – that I’ve cheated a little. (Is quadrilogy an actual word?)

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante

There’s not a lot left unsaid about these books, not least by me, as I reviewed #1 My Brilliant Friendin January and #s 2 and 3, The Story of a New Name and Those Who Leave and  Those Who Stay in the summer.

These books had an emotional charge to them that is rarely matched as well as a fierce honesty in the story-telling that made them compelling and uncomfortable in turn. When you start dreaming about characters in the book you’re reading, you know they have either deeply affected you or scared the life out of you. In this case it erred toward the former although Lila is more than capable of the latter.

Closing the book at the end of volume 4, The Story of the Lost Child, was the beginning of a grieving process. I’ve filled the gap these books left – to some extent anyway – with the Ferrante back catalogue. Amazingly, The Days of Abandonment, a story with incredibly strong echoes of the Lila and Lenú saga, managed to turn the emotional intensity up even higher.

These are books to be reckoned with, as memorable as anything I’ve ever read.

The New York Times Book Review

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Poetry Round Table: What’s Your Favorite Poem?

ELENA FERRANTE: Amelia Rosselli (1930-96) is one of the Italian poets of the last century who pushed herself most forcefully, most painfully and most imprudently beyond the limits destiny had set for her. Among her many “superb sheets of disobedience,” I recommend “Sleep” (1953-66, but published in Italy in 1992), a collection of poems written in English in the grip of Italian. I especially love “Well, so, patience to our souls.” I like that word, “patience,” which, in the 10 lines that follow — in a jiffy run, as we are “left alone with our sister / navel” — is struck by aggressive verbs like run, snap, tear and ravish, and by “flaming strands of opaque red lava” while “the wind cries oof! / and goes off.”
— Elena Ferrante is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Story of the Lost Child,” the concluding volume of her Neapolitan tetralogy.

Forbes

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Why You Should Embrace Being A Nobody

by J. Maureen Henderson

One of the biggest literary stories of the year has centered around Elena Ferrante, the Italian novelist who released the final installment in her popular Neapolitan series this past September. The catch? Elena Ferrante is a pen name and the true identity of the author behind the books beloved by critics and readers alike is a mystery. In an interview with Vanity Fair, the publicity-averse novelist addresses the speculation about her identity. For her, the work she pens speaks for itself and would not be strengthened by personal notoriety. Deliberately choosing to be an enigma has given her unprecedented creative freedom:

“Indeed, I have my private life and as far as my public life goes I am fully represented by my books. My choice was something different. I simply decided once and for all, over 20 years ago, to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who-knows-what. This was an important step for me. Today I feel, thanks to this decision, that I have gained a space of my own, a space that is free, where I feel active and present. To relinquish it would be very painful,” she says.

GalleyCat

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David Macaulay and Elena Ferrante Debut on the Indie Bestseller List

By Maryann Yin

(Debuted at #14 in Paperback Fiction) The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante: “The two protagonists are now in their twenties. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila. Meanwhile, Elena continues her journey of self-discovery. The two young women share a complex and evolving bond that brings them close at times, and drives them apart at others.” (Sept. 2013)

Citizen-Times

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Rob Neufeld: What’s all the buzz about Elena Ferrante?

Sometimes, a literary phenomenon comes upon the scene, and you just have to lay things down and see what’s up. For instance, there’s the “Neapolitan Quartet” by Elena Ferrante (a pen name; the author’s identity remains a secret).

The final book in this series — “The Story of the Lost Child” — is landing on many best-of-2015 lists, and Ferrante’s being hailed as “one of the great novelists of our time,” as well as the most important Italian writer of her generation.

Belatedly, I go to the first volume, “My Brilliant Friend,” to report what makes her work stand out.

In the prologue, a man named Rino calls his mother’s old friend, Elena Greco, the narrator, to report that Rino’s mom has been missing without a trace for two weeks.

“What a good son,” the narrator says sarcastically, “a large man, forty years old, who hadn’t worked in his life, just a small-time crook and spendthrift. I could imagine how carefully he had done his searching. Not at all. He had no brain, and in his heart he had only himself.”

This is wonderful. We’re going to be led through the story by a narrator with an attitude, and we’ll want to learn how that developed. When the story finishes its 10 years of life from a half a century ago, we’ll come back to the prologue to read more into it.

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Freight Books

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Freight Staff and Authors Pick Favourite Reads of 2015

Laura Waddell, Digital Marketing Executive at Freight Books

The most significant reading experience I’ve had in 2015 has beenElena Ferrante’s Neopolitan series translated by Ann Goldstein, the last of which, The Story of the Lost Child (Europa Editions), was published in English in September. Ferrante depicts what it is to be a working class woman from a Neopolitan village in this story spanning the lifetime of two friends. Although these parallel lives take different paths, Lenu and Lila are inescapably impacted by the class and gender situation of their births throughout, in ways both obvious and eye-openingly subtle. The story of the two friends is set to the backdrop of violent Italian politics in the mid twentieth century. Essentially, the novels are an exploration of pervasive systems of power told through the domestic, romantic and working lives of two characters who utterly got under my skin. Having finished the series I’m still grieving it being over.

 

Fader

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What The Best Authors Of 2015 Read This Year

Paul Murray, Author of The Mark and the Void

Beginning with My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet follows the interweaving lives of two women, Elena and Lila, from their girlhood in Naples through the turbulent Italy of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. It sounded to me when I first heard about it like exactly the kind of thing I wouldn’t like. But the voices of the characters are so powerfully alive, the events so vivid, the relationship between the women so stormy and complex, that the books hit me like a fist, over and over again. The Quartet is a staggering achievement, but it’s also unputdownably exciting, smart, passionate and alive. It will blow you away.

Oldie

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The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

Europa Editions £11.99

Review by Teresa Waugh

 

One of the first things I heard about the mysterious Elena Ferrante – before I had read any of her novels – was that she might be a man. A mere glance at a few pages of her writing makes this hypothesis seem unlikely.

A while back my curiosity led me to search the internet for a clue as to her real identity – and indeed I came across an Italian article in which the writer claimed categorically that Elena Ferrante, a woman in her late sixties, was married to a named Milanese publisher. I can no longer find the reference; only the statement that some items have been removed for data protection, all of which feeds my suspicion, that like Roberto Saviano, her fellow Neapolitan and scourge of the Camorra, she is persona non grata with the Naples Mafia whose tentacles now stretch right across Italy.

Or, like Flaubert, Ferrante wishes posterity to believe that the artist ‘has not lived’. Or perhaps like the great Sicilian novelist, Giovanni Verga, she simply wishes that the hand of the writer remain invisible.

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Jezebel

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The Best Things Jezebel Staff Read in 2015, Or a Reading List for Your Holiday Downtime

The Best Things Jezebel Staff Read in 2015, Or a Reading List for Your Holiday Downtime

From your favorite purveyors of beautiful online garbage, here are the books, essays and pieces of journalism that’ve stuck with us throughout the year. It’s a long list and a good one: we hope it’s useful as you prepare for the plane trips, family avoidance, blissful solitude and last-minute presents that will close out 2015.

Rachel Vorona Cote

The Neapolitan Novels (especially Book 4), by Elena Ferrante: There are certain books that I finish, only to realize that the desire propelling me to keep reading was a survival mechanism: the tapestry of Lena and Lila’s long intimacy so vividly depicts the way friendships become worlds of their own, the simultaneous ecstasy and peril of investing so much of yourself in another person—and regarding them as a muse. The last book in the series is probably not the *best* of the four; book two, The Story of a New Name, is probably the strongest. But I cannot help but feel the most affection for book four as the installment that traces out the twilight of a capacious friendship. The ending smarts, but in the best way.

Bobby Finger

The Story of the Lost Child, by Elena Ferrante: This could actually apply to the entire series of Neapolitan novels, all of which I read over the course of the year. Though My Brilliant Friend took some time to fall in love with, it was a love that kept growing—book after book—all the way to TSotLC’s quietly satisfying conclusion. I cared more about the lives of Lila and Lenu than I ever have for two fictional characters, and watching them both traverse through their ever-evolving lives—periodically taking flight, though never leaving each other’s orbit—was as moving and hypnotic a reading experience that I feel is possible for a writer to create. While waiting for TSotLC, I devoured the brief and mysterious Troubling Love, as well, which I found captivating in a host of different ways.

The Wall Street Journal

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Speakeasy – Some Surprises Stand Out in the Best-Book Lists for 2015

By JENNIFER MALONEY

Critics disagreed sharply on the best work of fiction this year, but amid the plethora of best-book-of-the-year lists there were some clear, and surprising, winners.

Two of the biggest surprises were a posthumous short-story collection and a satirical novel about race relations, both of which came seemingly out of nowhere to earn top spots, lifting their profiles – and their sales.

“A Manual for Cleaning Women,” a bracing short-story collection by the late Lucia Berlin, was named on eight out of 21 lists reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Paul Beatty‘s “The Sellout,” a novel in which the black narrator tries to reinstate segregation and slavery, earned at least half a dozen mentions.

That put them both in the company of novels that so far this year had enjoyed much more buzz: Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life” and Elena Ferrante’s “The Story of the Lost Child” (tied with 12 mentions); Lauren Groff’s “Fates and Furies” (nine) and Jonathan Franzen’s “Purity” (seven).

(…)

Bustle

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9 Books With Final Chapters That Completely Shocked You

BOOKS

According to the principal of Chekhov’s gun, if a rifle is hanging above the fireplace on a stage during a play, it better be used by the end. It’s about fulfilling your audience’s expectation and eliminating useless descriptions or actions. While there is much to be said for this approach — after all, it’s credited to the celebrated playwright Anton Chekhov — there are times where this rule is best ignored.

There’s nothing quite like a novel that upends all your expectations as you enter the final chapter, books with great twists. And while you can usually see the twist coming on a second read, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about that initial thrill of turning the page, believing everything is settled and you understand the plot and the characters, and then having it completely ripped out from under you.
It’s an element of a surprise that we don’t need — or want — in our own lives. It’s better to read and observe a surprise happening safely within the pages of a book. I don’t crave any particular unexpected adventure in my own life, but I’ll admit, I can be quite unsatisfied if a book’s plot goes exactly as I thought it would.
Some of the books below have final chapters that horrify, shock, or just plain confuse you. But whatever their differences, they all have one thing in common here: spoilers abound, so proceed with caution.

4. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

When we learn the motivations behind Lila’s disappearance, Elena seems to settle back, content with little answers. It’s in the final pages that she receives a mysterious package with no return address. It’s from Lila, of course, but what the package contains sent my jaw dropping: the misplaced doll from My Brilliant Friend, long forgotten, is within the box, and the questions begin again: what really was Lila’s long game, and how on earth did she ever retrieve that doll?

The Frisky

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Here are the shining gems pulled out of the constantly-flowing river of garbage that culture can be. Treat this as your reading list for the quiet weeks before and after the holidays, or buy any and all of these for anyone you forgot about this year.

A notable chunk of 2015 was spent binge-reading the works of Elena Ferrante, particularlyThe Neapolitan Novels, so it’s no shocker that the Neapolitan finale The Story of The Lost Child was one of my favorite reads of 2015. Seamlessly marrying meticulous prose with the ability to show a bird’s eye view of a city and its people, Ferrante portrays the paths of the two best friends with an honest complexity that forces you to nod and admit your ugliest flaws as you’re reading along. The Neapolitan novels in general, and especially the melancholic conclusion of The Story of The Lost Child forced me to reflect on the occasional jealousies, enduring loyalties and necessary hypocrisy present in my closest friendships. She’s basically a doctor that tears your guts out with her unrelenting-yet-compassionate prose and leaves them piled there in front of you, as you feel like a confused and yet grateful goddamn idiot. Also, she does an amazing job addressing the complex relationships between women and their bodies.

Read her shit, I guarantee even if you don’t enjoy it, you’ll have some sort of uncomfortable and necessary internal dialogues spark up. – Bronwyn Isaac

Independent

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Literary Fiction of the Year by Katy Guest: ‘All this to savour – and then the thrill of a new Harper Lee, too’

Katy Guest

 

Schermata 2015-12-17 alle 16.34.56

(…) Speaking of classics, the fourth in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet was published this year, increasing the number of readers around the world who now realise Ferrante’s brilliance. The Story of the Lost Child (Europa, £11.99) concludes the story of Elena and Lila – one of the most compelling female friendships in fiction.