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SAGA ADDICTS THE NEAPOLITAN QUARTET by Elena Ferrante (Europa Editions). These four mesmerising books of love and friendship in southern Italy, beginning with My Brilliant Friend and ending with The Story of the Lost Child, will keep everybody quiet and happy over Christmas. RRP £11.99 each.
Rachel Sylvester
Elena Ferrante is the literary child of Jane Austen and John Steinbeck — her delicately perceptive social observation has an angry undercurrent of political protest. The Neopolitan novels – My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child — had me gripped all year. This series tells the story of two girls, Elena and Lila, growing up in a poor neighbourhood of Naples. Although their paths diverge, their lives remain entwined. It’s a wonderful portrayal of female friendship that also explores sexual jealousy, motherhood and class. The books are beautiful but never mawkish.
Peter Brookes
Elena Ferrante’s four Neopolitan novels are not that patronising put-down, “women’s literature”. For a start, I’ve been totally absorbed by them. A complex story of a female friendship, narrated by a woman, it’s tough and uncompromising, like Naples itself. William Boyd’sSweet Caress also has a female narrator, the photojournalist Amory Clay, whose work takes her to a variety of exotic locations (1930s Berlin, war-torn Vietnam, hippy California), all ripe for a TV adaptation, no doubt. It’s in the same sweep-of-the century genre as his The New Confessions and Any Human Heart, without quite reaching their heights (you can’t quite believe in Amory). Like all Boyd, though, it’s meticulously researched and a gripping read. Clive James, in Latest Readings, serves up brief essays that contain more wisdom, humour and erudition than one would expect from so short a book. A world in a grain of sand.
Alice Thomson
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels feel like a cross between The Godfather, Lace and Proust. Every time you can’t take any more of the violence,corruption, sex and sausage factories, the writing pulls you back. The range of characters is astonishing, but it is the relationship between the two girls from Naples, Elena and Lila, that is so compelling. They feud, compete, support and love each other over the decades under the shadow of Vesuvius. It is a mesmerising tale of Italy in the 20th century, and almost never mentions pizza.
The subtitle of The Story of the Lost Child, “The fourth and final Neapolitan Novel,” broadcasts to Ferrante devotees and momentous and bittersweet occasion: the conclusion of the emotional, intellectually stimulating, and, at times, soap-operatic saga of Lila and Lenù, and their lifelong friendship that begins and ends in a working-class neighborhood in Naples. The Neapolitan novels are habitually referred to as a story of female friendship, however that description, especially in light of this stunning fourth novel, has always felt reductive. They are less the story of female friendship that the story of female identity, particularly female intellectual identity, and how relationships–platonic, romantic, and maternal–threaten, challenge and shape that identity.
Readers are highly recommended to enjoy these books sequentially, beginning with My Brilliant Friend, but for those who can’t wait to dive into The Story of the Lost Child may refer to our study guide, “Previously on the Neapolitan Novels.”
– Halimah Marcus, Editorial Director, Electric Literature
This was a year of voyages—and the tempestuous one of reading Elena Ferrante. I bought “My Brilliant Friend” in a New Delhi bookshop and finished it on a barge in Kerala. I read “The Story of a New Name”in a haveli overlooking the Ganges in Varanasi. In Havana, I stayed on the top floor of a spartan convent. I felt I should have been reading “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” under the covers, but it was too hot. It was even hotter in July, in Naples. I bought her first novel, “Troubling Love,” in Italian (“L’Amore Molesto”), in a bookshop on the Via Port’Alba. The protagonist’s mother lived on the corner. “The Days of Abandonment” is a slim volume, so I packed it for a week of sailing on a friend’s boat. It is a novel that you survive, rather than finish. One of my fellow passengers then lent me “The Lost Daughter.” When I came home, I found a copy of “The Story of The Lost Child” in the mountain of mail. Now I am off again, this time to Asia, but, alas, without a Ferrante. I wish I could take “Fragments,” a collection of essays and correspondence, with me, but it hasn’t been published yet. I plan to reread her next year.
—Judith Thurman
These are the books we loved this year.
Jess Bergman, Assistant Editor
The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante (trans. Ann Goldstein): I gave myself over to the Neapolitan Novels this past spring, finally convinced by the one-two punch of Jia Tolentino and Dayna Tortorici’s essays on Ferrante. Not one to approach anythinglightly, I became an instant evangelical and converted even my grandmother to Ferrante’s coven. I read The Story of the Lost Child while moving from Philadelphia to New York—a fitting synchronicity, as I expect I’ll miss the company of Elena and Lila, and the streets of Naples, as much as I miss my home city.
Emily Firetog, Managing Editor
This year we launched Literary Hub, which meant I was only able to focus on reading (and finishing) short stories or extremely long books/sagas.
Short: Colin Barrett’s Young Skins, which I first read back when I worked with the small Irish press that first put out the collection overseas. Like everyone else on the planet I loved Lucia Berlin’s A Manual For Cleaning Women. Cheers for Lauren Holmes’sBarbara the Slut, which also has one of the best covers this year. And, duh, Joy Williams’s The Visiting Privilege.
Long: I read both of the fourth books of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitian series and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (trans. Don Bartlett), although I only finished one of those (Lila forever).
After turning the last page of “The Story of the Lost Child,” the final volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, it’s easy to issue a long sigh. Few novelists have ever wrought as fine and intense a portrait of the circles and connections that radiate and intersect with the strains (and occasional joys) of a lifelong relationship between two people. The saga of the principals, Lila and Elena, which began in girlish childhood in the squalor of tenement blocks peopled by hoodlums and shopkeepers scratching out an existence, has drawn to a close amid the disappointments, dashed hopes, volcanic outbursts and ruptured connections of late middle age. Yet between these mordant bookends there exists a work for the ages—filled with finely carved characters, intricately etched plots and the entire spectrum of human emotion—all translated into exquisite English.
Mr. Moritz is co-author, with Alex Ferguson, of “Leading” and chairman of Sequoia Capital.
Sheila Mitchell
Elena Ferrante is an Italian author who grew up in Naples. She now lives in Turin and is noted for a quartet of novels about Naples and the people who lived there. The novels are My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child. They are consecutive and focus on a relationship between two women, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, spanning six decades of their lives. This is their story, a story told so poignantly, honestly and intensely that Ferrante took the world by surprise.
Ferrante describes the love-hate relationship between the two women in great detail. It is a story of love, power, class and gender. The stories are told always in the first person. Elena, who, despite her academic and social success, is portrayed as passive, envious and submissive to Lila. Lila, on the other hand, is a blaming, projecting person, submissive to no one. Naples itself is portrayed as another character in the novels. Through them, Ferrante brings together, in an extreme, condensed and volatile form, all the fault lines in modern Italy. The novels themselves sound autobiographical, but which (or both) of the two characters represent Ferrante is a mystery.
The two women seem like opposites, like Jung’s shadow archetypes – the Queen (Empress) and the Shadow Queen. The Queen ‘represents power and authority in women who symbolically rule over anything from a corporation to the home’ and is also ‘associated with positive arrogance and a need to protect one’s personal and emotional power’. Contrary to this, the Shadow Queen ‘can slip into aggressive and destructive patterns of behaviour, particularly when authority or control is challenged’. (Myss, 2003:84). In this way her two main characters can be two parts of the same, sliding seamlessly from one of power to one who is powerless and back again.
San Francisco Chronicle | December 15, 2015 Updated: December 15, 2015 9:15am
THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD included in the San Francisco Chronicle list of “Best Books of 2015.”
The best books of 2015: “Fates and Furies,” “Between the World and Me,” “Purity” and a whole lot more.
Every December we bring in book readers and sellers and critics and ask them to share their favorite books of the year. Some years there is lots of overlap on those lists. Some years, they’re all over the place. This is one of those sprawling years. Look around. Ta-Nehisis Coates makes lots of lists with “Between the World and Me.” Elena Ferrante is up there. Helen Macdonald, with “H is for Hawk.” Then it’s a free-for-all. But a rich free-for-all. Full of great reads. This hour, On Point, we put our net in the river for the best books of 2015. And it’s a good catch. Stay tuned.
— Tom Ashbrook
December 15, 2015 — What happens when the most ambitious rethinking of the politics of realism in recent memory can’t be attached to a face? (Can they give the Nobel Prize to a pseudonym?) Now that the Neapolitan tetralogy is complete, it’s clear that Elena Ferrante’s decision to remain biographically unavailable is her greatest gift to readers, and maybe her boldest creative gesture. Her intransigence has protected these books from the ambient noise that threatens to engulf any truly original cultural artifact: the vaguely bullying blurb delirium (The Story of the Lost Child comes prefaced with seven pages of it); the debate over the cheesy pastel covers; the reports that Knausgaard fans and Ferrante partisans are brawling in Park Slope.1
Who really cares about any of it when the books are so sheerly interesting? Ferrante’s inaccessibility to public consumption feels designed to help her books survive whatever storms of silliness are kicked up by the enthusiasm they have sparked. Her self-erasure is more than a challenge to the celebrity logic of contemporary literary culture. It has meant that readers are forced—are free—to confront these novels in all their unassimilable intensity. To paraphrase the most pitiless sentence in the final installment: we’re going to have to resign ourselves to not seeing her.
The woman behind some of today’s best-loved literary fiction is determined to remain an enigma. The FT is granted a rare interview
In 1991, when her first novel, L’amore molesto (Troubling Love), was about to be published, its author wrote a letter to her Italian publishers. “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t . . . Besides, isn’t it true that promotion is expensive? I will be the least expensive author of the publishing house. I’ll spare you even my presence.”
The least expensive, possibly, but certainly the most enigmatic, and by now the most successful. Since then, seven of her novels, published under the pen name Elena Ferrante, have been translated into English, and she has become the best-known Italian writer of literary fiction alive today. In September, the fourth and concluding book of her Neapolitan novels, The Story of the Lost Child, was published. Sales of the Neapolitan quartet have now reached 750,000 in the US and are approaching 250,000 in the UK. Foreign editions stand at 39.
The Story of the Lost Child
Elena Ferrante, Europa Editions
The fourth novel in the Neapolitan saga is as compelling as its predecessors. Ferrante describes the friendship of Elena and Lila and sets it against the backdrop of Naples, a city as diverse as the two main characters.
In his posthumous book of essays, “And Yet …,” published this year, Christopher Hitchens criticized “the rebarbative notion that people should be more likely to buy and enjoy books at Christmas.” Real readers, after all, consume them all year long. Mr. Hitchens has a valid point, yet the year’s end is a time for summing up, in books as in other things. Hence the lists that follow.
The New York Times has three daily book critics. Because they review different titles, there can be no getting them into a room to vote on a single, unanimous 2015 Top 10 list. But for each there were favorites, and books that stood out from the crowd. In the lists below, we are happy to share them.
Michiko Kakutani and Janet Maslin present their books roughly in order of preference. Dwight Garner’s list is in alphabetical order, by author.
Janet Maslin stepped down from full-time reviewing this year, but she remains a contributor of reviews to The Times. Look for selections from her recently hired replacement, Jennifer Senior, next year in this space.
“The Story of the Lost Child” By Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions). This concluding volume to the author’s dazzling Neapolitan quartet spans six decades in the lives of its two unforgettable heroines: Elena, the conscientious good girl, and her best friend, the tempestuous Lila. Their intertwining stories give an indelible portrait of Naples, and an intimate understanding of the women’s daily lives and their efforts to juggle the competing claims of men, children, housework and their own artistic aspirations. We see how time changes (and fails to change) old patterns of love and rivalry, and how their lives are imprinted by success and disappointment and almost unbearable loss. (Read the review.)
“The Story of the Lost Child,” by Elena Ferrante (Europa Editions, $18). Not every literary novelist takes Twitter by storm with her own hashtag. But this was the year of #FerranteFever, when the pseudonymous Italian author — whose real identity is unknown even to her American translator — published the final volume of her Neapolitan series, which has been winning over readers since the release of “My Brilliant Friend” in 2012. At the center of the books are two women, Elena and Lila, who grew up together in a poor, violent neighborhood of Naples in the 1950s; as the years and the volumes go by their lives diverge, but their friendship remains the focus, passing through every phase of passionate identification, resentment, disconnection, disdain and love.
