Story of the Lost Child (Ferrante)

The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels 4)
Elena Ferrante, 2015
Europa Editions
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781609452865


Summary
“Nothing quite like this has ever been published before,” proclaimed The Guardian newspaper about the Neapolitan Novels in 2014. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third book in the series, was an international best seller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Its author was dubbed “one of the great novelists of our time” by the New York Times Book Review.

This fourth and final installment in the series raises the bar even higher and indeed confirms Elena Ferrante as one of the world’s best living storytellers.
 
Here is the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery uncontainable Lila. In this book, both are adults; life’s great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses have been suffered.

Through it all, the women’s friendship, examined in its every detail over the course of four books, remains the gravitational center of their lives. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up—a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books.

But now, Elena has returned to Naples to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood.

Yet somehow this proximity to a world she has always rejected only brings her role as unacknowledged leader of that world into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable!
 
Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, this story of a lifelong friendship is told with unmatched honesty. Lila and Elena clash, drift apart, reconcile, and clash again, in the process revealing new facets of their friendship.

The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and, like Elena and Lila themselves, every return will bring with it new discoveries. (From the publisher.)

Books in the series
My Brilliant Friend (2011) is the first of Ferrante's four Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name (2012) is the second, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013) is the third, and this book is the last.

Author Bio
Elena Ferrante is the pen-name of an Italian novelist whose true identity is not publicly known. Though heralded as the most important Italian novelist of her generation, she has kept her identity secret since the publication of her first novel in 1992.

Works
Ferrante is the author of a half dozen novels, the most well-known of which is Days of Abandonment. Her four "Neapolitan Novels" revolve around two perceptive and intelligent girls from Naples who try to create lives for themselves within a violent and stultifying culture. The series consists of four novels: My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015), which was nominated for the Strega Prize, an Italian literary award.

Two of Ferrante's novels have been turned into films by Italian filmmakers. Troubling Love  became the 1995 feature film Nasty Love, and The Days of Abandonment became a 2005 film of the same title.

Her nonfiction book Fragments (2003) discussion her experiences as a writer.

Identity
In a January 21, 2013, article in The New Yorker, James Woods wrote that Ferrante has said, "books, once they are written, have no need of their authors." Perhaps that is one reason for her pen-name.

Speculation about Ferrante's identity is rife. In the same New Yorker article, Woods also wrote:

In the past twenty years or so, though, she has provided written answers to journalists’ questions, and a number of her letters have been collected and published. From them, we learn that she grew up in Naples, and has lived for periods outside Italy. She has a classics degree; she has referred to being a mother. One could also infer from her fiction and from her interviews that she is not now married. (“Over the years, I’ve moved often, in general unwillingly, out of necessity. . . . I’m no longer dependent on the movements of others, only on my own” is her encryption.) In addition to writing, “I study, I translate, I teach. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/11/2015.)

Book Reviews
Elena and Lila…are one of those unforgettable pairs who define each other and take their place in our collective imagination as a matched set.... Ms. Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet is utterly distinctive, immersing us not just in a time and place, but deep within the psychological consciousness of its narrator.... Ms. Ferrante's writing—lucid and direct, but with a cyclonic undertow—is very much a mirror of both her heroines.... Ms. Ferrante…captures the day-to-day texture of women's lives…The novels are beautifully enmeshed, one with another, as if Ms. Ferrante had the entire quartet in her head from the start.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


Ferrante...adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience.
Rachel Cusk - New York Times Book Review


[W]ith her new novel, The Story of the Lost Child, Ferrante has written what I’d call a “city book,” a knowing and complex tale that encompasses an entire metropolis. The breadth of vision makes this final installment feel like the essential volume.
John Domini - Washington Post


The saga is both comfortingly traditional and radically fresh, it gives readers not just what they want, but something more than they didn't know they craved...through this fusion of high and low art, Ms. Ferrante emerges as a 21st-century Dickens
Economist (UK)


The Story of the Lost Child does not offer a comfortable end to the series, but it confirms Ferrante—once again–as one of contemporary fiction’s most compelling voices.
Telegraph (UK)


This is Ferrante at the height of her brilliance.
Elissa Schappell - Vanity Fair


(Starred review.) The novel is Elena's final work and permanently ties Elena and Lila together, for better and worse. This stunning conclusion further solidifies the Neapolitan novels as Ferrante's masterpiece and guarantees that this reclusive author will remain far from obscure for years to come
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Word of mouth launched this series, glowing reviews helped, and, eventually, a publishing phenomenon was born. The series’ conclusion is a genuine literary event.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Elena's narrative...confidently carries readers through the course of two lives, but the shadowy circumstances of those lives will invite rereading and reinterpretation.... [A] mythic portrait of a female friendship in the chthonian world of postwar Naples.
Kirkus Reviews

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