The Story of the Lost Child: Elena Ferrante (Neapolitan Quartet, 4) Paperback – 13 Aug. 2020

Over the past year and a bit I've read the four volumes that make up this continuous story of a great friendship, between two Italian women in postwar Italy, Lila and Elena.They grew up in Naples, forming a deep and defining alliance that somehow survived the decades, despite their diverging paths. The books should be read as one narrative (this is not a standalone novel), just as one reads War and Peace, say, or Proust's seven volumes; their appearance in separate volumes is only a publishing convenience. My initial response is one is of unbounded admiration. The books have taken me through a visceral, intensely candid, and at times exhilarating experience that no other narrative that I know of offers.Has friendship ever been anatomised so extensively, at such analytical depth, with so many shades from light to dark? And is there a more complex woman in modern literature than Lila? She is a seer and a shrew, yet profoundly kind-hearted, charismatic, controlling and manipulative, full of pride and courage, clever but modest, with a fearsome reputation in the neighbourhood. We see her only through Elena's eyes, of course, and we see how her constant presence in Elena's life, psychologically if not always physically, shapes her life, her thoughts, her reactions, her sense of self in ways that cannot be untangled. Lila's most essential role in Elena's life is to skewer her with the truth of her situation, that truth that she's been doing her best to hide from herself, and this makes at times for a stormy relationship where hate is mixed with love, where pride is battered, where incomprehensibility and wariness abound. It's never an easy friendship; it transcends any other in their lives; it is more important than that between the women and their parents, their children, their lovers. With one exception, perhaps: Lila's for her daughter Tina.At least, that's how Elena presents it. We always have to bear in mind this caveat and ask ourselves, is this what it was really like for Lila, or is this only what Elena saw and tried to understand? If Lila had written the story it would have been very different.Elena's life dramatises the difficulties of a single mother - whose emotional experiences with the men in her life turn out to be profoundly disappointing, though not disabling - struggling to carve out for herself a career as a novelist and journalist. Drawn back to Naples to be near Lila, living first with her lover Nino in a posher part of the city and thus semi-detached from Lila's life, and then in an apartment above Lila's when the going gets tough, the women draw closer together, share the duties of motherhood, become more like that composite personality we saw in earlier volumes. In the first third or so of the novel it's Lila that appears the most successful and settled of the two, happily living with Enzo, running a successful computer business, pregnant at the same time as Elena with a daughter. It's Elena that is suffering, floundering, apparently awry. But Lila faces two major crises, the first during an earthquake - a marvellous passage when the two women shelter together in their car during the terrifying quake - in which Lila reveals that her deepest fear is that the world that she controls with a fierce determination will suddenly dissolve its boundaries: she has episodes of terrifying disassociation. The second crises is bigger, involving the fate of her child, which nearly unhinges her and destroys all the happiness she has so painstakingly achieved: the clue is in the book's title.Their relationship is the foreground. In the middle are the host of other characters we've met before, and their fates are spun out with consistency, surprise and verve, not least Pietro, Elena's husband; Nino, her chameleon-like lover; her mother who is an emotional monster to the last but with whom she has some kind of reconciliation; her mother-in-law who plots against her reputation as a writer; Antonio (the only gay character in the book, incidentally); the Salara brothers who symbolise the criminal elements in the neighbourhood, and a host of others. (Thanks heavens for the Index of Characters!) In the background is Naples itself, which from time to time intrudes with violence and casts its shadow over the lives of all its inhabitants. By returning to the scenes of her childhood Elena not only hooks up with Lila again on a day to day basis, just as they did as kids, she is able to use her local knowledge and dialect - a dialect which often reflects an alternative identity - in her novels, giving them a flavour of authenticity which proves popular with her critics and readers. Lila, who in some senses represents Naples too - she never leaves it - opens her eyes to the real nature of the city.The narrative, one hardly needs to say, is brilliantly written, with many passages of great power. It is compulsive - but after the long stretches of reading, which it seems to insist on, it's exhausting, emotionally as well as intellectually. But it's a good, a satisfying, exhaustion, giving one the feeling that Ferrante is pushing us to the limits of literary experience while never losing sight of the primacy of narrative and the analysis of character.

I have not read something this good for a very long time - the four books that comprise to be 'the Neopolitan series' by Elena Ferrante are mesmerising. I have read the various negative comments on this review page and I would like to question why people persevere reading this superior work by Ferrante when they say in their reviews that they were already fed up by book 2? So they read 2 more books only to write nasty comments ? Weird....... Well if you are about to start the series all I can add is that I learnt so much from these books - I learnt about Italian society and culture and ideas - I learnt about friendship and a particular identity of friendship between two unique women - I learnt about family , blood ties , Italian Mafia within the workings of Italian society and politics - I learnt about complex relationships between men and women and children and friends and family and most of all I enjoyed the challenge of discovering all this from Ferrante's writing. People complain about these books , find fault and savage the writer - it's laughably arrogant of them! The Neopolitan novels are remarkable in their depth and revealing the complexity of human relationship. The books convey so many themes within the context of Italian society - it's a gift for non Italian people to be able to discover this from the novels - I found that Ferrante provides access to understanding a closed society for most of us - the translation is impeccable . Yet arrogant people chose to complain about these books - and yet they couldn't write such a work in a month of Sunday's ! They fail to recognise the gift and the brilliance - I hope Ferrante could write a 5th and final because for me there is still a missing part of the jigsaw .

I love the Elena Ferrante books and have just read one after the other. The characters are absorbing and their lives in Naples are painted vividly.

What a delightful reading this was! How well have the characters been developed, their actions sometimes absurd , sometimes unexpected but never loosing their true essence despite the complicated lifes they lead. And how beautifully is the reader carried through the protagonist's story sometimes able to connect the dots and close circles but sometime left with unanswered questions. The reader is not just served a beautiful and honest story of a frienship but also a wity depiction of inequalities, gender stereotypes violence , vulgarity, class strugle and battle to overcome poverty through education. Then all these are topped with history and political ideologies elements for a truly unforgettable read.

The last of the 4 books in this series. Brilliant from start to finish. No idea what was going to happen from one page to the next. Just think Elena Ferrante is a brilliant writer and look forward to starting the next book !