The Story of the Lost Child

Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.

And so, with The Story of the Lost Child, the Neapolitan Tetrology is complete and we are asked to consider if this has been more story or real life; has it ultimately inclined towards obscurity or clarity? Here's what I know: I don't think I've ever used the phrase “modern classic” in a review, even though I have often wondered, “What are the books that people will still be reading in fifty years, a hundred?” I've given out plenty of stars without really being able to say, “This will endure.” Well, just as Anna Karenina was more about encapsulating 19th century Russia – from Moscow to the countryside – than it was a simple love story, so too is this series a magnificent portrait of 20th century Italy – and more specifically Naples – while also being a deep meditation on female friendship, identity, and the writer's life. With constantly surprising writing – shifting styles and genres in a uniquely modernist manner that doesn't make for light reading – Elena Ferrante has indeed created a classic; this will endure.

At the end of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena was on a plane with Nino, the love of her life, willing to abandon her husband and children in order to follow her heart. This leads her to move back to Naples with her children so as to be close to Nino, who claims his own wife is too mentally fragile for him to abandon. When Elena eventually discovers what a cad Nino actually is, she moves her children to the squalid neighbourhood she had grown up in; taking the apartment directly above Lila's own. Whereas in the first three books this friendship seemed like a see-saw – with one of the women down while the other is up – there is finally a sense of equilibrium: both are successful at work, unhappy in love, and struggling to raise their children to rise above their environment. We watch as the youthful political ideologies of their friends mellow into compromise or explode into extremism, and discover that those who thought they were untouchable might be forced to pay a price: the systems that had endured in the neighbourhood for generations might finally dissappear through modernisation. After the tragedy alluded to in the title (and after Elena writes a late-in-life bestseller about that event), the friendship between the two women is irrevocably broken and we circle back to the introduction to the first volume: Lila's son discovers her missing one day and enlists Elena's help in finding his 66-year-old mother; a task Elena takes to at her computer keyboard in the best way she knows how: writing out Lila's story (and by happenstance, her own) before Lila is utterly erased from history. 

Once again, I was intrigued by the clash between characters who struggled to speak Italian and those who employed the vulgarities of the Neapolitan dialect; specifically how the different languages represented class, education level, and thinking process; a clash that reaches a kind of stalemate here: 

It occurred to me that it was now a linguistic question. She resorted to Italian as if to a barrier; I tried to push her towards dialect, our language of candor. But while her Italian was translated from dialect, my dialect was increasingly translated from Italian, and we both spoke a false language.

And again, there was much political information in this volume that wasn't necessarily of great interest to me, but as Tolstoy did for Russia (and I was often glazing over during his political digressions, too), I certainly appreciate that Ferrante has captured the evolving political climate in these volumes: it goes some way to explaining an electorate unconcerned by bunga bunga parties at presidential retreats. 

We learn more about Lila's recurring problem with “dissolving borders”, and I love this following passage for the way that Elena sometimes writes disjointedly when she's describing confusing ideas, and also how she can be narrating from the third person and have Lila interrupt in the first, which further “dissolves borders”:

If she became distracted real things, which, with their violent, painful contortions, terrified her, would gain the upper hand over the unreal ones, which, with their physical and moral solidity, pacified her; she would be plunged into a sticky, jumbled reality and would never again be able to give sensations clear outlines. A tactile emotion would melt into a visual one, a visual one would melt into an olfactory one, ah, what is the real world, Lenù, nothing, nothing, nothing about which one can say conclusively: it's like that. And so if she didn't stay alert, if she didn't pay attention to the boundaries, the waters would break through, a flood would rise, carrying everything off in clots of menstrual blood, in cancerous polyps, in bits of yellowish fiber.

I was constantly intrigued by Elena's writing career – the promotional tours and public meetings and television appearances – and especially because Ferrante herself not only writes under a pseudonym but refuses all such promotional activity: is it ironic or merely mischievous that Ferrante imagines a parallel life for her stand-in? This rare interview in Paris Review gives some insight into Ferrante's processes. And ultimately, the following seems to be the point of the whole series:

It's only and always the two of us who are involved: she who wants me to give what her nature and circumstances kept her from giving, I who can't give what she demands; she who gets angry at my inadequacy and out of spite wants to reduce me to nothing, as she has done with herself, I who have written for months and months and months to give her a form whose boundaries won't dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn calm myself.

There are too many things to write about with these books and that makes my thinking feel scattered. I can only repeat that I think they have great value and will endure; read them despite the terrible cover art. A note on my ratings: I would give each individual volume four stars (including this one) but five for the series (which might more properly be considered one long work); I hope that doesn't seem inconsistent or devalue the previous installments. Read them; read them all; this is real life.