Europa Editions The Story of The Lost Child

It is the fourth volume of a fascinating story which flows continuously without ever boring. Ferrante's way of narrating is magical. It carries to its conclusion the friendship betwwen Lila and Lenù, that started with their childhood in the first volume. A continuous seesaw of preminence and control in the very competitive relationship between these two women, whose destiny, in spite of theri opposite personalities, are joined fot their entire lives. The psychological development of these two characters and of their friendship is analysed in every detail with extraordinary subtleness and sensitivity, and with a very deep insight into the human soul. All characters, actually, created by Ferrante come out vividly from the real world, and they acquire a permanent place in the imaginary of the reader as if they were alive. The world of the main characters - their families, their neighborhood - is then included in the larger portrait of the corrupted political and social scene of Italy, of which Naples is a simple reflection. A microcosmos with a thousand shades of Good and Evil, so entangled that it is impossible to give them a definite individual form. Through the everyday facts and details of the two protagonists, we are involved in the story of a whole city, of a country, of an age; n the problems and crises of our times, with a current of tension and suspense which keeps the reader glued from page to page. The tension increases towards the end, and, if at a certain point the narration seems to drag itself too much, it becomes soon clear that every tessera of this large mosaic is necessary to carry it to its stunning completion and enigmatic conclusion, appropriate for an enigmatic character like Lila, and her complex and intricate friendship with the narrator. This powerful quadrilogy is the result of a deep, intelligent and sensitive insight into human nature and social realities.

Writing this close to the truth of how we feel in our heads is rarely voiced. I haven’t yet read anything like this quartet.. an amazing tale of Lenu & Lila’s childhood friendship through the years till their twilight years. A must read.

J'ai beaucoup aimé ce 4 eme volet. Je craignais une lassitude et un essoufflement de l'histoire. Mais non la saga reste prenante et captivante.

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.

Genial.