Fifty Books Project 2023

 

The Story of the Lost Child

By Elena Ferrante

 

I, whatever I among those I was accumulating, I would remain firm.  I was the needle of the compass that stays fixed while the lead traces circles around it.  Lila on the other hand – it seemed clear to me now, and it made me proud, it calmed me, touched me – struggled to feel stable.  She couldn’t, she didn’t believe it.  However much she had always dominated all of us and had imposed and was still imposing a way of being on pain of her resentment and her fury, she perceived herself as liquid and all her efforts were, in the end, directed only at containing herself,  When, in spite of her defensive manipulation of person and things, the liquid prevailed,  Lila lost Lila, chaos seemed the only truth, and she – so active , so courageous – erased herself and, terrified, became nothing.

 

 

The 4^th novel of the incredible Neapolitan series tells the story of the full adulthood of Lila and Elena, friends since childhood, some 1200 pages ago.  As the book opens, Elena Greco has published her second book – a hybrid novel and treatise around the invention of the concept of women.  She has left her husband Pietro and is having a full affair with the love of her childhood, Nino, Lila’s former lover.  Lila has settled into a semi-platonic relationship with Enzo, one of her friends from her communist inspired organizing.

 

Over the course of almost 500 pages, Elena will discover that Nino was just as rotten as Lila said, leaving Elena alone to raise her children; Lila’s relationship with Enzo will become more like husband and wife; both women will become pregnant and give birth to daughters; Elena will move back to Naples – to an apartment upstairs from Lila and Enzo and Lila’s son Rino.  The friendship will enter its most intense phase:  Elena will become a famous and successful author, Lila will make a fortune as a computer programmer.  Their daughters will be inseparable and the women will earn a kind of independence from the men that have been the center of their existences.

 

However, stability is never the norm in this world.  After the eruption of Nino’s affairs, comes the earthquake that destroyed much of Naples in 1980.  This particularly affects Lila – the passage above is from a longer, beautiful and complicated passage in which Lila describes her inability to hold onto herself in a shifting world.  Elena continues to compare herself constantly to Lila, much of that competition now centering on their daughters – Lila’s daughter, Tina, (who shares a name with Elena’s doll from the opening of book 1) is clearly the more brilliant of the two and Elena’s daughter Imma seems destined to a life (like Elena’s) in which she sees herself as second to her friend.  Then, just as I had forgotten the title of the book, Ferrante reminds me that it is the story of a lost child and Lila’s and Elena’s relationship is thrown into permanent turmoil.

 

In addition to being the story of a truly lifelong friendship, this series continues to be a history of contemporary Naples, with the sweep of crime and earthquakes and political battles always in the background.  Their friends Pasquale and Nadia had gone into hiding, suspected of communist Red Guard activities and we see that violent period of Italian history build and then fade into the neoliberal contemporary world.  It is impressive that – without spending many words on architecture or economics, Ferrante has vividly portrayed the growth of Naples from a post-war ruin to a modern, post – industrial metropolis. 

 

I, again, am sorry that I have finished this volume and will miss the characters in the coming days and weeks.  The constant shift in Elena’s relationship to Lila (I need her, I must avoid her) bothered me less in this final volume because the shifts had catalysts that seemed more genuinely provocative than they had before.  I was somewhat put off by the focus on Elena’s daughters in the last 100 pages as they had never risen to the status of real characters and stayed somewhat amorphous till the end.

 

The real issue of this book, and the part that will keep me thinking about it for some time to come, is the way Ferrante deals with issues of individual identity.  To put it bluntly, there is very little faith in individual identity here.  Lina and Elena are like two halves of one person.  Not that they are not completely, fully formed as characters, but that those characters merge and separate as if they are boundaryless.  The liquid metaphor in the passage above is apt, and later in that passage Lila describes people as little sewn packets whose threads come apart and who spill their contents as they lose their outlines.  That lack of boundaries has been apparent in the Lila/Elena friendship all along.

 

In the end, Elena cannot be just Elena until Lila disappears, and I question whether Lila could ever be just Lila.  We all form our characters through relationships with others, but Ferrante has taken this concept to a radical extreme.  This strikes me as the core of the book’s feminism – not just that it centers on these two brilliant and successful women who come to live their psychic and material lives independent of men, but that it delves into a kind of relationship that – in the world of the novel and, I suspect, in the world we live in –  is only available to women.