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“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.
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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, she 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!
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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.
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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.
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Four starred reviews for Book 3 in the series
14 best-of-the-year appearances for Book 3
- Sales Rank: #1318 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-01
- Released on: 2015-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x 1.40" w x 5.40" l, 1.17 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 480 pages
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of September 2015: Elena Ferrante has been an under-the-radar phenomenon for a couple of years now: the pseudonymous, publicity-shunning Italian author of Days of Abandonment – one of my favorite novels of all time – and the three (until now) Neapolitan Novels is the go-to read for thoughtful, analytical women on at least two continents. But if the first three books made her a cult here, The Story of the Lost Child, the final volume of the Neapolitan books, is poised to make her a bona fide star.
Such widespread acceptance and popularity is only fitting, since the characters in the Neapolitan novels are not “fancy” women; they’re for the most part not particularly educated, rich or sophisticated. What they are, always, is full of life and self-doubt and self-consciousness and ambition and love and hate and energy and sexuality. The new book, like the others, centers around the lifelong relationship between Elena and Lina – frenemies from long before such a word existed. The Story of the Lost Child chronicles what happens when the women renew their friendship after many years of estrangement; “One morning, I woke up and thought of her without hostility for the first time in a long while,” as Elena says. Now they are beginning to face aging together.
That’s the plot here, and it is essentially the plot of all of the Neapolitan novels: how do women grow and age, together and apart, how do they relate, how do motherhood, money and men intervene? But you don’t read Ferrante for the plot; you read her for the sheer accumulation of detailed scenes and conversations, for its comings together and breakings apart, and for the way characters disappear and recur until the city in which they live becomes both a vast jungle and the original too-close small town. (Bonus: while it’s probably best to read all four of these novels in the order in which they were published, you can come to book 4 fresh and get up to speed within pages.) Along the way, you also get a glimpse into the politics of 20th century Italy and some sly understanding of the publishing world. (Elena is a published author of some success.) Reading Ferrante is, in other words, both exhausting and exhilarating. The other day, an acquaintance said she loved these books so much she felt like standing on a street corner and handing them out to every woman she sees. I know the feeling. – Sara Nelson
Review
Longlisted for the 2016 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE
Named TIME Magazine's #1 Book in it's "10 Best Fiction Books of 2015" list
Named one of the "10 Best Fiction Books of 2015" by The New York Times Book Review
Named one of the "10 Best Fiction Books of 2015" by People Magazine
Featured in the Wall Street Journal's list of "15 Books to Read This Fall"
Included as one of “30 blockbuster novels to look out for this fall” by�Entertainment Weekly
Listed as one of�Publisher Weekly's�"Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2015"
Included in the Kirkus list of "21 Must-read Fall books"
Featured as one of the�New York Times Book Review's "100 Notable Books of 2015"
Praise for The Story of the Lost Child
"Dazzling...stunning...an extraordinary epic."
— Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
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“It's spectacular, but you will only realize how spectacular The Story of the Lost Child is if you do not cheat. You must read the three earlier (also superb) Neapolitan Novels or the perfect devastation wrought by the conclusion of this last novel will be lost on you.”
— Maureen Corrigan, NPR Fresh Air
“It is the exploration of the women’s mental underworld that makes the book so singular an achievement in feminist literature; indeed, in all literature.” — Joan Acocella, The New Yorker
"This is Ferrante at the height of her brilliance." — Elissa Schappell,�Vanity Fair
“Ms. Ferrante has in fact, for more than 20 years, written about female identity with a heft and sharpness unmatched by anyone since Doris Lessing.” — The Wall Street Journal
"What words do you save? Here's your chance to bring them out, like the silver for the wedding of the first-born: genius, tour de force, masterpiece. They apply to the work of Elena Ferrante, whose newly translated novel "The Story of the Lost Child" is the fourth and final one of her magnificent Neapolitan quartet, a sequence which now seems to me, at least within all that I've read, to be the greatest achievement in fiction of the post-war era." — Charles Finch, The Chicago Tribune
“We are dealing with masterpieces here, old-fashioned classics, filled with passion and pathos. [...] The sheer power of her books is a challenge to the chilly, dour craftsmanship of too many 21st century literary novels.” — Joe Klein, TIME Magazine
"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." — The Economist
“Ferrante's accomplishment in these novels is to extract an enduring masterpiece from dissolving margins, from the commingling of self and other, creator and created, new and old, real and whatever the opposite of real may be. [...] Ferrante's voice is very much her own, but it's force is communal. Perhaps her quartet should be seen as one of the first great works of post-authorial literature." — Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic�
“Ferrante [. . .] adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience.”
— Rachel Cusk,�The New York Times Book Review
“[. . .] with 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,�The Washington Post
“This stunning conclusion further solidifies the Neapolitan novels as Ferrante's masterpiece.” —�Publishers Weekly�(starred review)
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“Ferrante has created a mythic portrait of a female friendship in the chthonian world of postwar Naples.”�
—�Kirkus Reviews�(starred review)
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“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)
Praise for The Neapolitan Novels
"Ferrante's Naples Quartet is anything but theater. It is the first genuine literary classic of the 21st century." — The Huffington Post
“One of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship.” —�John Powers,�Fresh Air, NPR
“The Neapolitan Novels tell a single story with the possessive force of an origin myth.”�
—�Megan O’Grady,�Vogue
�“Elena Ferrante is one of the great novelists of our time… This is a new version of the way we live now – one we need, one told brilliantly, by a woman.”�
—�Roxana Robinson,�The New York Times Book Review
“A strong sense of chiaroscuro characterises the tetralogy: the thuggish violence of the Neapolitan stradone, the political activism of the “years of lead”, the corruption at every level of society.”
— Jane Shilling�The Evening Standard (UK)
About the Author
Elena Ferrante was born in Naples. She is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2007), and The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2009). Her Neapolitan novels include My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and the fourth and final book in the series, The Story of the Lost Child.
Most helpful customer reviews
54 of 58 people found the following review helpful.
A Fitting End to a Great Series
By Tony's Reading List
The Story of the Lost Child takes us back to where we left off in Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, with Len� and Nino in Montpellier for a conference, the start of a life they hope to spend together. However, after this brief honeymoon moment, we head back to Italy where it’s time for the couple to face the music. While Len� heads north to break things off with her husband, plunging her little family into turmoil, Nino isn’t quite as eager to make a clean break. As will later become apparent, he’s a man who finds it hard to turn his back on a woman he has feelings for.
Nevertheless, the story eventually moves to Naples, and it’s here that the enigmatic Lila finally reenters the picture, rekindling the friendship with Len� and moving it on into the next generation by helping to look after her friend’s daughters, Dede and Elsa. Lila is now a successful woman in her own right, at the vanguard of the computer evolution, dragging Naples into the modern era. As much as the world progresses, though, this is still the neighbourhood, a dangerous place in a rather violent city – and her old enemies, the Solara brothers, have very long memories. Even Lila will struggle to stay afloat in a time of corruption and bloodshed…
The third part of the series was easily the weakest one so far, the absence of Lila lending the story a dull, slightly annoying air towards the end of the book, but in The Story of the Lost Child, Ferrante gets back to what she does best, throwing the two unequal friends together and watching what unfolds. After a tantalising start, with Lila in the shadows, the story returns to Naples, plunging Len�, and the reader, into the intrigues of the neighbourhood once more. The scenes in the neighbourhood prove to illustrate just what was missing in the previous novel, the anger and frustration boiling over onto the page – the tension here intensifies the story, the pace accelerating towards an inevitably tragic climax. Once again, Ferrante has produced a novel that compels you to keep reading, helped along by the many short chapters, the strong plotting and the lengthy, comma-laden sentences which reflect the frantic activity, sweeping the reader along.
Part of the appeal is the return to the main focus, the story of a lifelong friendship, albeit one which is constantly uneasy and intense. Len� has grown up; she’s intelligent, privileged, a woman with a formidable public profile. In spite of all this, she still, somehow, finds herself languishing in Lila’s shadow. As much as she wants to see her friend as a woman with no real education, someone who never escaped the childhood they shared, in her own mind she’s forced to admit that Lila is always a step ahead, and on her return to the neighbourhood, Len� finds that it’s Lila who has the people’s respect:
“And yet next to her, in the place where we were born, I was only a decoration, that is, I bore witness to Lila’s merits. Those who had known us from birth attributed to her, to the force of her attraction, the fact that the neighbourhood could have on its streets an esteemed person like me.”
p.270 (Europa Editions, 2015)
While Lila may have earned respect, that doesn’t mean she’s universally loved. One of the other main themes of the book is the prominence of the neighbourhood conflict with Marcello and Michele Solara, a struggle decades in the making. Every decision Lila makes, in both her personal and business lives, is a deliberate move designed to affect the brothers, forcing them to swallow their pride or confront her head on. It would be a dangerous game at the best of times, but in the climate of the story, a country in turmoil, it’s even more so. Loyalties can change very quickly, and there’s a sense it must all come to a head – soon. Here, more than anywhere else, Len� is merely a bystander in a battle to the death.
The focus on events in the neighbourhood doesn’t mean that the writer is ignoring Len� and her writing career. Much of the first part of the novel, and a fair part of the rest, examines Len�’s battle to find time for her work, balancing writing, book tours and the demands of her home life. The Story of the Lost Child sees her attempting to come to terms with her role as a writer and thinker, wondering whether she actually knows what she’s doing. At times, she feels she’s merely playing a role, a woman whose ideas have been gathered to impress others:
“I have to speak in public, I confessed, and I don’t know what I am, I don’t know to what point I seriously believe what I say.” (p.85)
There are some serious metafictional elements here, both in Len�’s book about the neighbourhood and her childhood (very My Brilliant Friend-esque), and, you suspect, in how Ferrante herself feels about the whole writing business…
More than an examination of the work of the writer, though, Len�’s real use here is in Ferrante’s look at the role of the woman in modern society, as the success our friend enjoys only increases the difficulty of the choices she has to make (and her desire for a room of her own…). While Nino, juggling families effortlessly, is free to do what he wants, when he wants, every move Len� makes is constrained by her role as a mother, something other people are only too happy to point out to her:
“Think about it. A woman separated, with two children and your ambitions, has to take account of reality and decide what she can give up and what she can’t.” (p.67)
Adding to her difficulties is a suspicion that her actions may not even be her own. Is her desire to write and be recognised what she really wants, or is she actually being influenced by men?
“Was I lying to myself when I portrayed myself as free and autonomous? And was I lying to my audience when I played the part of someone who, with her two small books, had sought to help every woman confess what she couldn’t say to herself? Were they mere formulas that it was convenient for me to believe in while in fact I was no different from my more traditional contemporaries? In spite of all the talk was I letting myself be invented by a man to the point where his needs were imposed on mine and those of my daughters?” (p.115)
As hard as it is for her to believe, Len� gradually realises that much of what she writes and thinks is the product of other people’s beliefs – and that she’s in danger of betraying the ideals she professes to stand for.
This feminist anxiety is merely part of a wider societal struggle, though, and The Story of the WITMonth15Lost Child, like Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, takes place against the backdrop of a country in the midst of a violent transformation (I’m sure that part of the attraction for the original Italian readership would have been the reflection of what they themselves experienced in the seventies and eighties). Old systems are being torn down, with no new ones to replace them; women struggle to gain a sense of freedom as family and church lose their pivotal importance; there’s corruption in parliament, with communists on the run, then later taking power. These wider societal issues are then reflected in the events of the neighbourhood, in particular in the struggle between the Solaras and Lila’s small band of followers. It all eventually comes to a head in a story destined from the start to end in disaster…
While I loved The Story of the Lost Child for the most part, the one issue I had with the book was Len�’s infatuation with Nino, her inability to break with him and the utter stupidity she showed at times in his presence. I know worse happens every day in real life, but it just doesn’t ring true here, the chances she gives him extending far into the realm of the unlikely. For me, this extended section away from Lila (from the end of the third book to the start of the fourth) is the weak part of the series, and Nino, while important in many ways (especially as a distorted reflection of Len� – or even Lila), is a frustrating, exaggerated figure. Whenever he’s around, Len� behaves like a fool, and the books are the worse for it.
On the whole, though, the character of Len� works extremely well as a person both of and estranged from the main battlefield of the neighbourhood. Her main value is as an excellently unreliable narrator, one heavily compromised by her experiences outside Naples and the jealousy regarding her friend, a feeling that she is unable to completely conceal. Throughout the whole series, the only image we have of Lila comes through Len�, forcing us to read between the lines, judging for ourselves if Lila is just a charismatic housewife or a secret genius, able to write novels better than Len�’s if she desired. It’s a question Ferrante often looks like answering before again leaving the reader to make up their own mind.
As a whole the Neapolitan Novels are a wonderful achievement, and the fourth book provides a fitting end to a enthralling series. I’d urge anyone interested in the books to go back to the beginning with My Brilliant Friend and enjoy them in order, as the Tolstoyan range of characters means you really need to start at the beginning to have any chance of making sense of what’s going on. The four novels span decades (and around 1500 pages), allowing characters to grow and evolve in a way shorter works are unable to do. It does take a lot of concentration on the part of the reader, though…
Even though I’d set aside five days to read The Story of the Lost Child, I raced through it in two, including knocking off the last 300 pages on the second day. However, that’s not to say that it’s just a page turner; while the plot is what many readers will focus on, for those who want to go beneath the focal events, there’s a lot to discover, whether you’re interested in Italian history, the life of a writer or feminism. The Neapolitan Novels are four books I’ll certainly revisit in a few years, a set of stories which many readers will remember fondly. While the face may be invisible, the name most certainly isn’t.
(This review originally appeared at my blog, Tony's Reading List - I received a review copy of the book)
29 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
THE ENCHANTMENT HOLDS.
By ann kern
THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD is of a piece with the preceding three volumes: the vivid characterizations, the ruthless candor in observing emotional states, the narrative shocks, the immaculate plotting which is sustained from the beginning through the end of the four-part saga. The writing accumulates tremendous force and is undiminished in its muscularity, speed, urgency, and brilliant originality of thought and expression.
The sum of the four-part series stands as a masterpiece. A huge, mighty work, intimate but deep-focused, profound, heartbreaking, triumphant, impossibly brave, and utterly female. There has never been a work of modern fiction quite like it.
I read this final installment obsessively, hypnotically, straight through, in two days. And it was DEEPLY rewarding. I will surely reread these books over time and often.
Grazie, Ms. Ferrante.
72 of 84 people found the following review helpful.
The Lost Child Lost Me along the Way
By Tony Covatta
I can't agree with the unstinting praise given this book by its almost universally adoring readers. If the reception were a little less overwhelmingly positive, I might have given the book another star. But somebody has to say what I am about to say, and I will be perverse and stick with three stars if principally for the shock effect. I cannot bring myself to agree totally with the NYC literary establishment. While there are good things to say about the work, it is not without its flaws. It does vividly and forcefully at an entertaining pace render the latter 35 years of Elena Greco and Lila Cerrulo's life, with some interesting if superficial glances at Italian life and the flow of life from the 70s to current times.
On the positive side, there is the vivid description of the emotional connection between Lenu and Lila. This is well rendered, if not to as good effect as it was in the first two volumes of the tetralogy. As with many other multi-volume works and with many multi-season television series (yes, I used that simile on purpose) the quality falls off with the later books or seasons. My Struggle, often compared with the Neapolitan tetralogy, was at its peak in volume two of the four so far released in English. For my money, that is similar here.
But to continue with the good points, Ferrante writes with verve and energy, and the story carries you along. She is great at describing people under stress, especially women, and also at describing a certain loathsome type of man, the philanderer or womanizer. It is interesting to watch the developing relationship of Elena with her three daughters, both for good and bad.
You get the feeling that some of the plot elements are taken from the newspapers and fan mags. I'm trying to avoid spoilers here, but it's hard to make my point without reference to the story. The loss of the child echoes the sad stories of Etan Patz and Madeleine McCann. Elena's discovering Nino in the bathroom with Silvana reminds me of Arnold Schwarzenegger's domestic adventure that led to Maria Shriver's kicking him out.
In all sad seriousness, I think Ferrante strove mightily to render some of the emptiness and despair that would flow from simply losing a child and largely succeeds-- although that ruins the focus of the tetralogy on the two women. The problem here, and it was developing in Volume Three is that this story is really Elena's story, and egotist that she is, it becomes more and more her story and Lila becomes more and more a pallid and passive figure before disappearing entirely--yet another lost child.
Another weakness is simply the lack of intelligent editing. Ferrante is trying to cram 35 years into this one volume where she took three volumes to get the girls from age six to age thirty. Unfortunately she tries to insert too much detail and the book bogs down somewhat for the last 150 pages. The Dickensian attempt to reintroduce characters who were absent for many pages and even volumes fails because there is little delight in seeing these pallid figures pop up again. As before, the minor characters are only vaguely rendered, a flaw not remedied by the useful and still necessary list of families and characters at the start of the volume.
As before, there is lack of believable motivation. It is hard to accept that Lila is as brilliant and powerful as Ferrante tells, not shows, but tells us, and equally tough to accept that the industrious and hardworking Elena is as obtuse and lacking in peripheral psychic vision as she demonstrates time after time. Moreover, I find Elena's life choices all too often self defeating and repellent. Her poor kids! No wonder two of them move to the States.
There is little intellectual depth in this work. It is all too much portrayal of emotion. When a Dostoevsky plumbs the depths of a character we understand the emotions experienced and the surrounding intellectual context. Ferrante gives us lists of terms, and spits out a few sentences on this or that shift in Italian life or Italian election cycle, but it is all on the surface, not below.
Finally, I found the ending, and I mean ending of the book false, unworthy of four volumes that had tried a lot and succeeded in many respects.
Am I glad I read all four volumes? Yes. But while I recommend Volumes One and Two to all my friends, I won't be doing the same here.
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