The Story of the Lost Child: A Novel (Neapolitan Novels, 4)

I got hooked on the show, and the third season left at such a cliffhanger that I couldn't wait. I devoured all four books in less than a month!! So good. I have to say the show is pretty faithful to the books, but the writing, my God!!! Every character is so rich and layered, they really jump out of the pages.

The friendship between Elena and Lila is so beautiful and so real. Elena, always insecure, doubting herself, and always needing that extra nudge from Lila. And Lila, being the headstrong woman she is, never once doubting herself, always throwing her stock behind her best friend. They are like two sides of the same coin.

In her casual, engaging style, Ferante takes us through the history of Italy over almost six decades, giving us a view of Italy that we seldom get. It is an incredible feat. She also gives us a look into the joys and tedium of motherhood that most don't talk about. The juxtapositon of joy and guilt when Elena gets to follow her dreams is so beautifully described.

Now that I'm done, I'm going to miss these strong incredible women and strangely even Naples!

I was so captivated by the Neapolitan novels that I read all 4 in about 3 weeks. They are psychologically more raw and revealing than anything I've read before, more detailed and rich. Not everyone will like these, because this level of brutal honesty is not for everyone. But these books really made me think a lot.

The old saying "the personal is political" is very true of these novels. (And you really must read all 4 -- they are really one very long novel, each continues where the last leaves off.) The story of Lenú and Lila is unforgettable. The world of postwar Naples/Italy, from the 50s when the girls first meet through the 80s, 90s, and mid-2000s, where the story concludes, is very much a part of the story. We go through the social upheavals of the 60s and 70s, the corruption and crime that plague Naples, and the sexism/paternalism of Italian society. Lila is a fictional character unlike any other, and Lenú is her counterpart and foil. They are friends, also frenemies -- you realize as you read these, at least if you are astute, that you must always question what you are reading... i.e., the reliability of the narration, as the narrator is giving her potentially biased impressions of her friend. Biased because of her own insecurities and interpretations. There is a seed of mistrust between the two women, from the beginning. And yet they are touchstones for one another, throughout their lives.

In a way, these books will make you rethink all of your relationships. How well do we really know anyone? The framing device for these books, which begin with "My Brilliant Friend" -- is brilliant in its simplicity: Lenú, the author Elena Greco, is writing this long story almost as an act of revenge, because her lifelong friend Lila (Rafaella) has essentially erased all evidence of herself and disappeared. And so Elena fights back the only way she knows how: by completely setting down the details of her lifetime of memories of her friend. A friend whose relationship she has now forfeited, by writing about her. But perhaps that's what writers must do, that is what makes them writers. They cannot NOT write about what compels them.

I will now read Ferrante's earlier novels, to see the genesis of this brilliant writer. And I will keep these novels to reread again in a few years. Take a look at the New York Times travel article on the Naples of Elena Ferrante: [...] I hope to go there and see for myself.

How do I write about my reading of The Neapolitan books and their completion in “The Story of the Lost Child” with unemotional clarity? I have been obsessed with these books ever since I began them some months ago yet in the final book, almost daily, I had to stop, put it aside, and steel myself to read the next chapter because I was so emotionally invested in the story and so distraught. Each new page brought a new experience of emotional disaster. These stories, in four volumes, about the life of two little girls who form a friendship while living in a poor neighborhood in 1950’s Naples Italy, to their matricuation as women in the time of now, are not happy stories. Yet, I think, Elena Ferrante is the best living writer on Earth today.

I finished the book on an evening when my wife was away visiting her parents. I wish I wouldn’t have. You need someone to cuddle with, to recover with, after you finish this story. I spent the night and into the morning questioning everything about my life and how I’ve lived it. I questioned my family, my education, my work, my children, my relationships, my motivations, my past, and my future. But mostly I questioned my friendships and the state of them and their failures. I am a 61 years old male, essentially the same age as Lenu, the narrator of the story. Certainly if I’d read these books at age 30 I would read them with a completely different perspective then when I read them now. But now is when I read them and, like the author telling the story of her life, with the good and very directly the bad, I can’t help but form a related assessment of my own life. It’s a very scary thing to do.

The cover and end plates of the book with recommendations from authors and critics describe these books very well. In my own words they are devastating, demanding, direct, unrelenting, fascinating, horrific, emotional, unsympathetic, visceral, lucid, loving, hateful, explosive, and all consuming. What they are clearly not is fiction. These stories seem incredibly real and that’s because every analysis says that for the most part these are real experiences.

I have read Game of Thrones and watched the television series and enjoyed them immensely. They are a horrific and highly memorable fantasy. The Neapolitan series is every bit as fraught with danger, duplicity, and deviousness as Game of Thrones except that they are not fantasy and that makes them, at times, almost unbearable. When I read the first two books I thought to myself that the only entertainment franchise who could put this on the screen is HBO. So I looked it up. HBO is bringing the series to television. From my assessment it will be the next “Game of Thrones” style global phenomenon.

I highly recommend these stories. They contain sentences and descriptions of life that many times made me stop and consider whether that sentence, which I had just read, wasn’t one of the most beautiful and evocative sentences ever written. That kind of experience is extremely pleasurable to me, but give yourself time to recover. The life and relationship of Lila and Lenu is not a kind one.

Note: Although I have the physical books for reference I “read” all of these books in audio format from Audible. The narrator, Hillary Huber, is so incredibly good that, in my mind, she will forever be the voice of Lila and Lenu.

In the final of the four volumes, Elena Ferrante returns to the beginning. Lina is missing. Then the back story again. Half a lifetime has passed and the two friends are back together in Naples, living in the same building, each with a baby. We are back to the patterns of childhood where the two girls played with their dolls, losing them into the cellar, making them disappear. Now Elena and Lina have real dolls - the same age, they birth baby girls within days of each other. Lina even calls her child by the name of Elena's erstwhile doll, Tina. The patterns of childhood re-establish themselves. Tina disappears just as Lina's and Elena's dolls disappeared, just as Lina has always promised to do herself. Lina's pattern of dissolving. The women themselves were born within days of each other in August 1944. They are twinned and entwined. Their names - Elena, Lenuccia, Lenù, Raffaella, Lina, Lila - is perhaps a play with identity and authorship. Who has authored who? Is Elena writing this story or is it Lina, by manipulating Elena? Whose story is it anyway? Who is the brilliant friend? The one who completes school, gets an education, leaves the traps of the city, becomes a writer - or the one who is so clever she absorbs knowledge on her own, has a native intelligence that goes far beyond her place in the city where she ends up learning about everything and everyone. Who is author? This is a central question within the story and without - for we do not know who the real Elena Ferrante is - just as we don't know whose story is told. Elena has written one final novel about friendship. She owes Lina everything - where would she be without her story, without her help, without Lina's brilliant pushing that urged her to do what she did? For after all, Elena took Lina's journals and threw them into the river, after reading, absorbing them. Again the reader wonders whose story this is. Is Elena telling her own story with Lina as a character, or is it Lina's story disguised, copied as Elena's? And what does Lina think? She will never know, for by the end of it, Lina has dissolved as she always threatened to do. The theme of disappearance and dissolution runs through the stories. Elena claims she has written a story in order to hold on to, keep Lina in the world, yet she goes against her friend's wishes. Elena does things on her terms, she keeps Lina in the world, her world. In these intriguing tales of friendship the author explores identity, self, meaning, the creative life. Lina is portrayed as someone who is constantly manipulating others, she forms and reforms her friends to her will. But she wants to disappear, to dissolve. Yet Lenu is the one who writes Lina, makes her say what she says, merging their identities, even their voices, so that the dialogue flows effortlessly, without any indication of who is speaking. One has to ask who is the brilliant friend? Who is the manipulative one? Are they one and the same?

Never have I read four books by the same author with such speed. Now that I think of it, I have never read four books by the same author, ever! But I could not put the Neapolitan Novels down. I read in the middle of the night, in the line at the grocery store, in between sets at the gym, and yes, even in traffic. It’s difficult to pinpoint what made this series so compelling for me. From a distance, it seems to be a story of neighborhood gossip and intrigue. But the stories go so much deeper. Ferrante creates a web of intriguing relationships, a story of the ebb and flow of life, pushed forward by the characters as they go along through their lives from childhood to old age. The characters become yours. You love them. You will not want the story to end.

Each story is told from inside the mind of Elena Greco. Her every thought is laid out for you to examine. Most of her thoughts were not pretty. Since she was 6 years old, she has been obsessed with and is in competition with her best friend, Lila. In every thought she has, every move she makes, she wonders if Lila will do better than her. She lives her life every day comparing herself to Lila, defining herself by Lila, denying her own feelings to impress Lila. As she matures, she relies on Lila to provide inspiration for her career as a writer. But she never shares her feelings with Lila. In fact, she expends a great deal of energy denying her true feelings to Lila.

Growing up in an impoverished neighborhood in Naples, Italy in the 1960’s, we follow the girls as they develop, from scrawny and awkward girls to beautiful women. Lila is brilliant, but her parents do not allow her to go to middle school. Middle school is a luxury only for the few who can afford it. Elena goes to middle school, high school and college, with the financial assistance of her professors. Lila goes to the library, she studies alone, she learns Latin and Greek and even tutors Elena. As she grows, Lila becomes the object of every man’s obsession. It first appears that her life will be charmed, that she will have all the things money can buy and great happiness. As time goes on, we see how their circumstances and their decisions define their hardships and successes throughout life. We follow the women as they become estranged, then intensely close. Never is anything steady in this relationship. Elena writes constantly about Lila, yet many times through her life she wants to avoid her.

These books address many of the issues present during these times in Italy, from the ‘60’s to the beginning of this century. Politics and corruption, violence and poverty, the abuse of the workers, the advent of technology and the personal computer.

Marriage and motherhood suppress the talents of women. All men misbehave in these stories. Each one proves himself to be a disappointment in one way or another. One man physically abuses, another sexually abuses, one abandons his responsibility to his children, another is a philanderer and deceiver.

Elena has a successful career as a writer, but her husband minimizes her career. She is “just” a fiction writer, while he is an important university professor. He torments her nightly with his sexual demands, never thinking of pleasing her. She must carry the responsibility of the children herself. She raises the children alone. Her three girls believe she thinks only of herself. They complain that she thinks only of her own career, and not of them. Yet they do not hold their father to the same standard. In fact, even though the father was largely absent in their lives, they idolize him.

The Story of the Lost Girl is the most poignant of the four stories. I will not spoil the story by revealing the plot. I will only say that Elena Ferrante nails human nature in this story. She nails what is the normal and often very hurtful response to tragedy. She has great insight into human nature, and the nature of relationships. I hope that she will continue the series with the lives of the children of Elena and Lila. I want more from this wonderful writer.

"Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?"

• from The Story of the Lost Child

I couldn't wait any longer to get back to the story of Elena and Lila. I had read the first three books of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels over the past five months, interspersed with my other reading. Now it was time to face up to the end; to find out how the relationship of these two women, built on a foundation of childhood friendship and resentment, would resolve itself.

In returning to the story, I quickly felt again my irritation with Elena. Do you ever feel the urge to reach into the pages of a novel you are reading, grab a character by the shoulders and shout, "No! Don't do it! You're being stupid! Can't you see that he is just like his sleazy, philandering father who disgusts you?" That's exactly how I felt throughout reading about Elena's grand passion for Nino. Really, Elena, he's such a jerk!

So, at the beginning of this book, Elena has abandoned her marriage to the professor, Pietro Airota, father of her two young daughters. Essentially, she also abandons, for long periods, those daughters, as she goes on the road following Nino and pursuing her career as a writer. She and Pietro arrive at a more or less amicable agreement for divorce and she expects that Nino will divorce his wife and then the two lovers will marry and live happily ever after. Silly woman! Nino, of course, keeps his marriage and thus his connection with the in-laws who sponsor his successes in life. He also keeps Elena as a bit on the side.

Okay. Those are the points that annoyed me about the character, Elena. But what I loved about this book, about all the books in the series, is the beautiful writing. With a precise and subtle prose, Ferrante evokes Naples of the '80s, '90s, and '00s with all of its political and social turmoil and violence, its cycle of poverty and the limitations imposed by social boundaries. And she shows us all of this through the ups and downs of the lifelong friendship of Lila and Elena.

Lila and Elena are so intricately and lovingly drawn that, even though the narrator is always Elena and we see things through her eyes, one feels that one is not just reading a story by one woman, one is living a story of two women. Living it, breathing it, experiencing the moments of triumph, of pleasure, but also the moments of unspeakable tragedy, loss, and manic grief.

While Elena experienced success as a writer and traveled around the world, Lila never left the old neighborhood. She stayed there and built her life. Along with Enzo, her partner, she built a successful computer company, state of the art for the '80s. In addition to their company, Lila and Enzo also produce a beautiful child, Tina. At the same time - literally - Elena and Nino produce a daughter. By now, Elena, too, has moved back to Naples and the two young girls grow and play together, even as their mothers did a generation before.

As Elena's writing career often takes her out of town, Lila takes care of her three daughters and becomes like a second mother to them.

This all sounds very prosaic, doesn't it? After all, it's just the story of two women who are living their lives along the paths they have chosen and experiencing all the love and loss and domestic dramas that are a part of sexual relationships with or without marriage and parenthood. And yet, the novels are so much more powerful than that simple explanation and it is difficult to put into words just why that is true.

Part of it may be that Ferrante manages to portray not just the lives of the two women but the life of the city and the country, and, indeed, world events of the period. I found particularly appealing and fascinating all of the history of Naples that she was able to weave into the story, especially in this final book. Having the historical context of the social and political boundaries and confinements made many of the events described so much more explicable.

Many reviewers have remarked upon the fact that these books read almost like an autobiography and the characters and events do seem very personal to the author. But that could be said of many literary masterpieces, and I am thinking particularly of many grand works of the nineteenth century with which it seems to me that these books have much in common. I think it is probably not a coincidence that when Lila and Elena come into some money in the first book, My Brilliant Friend, they decide to use it to buy a copy of Little Women. That decision comes up again at the end of this book. And, no, it is not a coincidence. Nothing about these books is coincidental. They are brilliant works of the imagination of a very talented writer.

This book amazes me, as have pretty much all four of the Neapolitan novels, in several ways, not the least of which are the ways that a book like this can fail miserably. First and foremost, I am utterly impressed at the way Ferrante can maintain four entire novels of first person narrative, a perspective that can get all too tiresome all too easily, and secondly, that she does so with a narrator who is not so much an observer of events but someone we are brought uncomfortably close to emotionally. Ferrante has already proven this capability in the previous installments of this series, but also The Days of Abandonment. But in this book, I found myself continually amazed at how we are brought through the narrator’s dives and ascensions of ego and self worth, and yet the narrative for me does not get self-serving and tedious. Add to that the other challenge of having a narrator who is also a writer, to challenge the border between author and narrator, especially when they both carry the first name of Elena, to even bring that kind of weirdness of the second volume of Don Quixote, but still feel very serious in tone and execution. And then, over the course of these novels to take us through the lives of a plethora of characters that never feels like a soap opera, with sudden twists and turns that only advertise the ennui that they’re trying to avoid, but instead to feel like we are being brought through a series of lives over the course of decades, like being in a dream that you think lasted years when you only dozed off a second in front of the TV. All of these qualifiers probably make this book sound too cerebral, too meta.

But no. Ferrante handles all of this with a wonderfully organic style that really just had me coasting along. Wanting to get to the end, but at the same time not wanting to skim at all. And the ending of this whole series does not disappoint one iota – what a heartbreak of a series. How thrilling. How full of life that I guess only good fiction can put into full perspective.

This is a review of all 4 volumes of the Neapolitan series by Elena Ferrante, as these books collectively tell the story of a lifelong friendship between 2 women, Elena Greco and Raffaella Cerulla, known as Lila. Born in Naples,Italy in 1944, they became friends at the age of 6 when they started primary school. The book ends more than 66 years later, when Lila disappears without a trace. Their friendship is informed by its origins in, and lifetime attachment to, a poor neighborhood in Naples, and members of the neighborhood's many large families are important presences throughout Elena's and Lila's lives.The story is also set against the background of Italy's political history during this 60+-year period, and several inhabitants of the neighborhood come to play leading roles in national politics. The Neapolitan novels are, in sum, a richly complicated narrative. The story is told from the point of view of Elena, and she and Lila follow very different paths in life. Lila, an extraordinarily brilliant child, quits school after primary school, and marries when she is 16 years old. Soon separated, and after an affair with a neighborhood friend, she and another local man move in together and start a successful business. Elena goes on to high school and university, and achieves a doctorate. She marries and divorces a member of a prominent Italian family, and has a long-term affair with the same neighborhood friend who was formerly Lila's lover. Elena becomes a published writer and well-known intellectual in Italy. However interesting the premisses of this 4-volume series, it must be said that the narrative is sometimes slow and boring and contains events that strain credulity. Nonetheless, one forges ahead, curious to discover the ultimate fates of these very interesting characters. These novels will perhaps be most appealing to the older reader who may well see in the complexities and changes of fortune in the lives of Lila and Elena, a reflection of the ups and downs of their own past lives: marriages and divorces, intense love affairs that fizzle, lovers - and children - who disappoint, new life paths taken and lost, joys followed by terrible tragedies. This retrospective reader will certainly find the 4 novels of the Neapolitan series worth the time and patience they demand.

I was eagerly awaiting this conclusion to the Neapolitan quartet, and it turned out to be all that I'd hoped. Now that it's finished, I can wholeheartedly recommend the series to anyone, especially to women but also to men.

Two things you should know right away. First, please don't be put off by the covers. Yes, they look like they belong on the grocery store's discount rack with lowbrow chick lit. Fortunately, the contents are nothing like that! They are excellent literary books with a lot of depth and no sentimentality or easy answers. Now that they're gaining recognition in the U.S., hopefully there will be a reissue someday soon. Second, this series is really one novel in four volumes, so if you haven't already read the first three, don't start here. You're looking for

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.