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The Story of the Lost Child
International Booker Prize
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2016 Shortlist: The Story of the Lost Child
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Not the strongest of the Neapolitan Quartet (the 3rd was), but as with The Fellowship of the Ring at the Oscars, this deserves to win awards as a tribute to a magnificent series of novels.Although please can the press stop speculating as to the author's identity. As she says: "I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors"
My review:
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"I publish to be read. It’s the only thing that interests me about publication. So I employ all the strategies I know to capture the reader’s attention, stimulate curiosity, make the page as dense as possible and as easy as possible to turn. But once I have the reader’s attention I feel it is my right to pull it in whichever direction I choose. I don’t think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn’t one. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones." (Elena Ferrante, Paris Review).
The biggest mystery of Ferrante's Neopolitan saga isn't the needless speculation about the anonymous author's true identity, but rather how books that might, at one level, be considered no more than chick-lit (even the covers of the novels scream "summer beach / book club read") work so well as literary fiction. And the quote above goes some way to answer the question - Ferrante writes to be read (a worthy manifesto) and any trick she can use to draw in the reader is, to her, fair game, particularly if that enables her to broaden the audience for her powerful observations on society, feminism and politics.
As for her desire to conceal her identity, to ensure readers and critics focus on her novels, in practice it appears to have the opposite effect. No review of her novels is seemingly complete without speculation on her identity or at least noting her anonymity. However the author's strategy at least forces critics to examine the novels closely for clues to her identity and views, rather than examine the author's biography and then merely seek confirmation in the novels.
Turning to this novel itself
"What's the sea from up there? A bit of colour. Better if you're closer, that way you notice that there's filth, mud, piss, polluted water. But you who read and write books like to tell lies, not the truth."
This is what Lila tells Elena about her house in a more up-market Naples away from and above the neighbourhood, and indirectly her novels - but Ferrante's novels are soaked in the filth and pollution of the Naples neighbourhood where Lila and Elena are born, and Lila lives most of her life until her sudden disappearance which opens the first novel.
Reading the four novels back-to-back one admires how, as the two friend matures, Elena broadens her narration to take in more of the outside world (the comparison to Knausgaard is irresistible if clichéd) e.g. from their naive childhood view that Don Achille is a literal ogre and Manuela Solara has a magical book to the left-wing politics, assassinations, kidnapping and bombs of the 1970s and 1980s.
And in this fourth volume, the contrast between Elena and Lila heightens in terms of their ambitions. Lina is a successful author, with some international recognition and keen to broaden her horizons.
"Montpellier, on the other hand, although it was far less exciting than Paris, gave me the impression that my boundaries had burst and I was expanding. The pure and simple fact of being in that place constituted in my eyes the proof that the neighbourhood, Naples, Pisa, Florence, Milan, Italy itself were only tiny fragments of the world and that I would do well not to be satisfied with these fragments any longer. It was marvellous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, to discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute"
Whereas Lila's is determined ("I noted for the first time, during that period, the rigidity of the perimeter that Lila had established for herself."), largely in reaction to the mental dissolving boundaries she sees in herself and others. She first recounts this to Elena is this novel, during the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, although she first experienced the phenomenon during the New Year's firework party in volume one.
"She used that term dissolving boundaries. It was on that occasion that she resorted to it for the first time: she struggled to elucidate the meaning, she wanted me to understand how much what the dissolution of boundaries meant and how much it frightened her...She said that the outlines of people and things were delicate, that they broke like cotton thread. She whispered that for her it had always been that way, an object lost its edges and poured into another, into a solution of heterogeneous materials, a merger and mixing. She said she had always had to struggle to believe had firm boundaries, for she had known since she was a child it was not 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."
We must never forget, though, that we are reading one side of a story of two lives. Elena as narrator fears, even wants, Lina's intrusion into the text (quite literally given Lina's emerging computer skills, she wonders if Lina could even edit her story):
"Only she can say if, in face, she has managed to insert herself into this extremely long chain of words to modify my text, to purposely supply the missing links, to unhook others without letting it show, to say of me more than I want, more than I'm able to say. I wish for this intrusion..."
but ultimately has to conclude that the account is hers alone.
One flaw of the four novels is the rather confusing cast of supporting characters. There is a scene at the start of the novel where some characters meet in the Solara's shoe-shop. Trying to remember who was who, I realised that here is Elena's boyfriend sweetheart Antonio who some years later, as a hired thug, beat up Elena's new lover, Nino because at the time Nino was Lila's lover. Lila was then married to Stefano who was business partners with the Solano brothers, for whom Antonio worked and who were both infatuated with Lila. Antonio's sister is now Stefano's new partner but later becomes the lover of Lila's estranged husband. Antonio's mother lost her mind many years ago after a love affair with Nino's father, who later was Elena's first lover ... and so it could go on.
There is an extremely helpful cast list at the start of each book helps keep the reader navigate their way through the maze of relationships, but the problem other character simply don't solidify in the reader's mind as real people anywhere near as strongly as Elena and Lila. And that in turn causes something of an issue with Nino, who emerges in this fourth novel as a crucial third character. Elena and Lina even allow their relationship with their children to be affected by whether they can trace Nino in them. Lila was passionately devoted to her son Gennaro when young but seems to lose interest as he grows and an emerging resemblance dashes her assumption (hope) that he was Nino's illegitimate child, and revealed instead him to be the child of her then husband's Stefano. Elena seems almost as fond of Silvia's son Mirko, fathered by Nino, than of her own children with Pietro, who she rather blithely leaves with her inlaws for 3 years as she sorts out her personal and literary life.
"It was terrible to confess it, but I still wanted him, I loved him more than my own daughters ...
Lila struck with precision a point in myself that I'd kept carefully hidden and which had to do with the urge for motherhood I'd noticed for the first time a dozen years ago, when I had held little Mirko, in Mariarosa's house. It had been a completely irrational impulse, a sort of command of love, which at the time had overwhelmed me. I had intuited even then that it was not a simple wish to have a child, I wanted a particular child, a child like Mirko, a child of Nino's. And in fact that yearning had not been alleviated by Pietro and the conception of Dede and Elsa. Rather it had reemerged recently, when I saw Silvia's child and, especially, when Nino had told me that [his wife] Eleonara was pregnant."
And when Elena eventually has a child, Imma, with Nino, Lina seems to take more interest in her than her own daughter, with Enzo, Tina - with tragic consequences.
The reader is left wondering why Nino is so memorable as to attract the devoted attention of both these two remarkable - and feminist - women and indeed so many others , despite showing nothing in his behaviour, at least towards Elena (she later realises the one time he did put a woman's interest before his own was for Lina on Ischia), to justify it. Elena realises in part that the answer for her revolves, as much of her life does, inevitably around her own relationship with Lina and the tension between her neighbourhood origins and her more cultured ambitions:
"I distinguished the love for the neighbourhood boy, the high-school student - a feeling of mine that had as its object a fantasy of mine, conceived before Ischia - from the passion that had overwhelmed me for the young man in the bookstore in Milan, the person who had appeared in my house in Florence. I had always maintained a connection between these two emotional blocks, and that morning instead it seemed to me as if there was no connection, that the continuity was a trick of logic. In the middle, I thought, there had been a rupture - his love for Lila - that should have cancelled Nino forever from my life, but which I refused to reckon with. To whom, then, was I bound, and whom did I still love today?"
"Then everything seemed clearer. There was no split between that man who came after Lila and the boy with whom - before Lila - I had been in love since childhood. Nino was only one, and the expression he had on his face while he was inside Silvana was the proof. It was the expression of his father, Donato, not when he deflowered me on the Maronti, but when he touched me between the legs, under the sheet, in Nella's kitchen."
The fourth volume is a fitting end to an overall story. It's not the strongest volume - the first half builds towards an event that would have been more shocking had the novel's title not rather given the game away (and indeed the Italian title "Storia della bambina perduta" gives us even more of a clue). And the second half is somewhat slower paced, not least as we know where it is headed - Lina's complete disappearance - from the first pages of the first novel. But against that, the sense of the wider world is stronger, and Ferrante manages to give the novel, in it's closing pages, a powerful finish.
4 stars for this volume, not quite 5, but 5 for the series, which I've awarded to the 3rd book.
To conclude, it seems fitting to quote Elena's publisher's reaction to the draft of her second novel, a novel that tells much the same story as these books.
"It is from the first line to the last, pure pleasure of narration"
Mod
Mod
Trevor wrote: "Between this being shortlisted and also doing well in the BTBA, I really need to jump back in this series and catch up!"It's definitely worth the journey. And given that shortlist I now hope either this, or The Vegetarian, wins - the latter by preference simply as the novel and author would benefit more from the exposure.
by Elena Ferrante
translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
Italy
Available in the U.K. and the U.S. from Europa Editions
The fourth and final installment of the Neapolitan Novels series, The Story of the Lost Child is the dazzling saga of the friendship between two women: brilliant, bookish Elena and fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both women fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up: a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Having moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books, Elena returns to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples. Her entrepreneurial success draws her into closer proximity to the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood; she becomes the unacknowledged leader of the world she has always rejected. 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.
Indeed, Ms. Ferrante’s writing — lucid and direct, but with a cyclonic undertow — is very much a mirror of both her heroines. Elena has a decidedly linear approach to life, and, as a narrator, she often takes a matter-of-fact tone, but that appearance of control belies the roiling, chaotic, Lila-like emotions beneath. This constant pull between detachment and turmoil (or, to put it in terms of the classics that the author loves, between Apollonian rationality and Dionysian ferocity) creates a kind of alternating electrical current that lends these novels a compelling narrative tension.
~Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times
Elena’s books attempt to decode her friend, to plot the dividing line between them. But she is continually frustrated by the inherent expectations of unity and order that such a task involves: "I’m wrong, I said to myself in confusion, to write as I’ve done until now, recording everything I know. I should write the way she speaks, leave abysses, construct bridges and not finish them, force the reader to establish the flow."
~Alex Clark in The Guardian