Review by New York Times Review
ELENA FERRANTE HAS written her story twice: once in a group of intense, highly modeled short novels whose action unfolds over a brief time span; and again in the four sprawling, rambunctious, decades-spanning works that compose her Neapolitan saga. That these two modes of storytelling - the compact and the commodious; the modern and the historical; the distilling of life into metaphor and its picaresque, riotous expansion - are so obviously the obverse of each other constitutes yet another narrative, the story of how an individual (more specifically, a woman) arrives, after the vicissitudes of living, at a definition of self. "Do you want the long answer or the short?" is the customary divide between explanations versus outcomes in the retelling of events. Ferrante gives us both the long answer and the short, and in doing so adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience. Ferrante is the by now famously anonymous Italian novelist whose works started appearing in 1992, though their setting is the Naples of the 1950s onward. By the time we reach "The Story of the Lost Child," the fourth and final installment of the Neapolitan series, we have arrived at the 21st century and Elena, its narrator, is growing old. One can call Ferrante's novels "her story" for the reason that they are openly autobiographical in form: Against the telling and retelling of the life of a single Neapolitan mother of two - frequently called Elena - who rises from impoverished beginnings to become a successful author, publisher and academic, her anonymity is a sort of beau geste as well as a precaution. These facts are as consistent in the short novels as in the long, but in the Neapolitan saga Ferrante's writ runs much wider, into detailed accounts of state corruption, murder and political scandals whose participants are presumably recognizable to the modern Italian reader. Ferrante's preoccupations - set out with great clarity in her short books "The Days of Abandonment" and "The Lost Daughter," and discernible in a different way amid the clamor of the Neapolitan novels - are with the inherent radicalism of modern female identity; the struggles of the female artist or intellectual with her biological and social destiny as a woman; and, perhaps most strikingly, with motherhood as it is lived by that woman in all her striving, transitional, divided newness. "The Days of Abandonment," Ferrante's finest short work, describes the awakening of its narrator into a Medea-like emotional frenzy when her husband coolly leaves her for a young and beautiful woman. Left alone in their apartment with the care of their two young children, she undergoes a complete dismantling of her traditional, passive female identity and reassembles herself as a raging, active and ultimately autonomous being. What is sacrificed is her relationship with her children; or so, at least, she fears. In this novel as well as others, the narrator views that sacrifice ambivalently, sometimes experiencing it as loss and sometimes glimpsing in it possibilities for a new, more complex maternal identity. The power and prestige of the conventional mother is something from which Ferrante's narrators - as daughters - have struggled to free themselves: What Ferrante describes so brilliantly is the double loss that entails for the modern woman, who finds herself neither mothered nor able to mother in turn. "The Story of the Lost Child" picks up these themes, as Elena and Lila, the girlhood friends and rivals whose relationship spans and forms the backbone of the Neapolitan novels, enter the middle terrain of marriage and motherhood. In Elena and Lila, Ferrante's modern woman is bisected and given two faces; where in her other works the divided woman speaks to and wrestles with herself, the Neapolitan series externalizes and literalizes those politics to show their almost insurmountable complexity. Elena is the woman who fears that her achievements and successes, while having the appearance of feminist autonomy, are in fact the fruits of a continuing, covert slavery to patriarchal values. Lila is the unwritten, unexpressed female potentiality, a more obstinate version of Virginia Woolf's concept of Shakespeare's sister. Elena's lifelong fear - that Lila, while having made no mark on the world, is in fact more brilliant than she is - bites more deeply, as the two women age, into the very roots of female identity: continuity, stability, the capacity to nurture. By now Elena has two daughters. Separated from their father, compelled by her effortful ascent into the literary world, she inhabits the rackety motherhood of the compartmentalized woman, by turns abandoning, remorseful, selfish, valiant and plagued with guilt. Lila has a single son, the unprepossessing Rino. Unlike Elena, who has moved to Florence and to a life of middle-class values, Lila has remained in the Naples area in all its untransfigurable squalor. Like everything else she does, Elena's version of marriage and family life bears an aspirational taint - an accusation she imagines coming from Lila, and frequently turns against herself. In order to disprove it, she decides in the wake of her marriage's collapse to return to Naples with her two daughters to live. She takes up residence first in a neighborhood overlooking Lila's, then in the apartment directly above hers, and there, in the pure gothicism of this spatial arrangement, the two women resume their relationship, Lila acting as mother to Elena's daughters - and almost, therefore, to Elena herself - so that Elena can pursue her career. With this shift into a psychological paradigm, Ferrante implies much about the stubbornly cyclical nature of female evolution. This atmosphere intensifies when both women, well into their 30s, conceive and give birth to daughters: Lila's quicksilver bright, Elena's slow to learn and - after she is summarily abandoned by her philandering father, whom she adores in the abstract - secretly worshipful of male power. What Ferrante illustrates here is the externalizing of an inner supposition whose contradictions lie deep within the female character in both its realized and unrealized state: The woman who has not proved herself through traditional measures of accomplishment suspects she has brilliance hidden inside her; while the realized woman, the woman who can point to her own successes, is afraid she has none. "She possessed intelligence," Elena writes of Lila, "and didn't put it to use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches of the world are merely a sign of vulgarity." Elena's own use of her talents has been, she increasingly sees, a form of submission too common among women, "and that submission had - through trials, failures, successes - reduced us." The fate of the women's two daughters - their mothers' imagos, the re-enactors of their symbiosis - is, predictably perhaps, entirely symbolic. Lila's child, in her moment of greatest potential, when her rare intelligence is visible but not yet practicable, vanishes one afternoon from a Naples street corner. Elena lives on to make her plodding progress from vulnerability to education to self-realization. She becomes, in short, normal - and this, Ferrante suggests, is where the female drive toward autonomy, with all its racking, successive waves, will ultimately deliver us: into a reality that is, if not transformed, at least better adjusted. Elena and Lila may both suspect that Lila possesses the greater, more radical brilliance. But the achievement of these novels belongs solely to Elena. "I've finished this story that I thought would never end," she writes, finally. "I finished it and patiently reread it not so much to improve the quality of the writing as to find out if there are even a few lines where it's possible to trace the evidence that Lila entered my text and decided to contribute to writing it. But I have had to acknowledge that all these pages are mine alone." Ferrante explores the struggles of the female artist with her biological and social destiny.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The fourth and final volume of Ferrante's Neapolitan series originally conceived as a trilogy picks up shortly after the closing of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014). Pursuing love and her writing career in a passionate fury in the late 1970s, Elena eventually lands on Lila's ceiling, occupying the small, neighborhood apartment in Naples above her friend's. Elena's return to hers and Lila's violent birthplace begins a period of calm, warmth, and stability uncommon in their friendship, yet, nonetheless, peripheral threads begin to fray. Beyond day-to-day dealings with their combined families, the women must contend with the continuous threats posed by life in their corrupt birthplace, a challenge they meet in quite different fashions. Although the eponymous child is of profound importance here, it's the disappearance revealed at the series' onset and to which Ferrante returns, after navigating the 40-plus-year span covered in the story, that will compel readers forward, puzzling over it and anticipating resolution. As Elena ages, struggling to understand her relationship to her books' success, she writes and we read, a level removed a story about story and its authorship. A friendship so reflective and yet so repellent, so truthfully plumbed, is a rare thing written. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Word of mouth launched this series, glowing reviews helped, and, eventually, a publishing phenomenon was born. The series' conclusion is a genuine literary event.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Ferrante's fourth and final Neapolitan novel, she reunites Elena, the accomplished writer, with Lila, the indomitable spirit, in their Southern Italian city as they confront maturity and old age, death, and the meaning of life. The two friends face the chaos of a corrupt and decaying Naples while the lives of the people closest to them-plagued by abandonment, imprisonment, murder, and betrayal-spiral out of control. "Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?" Lila asks Elena, disparaging her friend's career choice in the process. Readers will need the accompanying index of characters to keep track as Ferrante resolves the themes and events from earlier titles (My Brilliant Friend; The Story of a New Name; Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay) with a force and ferocity recalling the devastating earthquake of 1980 and Vesuvius's volcanic eruptions, which themselves provide the unsettling background to the narrative. Ferrante's precise foreshadowing is such that an early incident of a lost doll in book one mirrors the lost child in book four right down to their shared first name-and "The Blue Fairy," the story Lila scribbled in a childhood notebook that Elena threw in the Arno, resurfaces in this installment's final pages. Throughout, there's the sense of the circle completing: near the end, Elena pens a short novel entitled "A Friendship" (a metafictional nod to Ferrante's series as a whole), inspired by her half-century relationship with Lila. The novel is Elena's final work and permanently ties Elena and Lila together, for better and worse. This stunning conclusion further solidifies the Neapolitan novels as Ferrante's masterpiece and guarantees that this reclusive author will remain far from obscure for years to come. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
This conclusion to Ferrante's epic four-volume "Neapolitan" series continues the portrayal of Lila and Elena over several decades, from the 1960s to 2002. Both women give birth to daughters, and Tina and Imma's shared upbringing exemplify the love as well as the troublesome aspects of their mothers' day-to-existence. With fierce honesty and emotion, sometimes showing anxiety and estrangement, Ferrante etches the tumultuous lives and loves of Lila and Elena, their children, members of their extended family, and their friends. The worth and quality of work, the cost to family life of a successful career, the complications of men and their needs, the value of formal education and writing-all are scrutinized in this study of the role of women today. Verdict Readers should tackle all the books in order (My Brilliant Friend; The Story of a New Name; Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay) to savor the fabulous writing and translation, get to know the memorable characters, and experience a masterpiece of storytelling with a true, living pulse. Very highly recommended, this series is destined to become a classic of Italian literature.-Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Inexorable seismic changesin society and in the lives of two female friendsmark the final volume of Ferrante's Neapolitan series. Elena and Lila, the emotionally entwined duo at the center of Ferrante's (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, 2014, etc.) unsentimental examination of women's lives and relationships, advance through middle age and early old age (perhaps) in this calamitous denouement to their saga. The more fortunate Elena, an author who struggles to assert herself in the misogynistic world of 1970s and '80s Italy, is drawn back to Naples and its internecine bloodshed; Lila, who has stayed in the city of their youth, is at odds with its controlling families. Elena's "escape" and attempts at personal and familial fulfillment, on her own terms, hint at the changing roles of women in that era, but it's Lila's daily struggle in a Camorra-controlled neighborhood that illuminates the deep fractures within contemporary Italian society. The paths to self-determination taken by the lifelong friends merge and separate periodically as the demands of child-rearing, work, and community exert their forces. The far-reaching effects of a horrific blow to Lila's carefully maintained equilibrium resonate through much of the story and echo Ferrante's trademark themes of betrayal and loss. While avid devotees of the Neapolitan series will be gratified by the return of several characters from earlier installments, the need to cover ground in the final volume results in a telescoped delivery of some plot points. Elena's narrative, once again, never wavers in tone and confidently carries readers through the course of two lives, but the shadowy circumstances of those lives will invite rereading and reinterpretation. The enigmatic Ferrante, whose identity remains the subject of international literary gossip, has created a mythic portrait of a female friendship in the chthonian world of postwar Naples. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
