The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante (Translated by Ann Goldstein) - review by Catherine Taylor

Catherine Taylor

Two Women of Naples

The Story of the Lost Child

By

Europa Editions 473pp £11.99
 

The fourth and final volume in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novel series arrives freighted with expectation. The decades-long rivalrous friendship of two women from the slums of postwar Naples – Raffaella ‘Lila’ Cerullo and Elena Greco – has, by means of its eviscerating neorealism, gripped the reading public, not least because of Ferrante’s continued wish to remain pseudonymous and unknown. Lila and Elena’s relationship, which from childhood has been a near-metaphysical battle of wills, is now, at the beginning of The Story of the Lost Child, in stasis. It is 1976. At the close of the previous novel, narrator Elena, a university-educated writer living in Florence with her husband, Pietro, who is a professor, and two daughters, abandons this seemingly becalmed existence for a tumultuous affair – and ultimately a return to her home city – with Nino Sarratore, a former lover of Lila from their Naples ghetto. Lila, meanwhile has remained at the heart of what is pointedly referred to as ‘the neighbourhood’, in a low-status job, living with the son from her violent early marriage and Enzo, her new partner.

Ferrante traces Elena and Lila’s progress through late 20th-century Italian society with only fleeting reference to external events – the murder of the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, the emergence of AIDS, the devastating earthquake that hit southern Italy in November 1980, the cataclysm of 9/11. Ferrante uses the earthquake in particular as a dramatic device: Lila and Elena, both unexpectedly pregnant in their late thirties, are

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter