THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD
Elena Ferrante
Europa Editions
2015
Ms. Hen has read all the previous books in the Neapolitan
novels series, and when she read the third one, she told herself she would not
wait as long to read the next one as she had to read each book, but she did. She
waited longer. She’s not sure why. She might have wanted to prolong the
anticipation of the pleasure of reading it, or she had too many other books to
read.
Ms. Hen loved the three first books. They are the story of
Elena and Lila, their friendship growing up in a small town outside of Naples,
in the macho middle of the twentieth century. Throughout their lives Italy and
the world changes, attitudes towards women and lifestyles transform, and the
friends are swept along with the tides.
THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD is a novel about maturity, both
friends are in their thirties, and they have children. At the beginning of the
novel, Elena is having an affair with her lifelong love Nino, but she doesn’t
realize what a philanderer he is. Ms. Hen wanted to scream at her in the last
book, not to go with him, but she knew it wouldn’t make any difference. Elena
is a romantic and believes in love, even when all the signs are there that the
person she loves is a terrible man.
Elena and Lila become closer in this novel than they had in
the previous three novels. Elena moves back to the neighborhood, directly
upstairs from Lila. They take care of each other’s children. They even get
pregnant at the same time.
Ms. Hen didn’t enjoy this novel as much as the other three. She thinks it might have to do with the fact that this is the end of
their lives, and there doesn’t seem to be much hope left. In the other novels,
there was always the fantasy of what would happen next, but in this one,
there aren’t any dreams about the future, because their lives are what they
are, and they probably won’t change. It’s the dreariness of the end of life
that brought Ms. Hen down; she wondered, is this what we have to look forward
to? She doesn’t want to lose hope, and she’ll do her best to keep it alive in
her life.
There is a lot of mystery about who Elena Ferrante truly is, since her name is a pseudonym. A lot of people in Italy have an idea of who
she might be, but Ms. Hen doesn’t think it matters. If someone wants to be
anonymous, then that is her right. People say they know she is a woman, but
that’s all they know.
Ms. Hen had an idea that Ms. Ferrante might have written
these novels to create a friend she always wished she had had. The character is
a writer, and it appears that the author knows Naples and the time in which the
characters lived perfectly. Ms. Hen thinks that she might have created Lila
because she never had a lifelong friend who was as talented as she is herself,
and she created Lila as a mirror of who she could have been if she never left
her neighborhood, and was never educated. The books teem with honesty, so Ms.
Hen knows that there has to be some reality to the stories and the characters.
Even though Ms. Hen didn’t enjoy this novel as much as the
other three, it is still worth reading to see how Elena arrives at the end of
her life and how much she and the people around her have to endure. Life doesn't have to be all suffering, it is simply what we go through, says Ms. Hen. Some people might
argue, but Ms. Hen will stand her ground. Nobody can argue with a hen.
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