The Story of the Lost Child concludes the dazzling saga of two women—the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila—who first met amid the shambles of postwar Italy.
In this book, life’s great discoveries have been made; its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, Elena and Lila’s friendship remains the gravitational center of their lives. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. But now, she has returned to Naples to be with the man she has always loved.
Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood. Yet, somehow, this proximity to a world she has always rejected only brings her role as unacknowledged leader of that world into relief.
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“[The] 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…Ferrante gives us both the long answer and the short, and in doing so adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience.”
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New York Times Book Review