Reading guide: The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
Against the backdrop of the tumultuous political environment of 1980s Italy, Elena Ferrante delivers a searingly honest chronicle of a lifelong female friendship
Read an extract from The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein
In the fourth volume of her Neapolitan Quartet, Elena Ferrante presents the concluding volume in the dazzling saga of two women
Having moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books, Elena returns to her home city to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, on the other hand, never freed herself from Naples. And her entrepreneurial success only draws her into closer contact with the nepotism, criminal violence and inviolable taboos that infect her neighbourhood.
Published in the UK by Europa Editions.
We sat down at the kitchen table, while Tina and Imma chattered softly, moving dolls, horses, and carriages around the floor. Lila took out a lot of papers, her notes, also two notebooks with stained red covers. I immediately leafed through these with interest: graph-paper pages written in the calligraphy of the old elementary schools—account books, minutely annotated in a language full of grammatical mistakes and initialed on every page “M.S.” I understood that they were part of what the neighborhood had always called Manuela Solara’s red book. How the expression “red book” had echoed during our childhood and adolescence: evocative yet threatening—or perhaps evocative precisely because threatening. But whatever other word one might use in speaking of it—“register,” for example—and no matter if the color was altered, Manuela Solara’s book excited us like a secret document at the center of bloody adventures. Here it was, instead. It was a collection of school notebooks like the two I had before me: very ordinary dirty notebooks with the lower right edge raised like a wave. I realized in a flash that the memory was already literature and that perhaps Lila was right: my book—even though it was having so much success—really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn’t been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.
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While the children played—if they merely hinted at a quarrel we let out nervous cries to quiet them—Lila placed before my eyes all the material in her possession, and explained the meaning of it. We organized and summarized. It was a long time since we had undertaken something together. She seemed pleased, I understood that this was what she wanted and expected from me. At the end of the day she disappeared again with her bag and I returned to my apartment to study the notes. Then, in the following days, she wanted us to meet at Basic Sight. We locked ourselves in her office and sat at the computer, a kind of television with a keyboard, very different from what she had showed me and the children some time before. She pressed the power button, she slid dark rectangles into gray blocks. I waited, bewildered. On the screen luminous tremors appeared. Lila began to type on the keyboard, I was speechless. It was in no way comparable to a typewriter, even an electric one. With her fingertips she caressed gray keys, and the writing appeared silently on the screen, green like newly sprouted grass. What was in her head, attached to who knows what cortex of the brain, seemed to pour out miraculously and fix itself on the void of the screen. It was power that, although passing for act, remained power, an electrochemical stimulus that was instantly transformed into light. It seemed to me like the writing of God as it must have been on Sinai at the time of the Commandments, impalpable and tremendous, but with a concrete effect of purity. Magnificent, I said. I’ll teach you, she said. And she taught me, and dazzling, hypnotic segments began to lengthen, sentences that I said, sentences that she said, our volatile discussions were imprinted on the dark well of the screen like wakes without foam. Lila wrote, I would reconsider. Then with one key she erased, with others she made an entire block of light disappear, and made it reappear higher up or lower down in a second. But right afterward it was Lila who changed her mind, and everything was altered again, in a flash: ghostly moves, what’s here now is no longer here or is there. And no need for pen, pencil, no need to change the paper, put another sheet in the roller. The page is the screen, unique, no trace of a second thought, it always seems the same. And the writing is incorruptible, the lines are all perfectly straight, they emit a sense of cleanliness even now that we are adding the filthy acts of the Solaras to the filthy acts of half of Campania.
The city of Naples
©️ AlamyWe worked for days. The text descended from Heaven to earth through the noise of the printer, materialized in black dots laid on paper
We worked for days. The text descended from Heaven to earth through the noise of the printer, materialized in black dots laid on paper. Lila found it inadequate, we returned to pens, we labored to correct it. She was irritable: from me she expected more, she thought I could respond to all her questions, she got angry because she was convinced that I was a well of knowledge, while at every line she discovered that I didn’t know the local geography, the tiny details of bureaucracies, how the communal councils functioned, the hierarchies of a bank, the crimes and the punishments. And yet, contradictorily, I hadn’t felt her to be so proud of me and of our friendship in a long time. We have to destroy them, Lenù, and if this isn’t enough I’ll murder them. Our heads collided—for the last time, now that I think of it—one against the other, and merged until they were one. Finally we had to resign ourselves and admit that it was finished, and the dull period of what’s done is done began. She printed it yet again, I put our pages in an envelope, and sent it to the publishing house and asked the editor to show it to the lawyers. I need to know—I explained on the telephon — if this stuff was sufficient to send the Solaras to jail.
The streets of Naples
©️ Alamy- By
- Elena Ferrante
- Translated by
- Ann Goldstein
- Published by
- Europa Editions
Against the backdrop of a seductive and perilous Naples, Elena Ferrante delivers a searingly honest chronicle of a lifelong female friendship. Translated by Ann Goldstein.
