The last one... The fourth and final volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels.

I've been following the characters in this saga for a long time now, starting with My Brilliant Friend, almost a year ago (with additional TV version), and moving on through The Story of a New Name a few months later, to The Story of the Separate Ways in January this year.

Elena Ferrante is undeniably a talented writer, and following these Naples families -- in particular struggling writer Elena (Lenu) and her friend/rival/nemesis Lila -- has been an enriching experience. It has also been a multi-media and multi-lingual experience, although less so this time, as the fourth series in the television adaptation is still in the making, so I've had just one pass at this one, as opposed to two (or even three) exposures to the previous volumes.

This fourth book was originally published in Italian in 2014, as The Story of the Lost Child (Storia della bambina perduta), but -- once again -- this edition was very pricey. No Indonesian translation is available after Volume 2 (I read the first two in Indonesian), so I read this one in Spanish. That version (La nina perdida), translated by Celia Filipetto Isicato, came out in 2015.

In a conversation about Ferrante's books, Merve Emre ventures to say: "My controversial opinion is that there should not have been a fourth book. I think it’s a fantastic trilogy. And then as a quartet, I think the fourth one -- I do not think it sticks the landing."

I have to say I'm inclined to agree, although it would have been truly terrible to have the series end where the third book ends (which is where Elena is about to go off with good-for-nothing Nino, her childhood love, and the "other man" in the adulterous holiday liaison that Lila struck up during those dreamy Ischia days many years ago).

What is very different about this volume is the sheer number of years it covers (from the late 1970s to the first decade of the 21st century). Inevitably, the longer time span means that we feel the events less intensely, and there is much less of the sheer nail-biting pressure that relentlessly drives the first three volumes forward.

It's also as though, looking back so far, now so much older, Elena sees everything in sepia. The bumps have been ironed out by time, and all the things that back in the 1960s and 1970s were so crucial, so critical, so heart-stopping, just aren't any more. Everyone dies, after all; the world keeps changing; what does anything matter at the end of the day?


Bari, 2019. Due east of Naples...

I ended my post on the third volume with a series of questions, and they make a useful enough springboard into this final part.

1. How long will Lenu-and-Nino last?

Well, as we all confidently predicted, not long. There's no changing Nino. He's just a serial ratbag. While Lenu leaves her husband, and resettles in Naples (where Nino is based), he leaves nothing. Lenu learns from Lila (who knows everything) that his marriage with Eleonora is still very much intact (indeed, not far into the story, she's expecting yet another of Nino's children). Not only does Lenu carry on loving him, but she decides she wants a child with him. What?! She's already struggling to juggle her two children, her career, and her life with Nino, and now she wants another complication? (At this point I add a note to my e-book: "Seriously? Incorrigible. This is the first time I've really lost patience with Lenu." And I do actually wonder whether this third child thing is a creaky plot point.)

In January 1981, the baby arrives. Immacolata Sarratore, named after Lenu's mother, now in very poor health. If Lenu thinks this will keep Nino grounded -- but why on earth would she think that? -- she's sadly mistaken. He continues to bed anything female that has a pulse. (This must actually be an addiction, but this element is not really analysed, just presented.) So Lenu finally decides enough is enough, and leaves him, although she still maintains enough contact for him to see his daughter from time to time. He's a very flaky provider, but he's somehow a survivor. As a parliamentarian, he's caught up in a corruption purge for a while, but he eventually slithers out again. The last time we see him, he's very definitely run to fat. Serves him right.



2. Can Lila and Lenu ever escape from each other?

No.

Again, as predicted.

When Lenu returns to Naples, after a long absence, she initially tries to keep Lila at arms' length. But Lila muscles her way back in, and in any case -- as we've seen in the first three books -- it is her energy that feeds Lenu's creativity: "Whatever topic we brought up..., there was something that irradiated her own body, and captivated me; something that stimulated my brain, as had always happened, and helped me to reflect. Perhaps that's why I was always seeking her company. Lila continued to emanate an energy that conferred wellbeing, that consolidated a purpose, that spontaneously suggested solutions."

So we continue with the love/hate, push/pull pattern we're so familiar with from the three previous volumes.

At times, the women become incredibly close. They happen to get pregnant at the same time (another plot point I find a little contrived), and in the gynaecologist's waiting room, Lenu tells us, "we went back to being two little girls". It's as though they're in school again: "We loved to sit next to each other. I was blonde, and she brunette; I was quiet, she was nervous; I was nice, she was perverse; the two of us were in opposition and in agreement; and the two of us were distant from the other pregnant women whom we spied on with irony."

But Lenu, who only intermittently enjoys a sense of security, is racked by jealousy of Lila. She worries that Nino might again be captivated by her (he is indeed pursuing her, according to Lila). She worries that Lila takes better care of her parents (she does, according to Elena's mother). She smarts at the realization that the neighbourhood sees her as Lila's sidekick, and is convinced she has been drawn back to her birthplace by Lila's power. She worries that Lila is a better mother-figure (not only to Lila's own children but to Lenu's daughters as well). She compares little Imma negatively to Lila's child (who is called Tina, and is named after Lila's mother, Nunzia, the diminutive of which is Nunziatina, which shortens to Tina -- oh, these Italian names...). And towards the end, when Lila plunges into writing and research on Naples, Lenu is terrified that she will write a better book, which will eclipse all her own work.

And though there is often camaraderie, it's unequal. Elena tells Lila almost everything; Lila tells Elena little or nothing.

There's a lot about Lila, therefore, that we just don't understand. This is partly because she intrinsically resists and disrupts interpretation, but also partly because Lenu -- on whose eyes we are dependent -- is sometimes totally incapable of fathoming her friend, and sometimes bizarrely unempathetic. Often it is other people -- Lila's partner Enzo, or their mutual friend Carmen, or (strangest of all for a man not gifted with much perception) Lenu's one-time husband, Pietro -- who "get" Lila.



As prefigured by the title, the book revolves around a terrible tragedy. Little Tina is bright, beautiful, and full of life. But when she is only a few years old, she disappears without trace. She never returns; her body is never found; her fate remains a mystery. This is obviously a harrowing experience for Lila, and sets in motion her process of unravelling. She has dominated the neighbourhood very effectively, knowing everything there is to know, and pulling strings accordingly. But from the time Tina disappears, her powers steadily decline.

Lenu never really seems to grasp the way this event has hollowed her friend out. She tries to imagine her state of mind (Lila, of course, is silent on the subject of her feelings), but later wonders whether this projection of her own imagination has been a hindrance, and has only served to make Lila "even more elusive".

While she is still pregnant, Lila is caught up in the highly destructive 1980 earthquake, and experiences a debilitating attack of her "dissolving margins" syndrome. This section offers more detail than we are given elsewhere about Lila's curious mental condition. When her meltdown occurs, "Lila lost Lila, chaos seemed the only truth, and she -- so active, so brave -- cancelled herself out, full of fear, and became nothing."

Such bouts prefigure her eventual disappearance. Right at the beginning of the first volume, we're told Lila has vanished without trace. The way Lenu reacts to this dissolving-Lila mystery is the whole raison d'etre of the series. She wants to "fix" her in words that will not vanish or melt away. But Lenu is never sure the words are her own. Lila has always jokingly said that she can reach into her friend's computer, and manipulate what she finds there. By the end of the story, having read and re-read it, Lenu can assert that the writing is hers and hers alone, but can't help adding a caveat: "Unless, by dint of imagining what she would have written and how, I am no longer in a position to distinguish what is mine from what is hers."

This synergy is indeed pervasive. Whenever Lenu thinks she has written something good, she feels it is because she has made space for Lila's spirit within her work. Alex Clark wonders, "Who, after all, is the real teller of Elena and Lila’s lives: the woman who writes the words, or the woman she writes them about, and for?... A portrait of the dynamic of a friendship has mutated into a weightier, more uncanny exploration of the antipathy of love, of our compulsion to create one another, over and over again."

But it is far from a peaceful synergy. The constant power struggle between these two women is still clearly evident when Elena -- contravening the promise she had made to Lila -- writes A Friendship, a book that talks about Lila: "I loved Lila. I wanted her to endure. But I wanted to be the one who would make her endure. I considered it my obligation. I was convinced that she herself, as a young girl, had required this of me."

And the struggle continues in the pages she is now writing. Jennifer Kurdyla concludes: "Elena’s attempt to un-erase her friend is as much a final defiant act of dominance as it is a testament to her quest 'to seek on the page a balance between her and me that in life I couldn’t find even between myself and me.' The resulting ambiguity may not be a perfect 'balance,' but it is an authentic conclusion to this messy, angry novel."

There's another plot element that throws this core relationship into relief, but I would say it's another of the less successful aspects of the novel. It involves the gradual transformation of Alfonso, Lila's brother-in-law, whose gayness increasingly expresses itself in a tendency to imitate Lila's appearance and dress. In this, he is aided and abetted by Lila herself. The gentle and intelligent boy who was Elena's ally at school eventually dies a tragic death at the hands of homophobes. Melinda Harvey argues that the focus on Alfonso allows us to see the Lila-Lenu relationship as actually a triangle. His life-path reflects theirs in many ways: Same age, similar intelligence, a martyr to marriage (and Lenu admits she doesn't really understand him either). All of which is interesting -- but it feels under-developed to me, and half-hearted.



3. Can dominant families ever be tamed? And can intellectuals ever speak for workers?

No and no, I think Ferrante is saying.

Another element of the push/pull seesaw of distancing and closeness in the Lila-Lenu relationship has to do with the neighbourhood. Lila has become a local source of authority, rivalling and threatening the Solaras. But she constantly expects from Lenu's fame and social position more than these attributes can realistically return.

Lila wants to have Lenu as an ally, so that together they can change the neighbourhood, and smash the Solaras. But nothing goes quite as she expects. Lenu writes another book (or rather resurrects one that was rejected earlier), and allows her publisher to exploit her renewed residence in the neighbourhood to market it. (It is in the course of a publicity photoshoot that a photo of Lenu and Tina is inaccurately captioned as showing Elena Greco and her daughter; whether this was a factor in Tina's disappearance is never elucidated, although Lila suspects it is.)

The article angers the Solaras. Lila never liked the book (a half-way house, she feels -- either you say things or you don't, and Elena has stopped half-way), but she is happy with the Solaras' discomfiture. The book gets good reviews, but Carmen (blackmailed by the Solaras) threatens legal action. Lenu's publisher sends a letter to the press, defending the book, and denouncing reactionary pressure. But Lila is disappointed by this move: "Freedom of expression and the battle between backwardness and modernization didn't matter in the least to her. The only thing that interested her was the infinitely sad local disputes" -- precisely the element that the publisher had tried to play down.

Lenu wants to keep up the pressure against the Solaras, and she and Lila collaborate on a fairly damning, evidence-based text. The publisher says it's not enough to ruin them, but Lila sends it to a newspaper, where it comes out under Elena's name. It is hard to know whether Lila is just being naive -- she thinks that because her friend is famous, she must have more clout than she actually does -- or whether she is using Elena, or whether her motivation is a combination of these factors. Lenu's high visibility does keep the brothers at bay -- overtly, at least. But the resultant hostile truce disappoints Lila.

By the end of the book, the Solaras are no more (they are gunned down in 1986). But Lenu realizes how bound up they had all been with this gangster-ridden world: "The line of separation with people like the Solaras, in Naples and in Italy, had been and remained vague." Later, an anti-corruption campaign shakes even powerful families like the Airotas (Lenu's former in-laws). But so many lives have been irreversibly impacted in the meantime. And you never have any confidence that the hydra heads will not grow back...



4. What are women supposed to be like?

Ferrante is awesome (yet again) on this topic. She is absolutely fearless in taking everything society has taught us to expect from women, and showing how real women just don't work that way.

Elena candidly admits that -- gasp! -- her children are not the most important thing in her life... Even after her first disappointment with Nino (his ongoing marriage), she is upfront about her feelings: "It was terrible to admit it to myself, but I still loved him, I loved him more than I loved my own daughters." She refuses to sacrifice her career to run round after her children. There are lots of histrionics on the way, and at one point the older daughter tells her bitterly: "There's no possibility of establishing a real relationship with you; for you the only things that exist are work and Aunt Lina; there is nothing that doesn't end up being swallowed by those things." But by the end of the book, all the daughters seem to have come through things just fine. Or at least that's the way Elena sees it...

Nor are women are always warm-hearted, Ferrante insists. Elena, for example, can be quite cold. When Franco (a former boyfriend at university) commits suicide in the house they are both staying in at the time, she seems to take the event (never entirely explained) remarkably calmly. Similarly, Lila often gives her son Gennaro (aka Rino) short shrift.

Elena's stormy relationship with her mother is also recounted with brutal honesty. Immacolata (the first one, after whom Elena's third daughter is named) is furious when Elena leaves Pietro. She goes to their home, and creates a monumental scene the like of which upper-middle-class Pietro has never experienced in his life... When Lenu returns to Naples, she continues to cold-shoulder her, and compare her unfavourably with her other daughter, Elisa (now shacked up Marcello Solara), and with Lila: "Don't give yourself airs with me," she scolds Lenu. "You're nothing. As far as normal people are concerned, what you believe yourself to be is nothing. I'm respected here not because I gave birth to you but because I gave birth to Elisa."

But when she is sick, she draws closer to Elena. The only beautiful moment of her life, she tells her, was the day she gave birth to Elena, her first child; she never felt so much for her three other children, whom she regarded more as stepchildren; now, she feels guilty that the other three are all in the pay of the Solaras.

Such honesty is refreshing. Surely we're all tired of the sainted-motherhood trope.



5. How do authors live with their work?

The answer to this must be that it's difficult, and unpredictable problems are likely to arise, but Elena -- surely -- is way too naive on this score.

I've already noted the reaction Elena's neighbourhood-focused book provoked within the locality itself. She was caught off guard. But it's surprising that she was surprised... You can't write about recognizable events and people, and expect no response.

Despite her successful career, Elena never outlives her self-doubt. When her grown-up daughters mock her work, she is profoundly affected. All her old uncertainty returns. She's worried that nothing she has done will last. She's increasingly terrified of Lila's potential writing prowess.

All these considerations factor into the fateful decision to write A Friendship.

The chronology goes like this: Tina disappears in 1984. Enzo and Lila separate in 1992. Lenu moves to Turin in 1995. She visits Lila in Naples in 2005 -- the year of Gigliola's death (the occurrence that opens the third book). The following year, she writes A Friendship. It is published in 2007. The public loved it. But it spells the end of her relationship with Lila.

Again, I'm surprised that she's surprised.

After all, she sounds pretty brutal: "For a long time I thought that she had been angry because in the final part, despite resorting to fantasy more than at other points in the story, I recounted what had actually happened in reality: Lila had been extolling Imma in front of Nino, and in doing so she had been distracted, and consequently had lost Tina. But evidently, the element that in the fiction of the story serves in all innocence to reach the hearts of the readers becomes an infamy for someone who perceives the echo of events she has really experienced. In short, for a long time I believed that what had ensured the success of the book was also what had caused Lila the most damage."

But then she changes her mind, and thinks that what upset Lila was the story of the dolls. This incident is recounted very early in the first volume. Nu belongs to Lila, and Tina --yes, she was called Tina... -- belongs to Lenu. When Lila pushes Tina through a grating into a dark and inaccessible cellar, Lenu tit-for-tats, and sends Nu tumbling to the same fate.

In her story, Lenu overtly connects this childhood drama with the loss of Lila's child. "Lila," says Lenu -- and again her surprise leaves us incredulous -- "must have found it cynical and dishonest that to please my audience I had had recourse to an important moment of our childhood, to her girl, to her pain." But these are only suppositions, she continues...

Surely, surely, she can see why this would be SO hurtful...? There is a cruelty about Lenu that really stands out in this volume (in a way that goes way beyond the requirements of my fourth point above).

"At times," says Lenu, in full-on victim mode, "I hate her for this decision of hers to remove me from my life so unequivocally... She always did the same: When I don't yield, she excludes me, punishes me, takes away the very pleasure of having written a good book." And yet Lenu is driven by an absolutely visceral fear, which Natalie Bakopoulos explains like this: "Lila’s disappearance, after all, is a moment of danger, and Elena is left to translate it, narrate it, give the past meaning in order to understand the present. The danger is not only for Lila, however, but for Elena herself, as if she too might disappear with Lila, be made irrelevant, her whole past vanishing along with her. 'What I could become outside of Lila’s shadow counted for nothing,' Elena writes. Her identity, once again, is always relational. If Lila disappears, who is Elena? And so she must write the books to keep herself alive. To keep herself known."

Which sums up, very neatly, all the power and the duplicity of writing...



The somewhat creepy finale involves the arrival at Lenu's flat in Turin of a package -- which contains the old dolls. Profoundly affected, Lenu desperately hopes Lila will appear in person (she wants that, she tells us, more than she would even have wanted an unexpected meeting with her daughters and grandchildren). But no-one appears. She is reduced to tears: "Look at what she had done: She had deceived me, she had led me where she wanted, from the beginning of our friendship. All my life she had told her own rescue story, using my living body and my existence." Then she reconsiders, and wonders whether the dolls just meant that Lila was well, and that she loved her friend, and "that she had gone beyond her limits, and finally intended to travel the world, now less small than hers, living in old age... the life that in youth others had denied her, and that she had denied herself".

But the dolls smell of mould; they're poor and old: "Unlike what the stories tell us, real life, when it has passed, doesn't look out onto light but onto darkness. I thought: Now that Lila has made herself so clear, I must resign myself to never seeing her again."

And given that Elena Greco is again writing -- what we're reading is ostensibly her words -- then I would say there's not much chance of Lila's reappearing, even assuming she's still alive. Lenu's latter descriptions of Lila are pitiless. When she moves to Turin, the once beautiful Lila looks 10 years older than her age. She's plagued by hot flushes, and has an old person's disregard for bodily decorum. For all the tears -- crocodile or genuine -- Lenu has done a real number on her rival.

But again this raises the question: If we see these thoughts emerging because Lila has effectively insinuated herself into Lenu's head, then SHE is the one who has done a number on her supposed chronicler, by exposing her to a gaze that grows ever less sympathetic...

*_*_*

So there we have it. The end of the line. The Lost Child has its elements of awkwardness, and it's not my favourite. But again -- what power. What capacity to really make us think. What poignancy and resonance in the aspects that are intentionally left dark.

Brava, Ms Ferrante, whoever you are.