Life is Obscurity, Not Clarity

Two important things to say about Elena Ferrante’s “The Story of the Lost Child”::

First, do not start reading it if you haven’t finished the previous three novels in the series. You’ll miss a powerful experience.

Second, having read the first three, do not expect a tidy resolution in the final installment. The author deliberately deprives us of that. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator tells us why: “real life, when it has passed, tends towards obscurity, not clarity.”  To capture that obscurity, she peppered the novels with unanswered questions and tensions with no release. These are a large part of the series’ artistic success. 

Beginning with 2004’s “My Brilliant Friend,” the novels trace the lifelong fascination that the narrator, Elena Greco, has for her childhood friend, Lila Cerullo. Now a successful novelist in her 60s, Elena reflects on what this not altogether healthy relationship has done to her life. In dry sentences, studded with parentheticals, she captures the minute shifts in thought that transformed their friendship over the years.

Her academic tone does not, as one might expect, undermine the emotional impact of the story. Rather, the almost-clinical precision in her language renders some familiar experiences with exquisite clarity. This prose style is especially powerful in chronicling Elena’s envy for her charismatic friend. The episodes of naked jealousy arouse cringes of recognition.

Much of this envy, however, arises from Elena guessing at details that she cannot know. She wonders at Lila’s intentions, and at the origins of her talents, without ever satisfying her curiosity. What’s more, a few natural phenomena – a broken pot, a fire – occur without any explanation. Elena struggles to draw cohesion from these obscure moments, but can’t. Her confusion makes the final moments of “The Story of the Lost Child” all the more devastating. They effectively mirror the haphazardness of real life.

This extreme commitment to realism may explain why Ferrante’s identity fascinates so many readers.  She guards her anonymity well, and she famously said “books, once written, have no need of their authors.” But when a novelist from Naples writes a novel about a Neapolitan novelist, the books themselves beg the question: How much of this is autobiographical?

That question, too, must be resigned to obscurity. And whatever the answer to that question, The Neapolitan Novels are well worth the nearly 1600-page investment.