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The Story of the Lost Child
Sep. 26th, 2024 09:35 amThe fourth installment of Elena Ferrante’s Neaopolitan Novels dropped on HBO at the beginning of this month.
So, I’ve been reading the fourth novel, The Story of the Lost Child.
The fourth novel is the one I didn’t read when I was on my Elena Ferrante kick a few years back, binging on the HBO series and reading 1,000 pages in two weeks.
I avoided it partly because I OD’d on Southern Italian bildungsroman, & partly because the lives of Italian intellectuals in the 1980s bored me, that weird combination of petit bourgeois patriarchy & revolutionary posturing, all channeled through the ruminative introspections of Lenu, the novel’s oddly passive protagonist.
Lenu is not particularly interesting.
Lila, the titular “Brilliant Friend” is interesting.
There’s a lot of Lila in the last book.
###
Since I’d mostly forgotten the books, in addition to watching the new episode drops, I went ahead and binged the first three seasons.
The first season is an extraordinary piece of film-making, right up there with The Wire, I’m thinking. It somehow manages to capture the texture of childhood memory in a linear narrative format—quite a feat, that, because childhood memory is not linear, which is the reason most people remember so little of their childhoods. Childhood memories, for those who keep them, mostly come in the form of sensory flashes imbued with the gravitas of mythology.
Seasons 2 & 3—eh! You’re interested because by then, you’ve become invested in the characters & want to know what happens to them.
But they are not amazing.
And the same is true of the novels.
###
The fourth novel is kind of a mix.
Taken together, the four novels are a kind of odyssey that follows Lila’s descent into existential madness. In the cozy contemporary psychological jargon, Lila dissociates, and her dissociative episodes are channeled through Lenu’s essentially unsympathetic narration.
There is a brilliant scene in The Story of the Lost Child where Lila falls apart entirely during what I guess was the big earthquake of 1980 when Lila details the way boundaries dissolve that is riveting. And simultaneously chilling—almost Lovecraftian in terms of the horrors she sees.
###
I could write 50 pages about Lila—but actually, I can’t because shortly, I must scurry off and spread Harris/Walz cheer among the unenlightened natives of Trumplandia.
So, I’ve been reading the fourth novel, The Story of the Lost Child.
The fourth novel is the one I didn’t read when I was on my Elena Ferrante kick a few years back, binging on the HBO series and reading 1,000 pages in two weeks.
I avoided it partly because I OD’d on Southern Italian bildungsroman, & partly because the lives of Italian intellectuals in the 1980s bored me, that weird combination of petit bourgeois patriarchy & revolutionary posturing, all channeled through the ruminative introspections of Lenu, the novel’s oddly passive protagonist.
Lenu is not particularly interesting.
Lila, the titular “Brilliant Friend” is interesting.
There’s a lot of Lila in the last book.
###
Since I’d mostly forgotten the books, in addition to watching the new episode drops, I went ahead and binged the first three seasons.
The first season is an extraordinary piece of film-making, right up there with The Wire, I’m thinking. It somehow manages to capture the texture of childhood memory in a linear narrative format—quite a feat, that, because childhood memory is not linear, which is the reason most people remember so little of their childhoods. Childhood memories, for those who keep them, mostly come in the form of sensory flashes imbued with the gravitas of mythology.
Seasons 2 & 3—eh! You’re interested because by then, you’ve become invested in the characters & want to know what happens to them.
But they are not amazing.
And the same is true of the novels.
###
The fourth novel is kind of a mix.
Taken together, the four novels are a kind of odyssey that follows Lila’s descent into existential madness. In the cozy contemporary psychological jargon, Lila dissociates, and her dissociative episodes are channeled through Lenu’s essentially unsympathetic narration.
There is a brilliant scene in The Story of the Lost Child where Lila falls apart entirely during what I guess was the big earthquake of 1980 when Lila details the way boundaries dissolve that is riveting. And simultaneously chilling—almost Lovecraftian in terms of the horrors she sees.
###
I could write 50 pages about Lila—but actually, I can’t because shortly, I must scurry off and spread Harris/Walz cheer among the unenlightened natives of Trumplandia.
