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    The Story of the Lost Child
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    The Story of the Lost Child
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    The Story of the Lost Child
    Audiobook18 hours

    The Story of the Lost Child

    Written by Elena Ferrante

    Narrated by Hillary Huber

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    “Nothing quite like this has ever been published before,” proclaimed the Guardian about the Neapolitan Novels in 2014. The first book in the series, My Brilliant Friend, was a New York Times bestseller. Book three was a Times bestseller and a Notable Book of the Year. It was named a best book of 2014 twenty-five times, including in the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, Slate, the Daily Beast, the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and the Boston Globe. This final installment in the series gives validation to the New York Times Book Review’s opinion of its author, Elena Ferrante, as “one of the great novelists of our time.”

    Here is the dazzling saga of two women: the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both are now adults; many of life’s great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women’s friendship has remained the gravitational center of their lives. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up—a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received novels. In this final book, she has returned to Naples. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from the city of her birth. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity to the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood. Nearness to the world she has always rejected only brings her role as its unacknowledged leader into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, and unforgettable.

    Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous, the story of a lifelong friendship is told with unmatched honesty and brilliance. The four volumes in this series constitute a long, remarkable story that listeners will return to again and again, and every return will bring with it new revelations.

    Editor's Note

    Final Neapolitan novel…

    The fourth and final novel in Elena Ferrante’s beloved Neapolitan series is a must-read for her searingly honest portrayals of friendship, feminism, and family, and of the redeeming power of art.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlackstone Audio
    Release dateSep 1, 2015
    ISBN9781504630085
    Author

    Elena Ferrante

    Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), and The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), now a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, and Jessie Buckley. She is also the author of Incidental Inventions(Europa, 2019), illustrated by Andrea Ucini; Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (Europa, 2016); and a children’s picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night (Europa, 2016). The four volumes known as the “Neapolitan novels” (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child) were published by Europa Editions in English between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018 and is in its third season. Ferrante’s most recent novel is the instant New York Times bestseller, The Lying Life of Adults (Europa, 2020).

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    Reviews for The Story of the Lost Child

    4/5

    333 ratings25 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A breathless sovereign capstone.
    • 5/5
      Wow. Despite reading the three previous volumes, this was still an emotional gutpunch that took me by surprise. I don't think I will ever fully understand the relationship between these two complex women, Elena and Lila. I'm not even sure if we're supposed to think that the whole thing had been written by Lila in the end mimicking the voice of Elena. It was all tragedy and parenting and learning to love yourself in one enormous emotional bundle that felt essentially Italian and wholly of our time.

      These books have been a revelation. Unashamedly soapy. Unapologetically about women. Determinedly literary. A hugely satisfying experience.
    • 5/5
      The final in Ferrante's Neopolitan quartet does not disappoint. This book brings fills in the final stages of the story of the friendship between Elena and Lila into the 21st century and into their older years. It is a magnificent story covering women's interpersonal relationships, good and bad decisions, the political and social climate in Italy (particularly Naples) and the process of coming to terms with ageing. I'm devasted to have finished reading the series. A must read.
    • 4/5
      Elena ist schließlich doch nach Neapel zurückgekehrt, aus Liebe. Die beste Entscheidung ihres ganzen Lebens, glaubt sie, doch als sich ihr nach und nach die ganze Wahrheit über den geliebten Mann offenbart, fällt sie ins Bodenlose. Lila, die ihren Schicksalsort nie verlassen hat, ist eine erfolgreiche Unternehmerin geworden, aber dieser Erfolg kommt sie teuer zu stehen. Denn sie gerät zusehends in die grausame, chauvinistische Welt des verbrecherischen Neapels, eine Welt, die sie Zeit ihres Lebens verabscheut und bekämpft hat. Bei allen Verwerfungen und Rivalitäten, die ihre lange gemeinsamen Geschichte prägen – Lila und Elena halten einander die Treue, und fast scheint das Glück eine späte Möglichkeit. Aber beide haben sie übersehen, dass ihre hartnäckigsten Verehrer im Lauf der Jahre zu erbitterten Feinden geworden sind.Quelle: amazon.de
    • 4/5
      Elena, bookish and brilliant and a feminist, and Lila, fiery and uncontainable, are now adults with husbands, children, aging parents, and careers. Their friendship is the center of their lives. Both women fought to escape the neighborhood they grew up in. Elena manages to do so while Lila becomes ensnared in it. A wonderful story of friendship with all of its pitfalls, kindnesses, and wonders.
    • 3/5
      The final book of the Neapolitan series of Elena Ferrante. I'm glad I read this series, and I enjoyed the books, but my enthusiasm was waning a little by the end. While the core of the series is the relationship of the two friends, and plot is not central, I was disappointed by the lack of plot finalisation in this book. I can't help thinking that if plot was to be optional, then the plot scene setting at the start of the first book (Lila gone missing) should have been omitted.But I quibble - great characterisation (and the novelty of Lila is marvelous) and great moody background of Naples, the culture of honour, and Italy more generally.Read Jan 2017
    • 4/5
      I was trying to think of words to describe this book. Opaque, complex, femine, insightful, profound, complicated and at times long winded.
    • 4/5
      It's good; in fact, I read the entire series without a break. Nonetheless, I am bemused by the sheer amount of praise it's garnered. It's not THAT good. This review contains my reflections on the entire series rather than on individual books within it.Ms. Ferrante really captures the uncertainty and perspective of youth, and her characters develop more mature voices and perspective as the series evolves. She also captures life in a close-knit neighbourhood really well. The neighbourhood provides not only the setting, but the mood of the series...it is almost a character in itself. A central theme is whether one can break away from the place, people and expectations they come from.The relationship between Lila and Lena is so well portrayed. It's complex...they are so tightly bound to each other at times by love and other times they almost hate each other. Yet there is a loyalty and trust that they each can rely on. The telling of this relationship is, I think, the highlight of the series and evidence of Ms. Ferrante's great skill as a writer who understands people.A great story that gets richer as you proceed through the four books. By the end, you will really know and care about these characters. Worth reading all 1,693 pages!
    • 4/5
      This series was the backdrop for my summer. Thank you, Elena Ferrante, for these wonderful characters. I'm sorry it's over.
    • 4/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed this 4 part saga though I never would have picked them up if they hadn't been recommended by a trusted friend. The cover art on all four is ATROCIOUS and does not in any way reflect the story, style of writing, quality of literature, etc.
    • 5/5
      I loved this series. As I was reading all the books I always managed to picture it in Black in White. The book had a very cinematic effect to me, as if directed by Vittorio De Sica.
    • 5/5
      2015, Blackstone Audiobooks, Read by Hillary HuberIn this final Neapolitan novel, Lila and Elena are in their mid-30s to mid-50s. Life’s whims and joys and disappointments have been experienced – and when tragedy strikes in this final installment, they will know great loss. Still, their friendship remains a central staple in both of their lives, in spite of the different paths they’ve chosen. Elena, who moved to Florence when she married, has now returned to Naples, where she continues to enjoy success as a novelist. Lila, who has become a successful entrepreneur, has never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples, but her personality is somehow mirrored in her proximity to the city: perilous, unmanageable, seductive. As they age, the women continue to clash, drift apart, reconcile, only to clash again – and in the process, Ferrante reveals new facets of their friendship.In my review of the previous novel, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, I commented that whatever attracted the two women to Nino Sarratore completely escaped me. So I found it humourous and satisfying to see the women’s thinking at last align with mine. Lila, for her part, ignores Sarratore, and even finds his political embarrassments amusing. Elena has this to say (LOL!): “Then Nino arrived and all he did was talk loudly, joke, even laugh, as if we were not at his mother’s funeral. I found him large, bloated, a big ruddy man with thinning hair who was constantly celebrating himself. Getting rid of him, after the funeral, was difficult. I didn’t want to listen to him or even look at him. He gave me an impression of wasted time, of useless labor, that I feared would stay in my mind, extending into me, into everything.” (Epilogue, Ch 2)I thoroughly enjoyed The Story of the Lost Child, and commend Ferrante for a fine conclusion to her quartet. I recommend the series highly, and endorse the audiobooks for those who like to listen: Hillary Huber is fabulous!
    • 5/5
      Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels explore, in great depth, the lifelong friendship between Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo. The women are two sides of the same coin, and although their lives take them in very different directions and the depth of their friendship waxes and wanes, the magnetic bond between the brings them together time and time again.In this fourth and final novel, the women mature from their mid-30s into their 50s. Elena has followed the path she set for herself in the first novel and become a successful writer. She also challenges traditional views of motherhood, striving to have a career while raising her children. As always, Lila’s life has been subject to many more twists and turns. Despite her impoverished upbringing and lack of education, she is now a successful businesswoman and has found a supportive partner. She does not hesitate to share her candid opinions with Elena, even (and especially) when they touch on aspects of Elena’s life. Whether she does this out of love or rivalry is left to the reader to decide. While reading The Story of the Lost Child, I found myself focusing on Ferrante’s literary techniques; the plot carried me along but I was alert to the way the story was being told. For example, the Neapolitan Novels are narrated by Elena, who has proven to be somewhat unreliable. She constantly questions herself, fails to spot signs of trouble or distress in others, and often grossly misinterprets the behavior of those around her. Her narrative is more focused on telling Lila’s story than on making herself look good; Elena’s selfish acts are presented in a matter-of-fact way as if she cannot see the potential consequences of her behavior. Ferrante also repeatedly shows the good and bad sides of Lila and Elena and the ways that “good” events can have “bad” consequences, and vice versa. Sometimes she revisits a situation from a different vantage point in order to shed new light on it; for example, the “lost child” of the title, a very emotional moment in the novel, became even more so when seen from a different angle. The ending also brought surprises, making me want to re-read the series from the beginning for new details and insights. I love it when that happens and just might do so someday.
    • 5/5
      The Story of the Lost Child is the final of the Neapolitan Novels, a marvelous tetralogy by Elena Ferrante that tells the decades long story of a female friendship. Through these four novels, Elena Ferrante has told the life story of Elena (Lenú) Greco and Raffaella (Lina) Cerullo from their childhood to old age and through those sixty some years, she also told the story of their neighbors, of Naples, and of Italy.Elena Greco is the narrator, telling you the story of her life-long relationship with Lina. The first novel began when the final novel finishes, with Lina disappearing and Elena not being terribly worried about it. In more than one way, this fourth novel brings us back to the first, closing the circle on this sixty year friendship between Elena and Lina.Like the other three novels in this series, the writing is simple, direct and confessional. Ferrante is not trying to write epigrammatic sentences or highly stylized paragraphs that will be copied and pasted onto pretty pictures and shared in memes for the rest of the digital era. She is a naturalistic writer, her words seem like a conversation sometimes with the reader and sometimes with herself. Taken as a whole, this tetralogy is an amazing accomplishment, but even more stunning is the ability of each work to stand alone, a cohesive story in itself.Elena and Lila are fascinating. Two brilliant women, Elena, the well-educated one, is a successful novelist and political thinker who writes opinion pieces, is on television discussion panels and active in literary and political circles of the elite. Lila never went past fifth grade, married young, worked in brutalizing jobs and struggled for years for self-determination and independence and dignity. And yet, Elena always seems to envy Lila and we can understand why. Lila has a life force that burns bright – with ambition, pride, anger, justice, passion. She is always living. Elena often finds inspiration in Lila’s ideas, too, though sometimes it seems that Lila thinks and Elena writes.And Lila envies Elena sometimes, while also admiring her, pitying her, and feeling contempt for her. The one thing that they don’t feel for each other is indifference and their life is a constant orbit, sometimes closers, sometimes far apart.This last novel tells of their mid life and later years. We learn of the great tragedy that is mentioned in this first novel and see the connections that Elena makes with that past. This life is as tumultuous and violent as their younger years, Naples is just as corrupt and it seems that everything is an endlessly repeating cycle.5pawsI enthusiastically recommend the entire series. Many series begin strong and peter out by the end, but this feels like it was really just one book, written all of one piece, and then just broken up into four in order not to intimidate us from reading it. I love these two women and will miss them now the book is done. I want more.
    • 5/5
      It's hard to imagine that Elena Ferrante could surpass the gut-wrenching impact of My Brilliant Friend. But by the time this novel reached the point where I understood the title, it did.As a whole, this four-novel series, with its two unforgettable main characters, is an achievement that should be shouted from the rooftops. Elena Ferrante is a wonderful writer.
    • 5/5
      Has anyone noticed that this volume, more than any of the previous installments, is a meta-novel? I've awaited the fourth volume with some impatience, and delayed reading it by re-reading the third volume. The story rushes through like a fast-moving stream, in a similar way to the earlier volumes, but here I found that the narrative is often mediated through the prism of writing about it. The story of the lost child is doubly distanced through Friendship, the novel within the novel - or rather the act of writing the novel within the novel, because we get it in a summary form, and as much is said about the process of writing as about its contents. I have increasingly had the feeling of mise-en-abime, like in that Escher drawing in which a hand is drawing a hand which is drawing that first hand, so that the longer you look the less you're certain which hand started the drawing, and you know at the same time that there is a third hand, invisible, that drew all this in the first place. Beneath the surface of a traditional narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end, Ferrante's novel is, well, quite novel, quite innovative. I have to admit that the passages I enjoyed the most were moments where the writing becomes self-reflexive. That said, I also got the sense that portions of the novel were written in a hurry: very well written, but as if with the desire to complete the series as soon as possible. However, having now read twice volumes 1 through 3, I look forward to seeing how this last volume stands up to re-reading ... when I've gone long enough with Ferrante and feel the need to reread her. Because, I have to admit, I feel quite at home in her novels and in her prose.
    • 5/5
      Ah, the last book. Sorry to see the end. I do keep thinking Ferrante, whoever she really is, wrote all four books to Lila, because Lila really did disappear. If she comes back, maybe we'll get another book!
    • 5/5
      I found Ferrante's quartet a sophisticated and psychologically elegant Bildungsroman of two women whose lives are inextricably entwined for over 60 years beginning with their childhood in the 1950s. In an act of love (or, perhaps revenge), Elena Greco sits down to write the life story of Lila Cerullo, who has disappeared. Lila is overdoing it as usual, I thought.She was expanding the concept of trace out of all proportion. She wanted not only to disappear herself, now, at the age of sixty-six, but also to eliminate the entire life that she had left behind.I was really angry.We'll see who wins this time, I said to myself. I turned on the computer and began to write -- all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory.The poor, working-class neighborhood in Naples in which the girls grew up, one rife with corruption and nearly incestuous family ties, is a kind of collective antagonist to Lila and Elena's struggle to survive and succeed in the tumultuous last half of the 20th century. Ferrante plays with warring philosophies and ideologies, class conflict, Italian politics, the student and worker protests of the the 1960s and 70s, the sexual revolution, the rise of feminism, the sea-change in economy and work brought about by the introduction of computers as integral aspects of the friendship and competition between Lila and Elena. The reader sympathizes first with one, and then the other, but rarely both at the same time, as their lives follow very different paths, that remain tangled together.Ferrante's Neapolitan series is a great read, and I expect the ideas and memories generated will remain with me for a long time.
    • 4/5
      Once again, Elena Ferrante brings the intimate friendship of her principle characters, Elena and Lila, to life, though much of what occurs in this final novel in her Neapolitan series is harmful to their friendship. Elena rushes into her relationship with Nino Sarratore, all the the while trying to suppress her suspicion of Lila’s disapproval. Indeed, much of what Elena does and thinks and even writes in her growing career as a novelist and intellectual is shaped and conditioned either by Lila’s explicit critique or by Elena’s imagined version of what Lila might say. And so Elena acts both for and against her childhood friend, desperate to attain some form of autonomy even whilst she foregoes it in her anxiety. Elena has moved back to Naples, though not the old neighbourhood, with her two daughters. And it is motherhood comes to dominate the themes here as first Elena and then Lila herself become pregnant. Their shared condition is emblematic of just how entwined their lives have been throughout whether they were conscious of it or not.Eventually Elena moves with her now three daughters into the flat above Lila’s in the old neighbourhood. Here the ties with the past are strong. But so too are the ties with elements from the earlier three novels. Ferrante weaves the stories together so tightly that everything in the current novel feels as though it might have been there in the very first one, just hidden around a corner. The lives of Elena and Lila, their lovers and children, and their friends from the old neighbourhood breathe with fire. And once that fire catches you, it is nearly impossible to put the book down.Ferrante’s Elena narrates the whole of this volume but she is not spared. Even when she is most critical of her friend, the reader sees through her fears to the self-doubt at its root. While not an unreliable narrator, we come to see her view as slanted, as given to jealousy and pettiness as any other, and so she becomes, unsympathetically, even more believable. It is a remarkable balancing act. By the end, I found myself reading ever more slowly, fearing with each page the inevitably loss of this brilliant friendship. Fortunately, I can start again almost immediately, which is surely one of the great blessings of novels as fine as these. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      I just finished this, the last Neapolitan novel, having doled it out to myself a few chapters a night to make it last as long as possible. But the last 100 pages I raced through, desperate to see a conclusion to the mystery disappearance described at the beginning of Brilliant Friend. I feel drained and bereft. Was the ending a cheat, a contrivance, a sop to the lit crits, or was it perfect? All these, I suppose. For throughout, Ferrante has been demonstrating the illusory and fleeting nature of our strongest convictions and analyses of our lives and the lives of those we think we know, and the refusal of life to conform to tidy explanations and endings. I'm reminded on some levels of the great Visconti film, Rocco and His Brothers, which graphically illustrates some similar themes. These books are a phenomenal achievement, meriting for once the enormous acclaim they have received. They are the strongest representation of lifelong female friendship and the ties that transcend even motherhood that I have ever read - in fact, I can't think of anyone else who has attempted this, and the background of Italian life and politics ground the story without losing its universal application. Two formidable, unforgettable female main characters, a host of minor memorable ones, 4 page-turning novels that etch themselves on your brain. Genius? Very possibly.
    • 5/5
      I would go back to school to learn Italian just to read these books in their original language. The translations are excellent (moments of sloppiness in this last one), but I would like to squeeze out every drop of the vitality they contain.
    • 4/5
      I recently completed The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth (and final) book in what has become known as the purposely-mysterious Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Series. The books explore the decades long friendship between two Italian women who met as children in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Naples. My Brilliant Friend, first published in 2012, seemed to come from nowhere as it became a 2015 bestseller in, I suppose, anticipation of the publication later in the year of the fourth book in the series, The Story of the Lost Child. Between these two came 2013’s The Story of a New Name and 2014’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.With the exception of a few brief moments in the books during which Elena, the book’s narrator, addresses the reader about her current feelings regarding her old friend Lila, the books offer a chronologically linear progression of the pair’s more than fifty-year relationship. Seldom has a relationship between literary characters been more deeply explored than this one. Each book in the series comes in at around 400 pages, but the Neapolitan Series is easier to read than one might imagine. My Brilliant Friend, beginning as it does (after a brief word from the sixtyish Elena) when its two chief characters are preschoolers, is both charming and intriguing - and when it ends, some four hundred or so pages later, most readers will want to know more. And Elena Ferrante has a lot more to say about Elena, Lila, their working class families, their friends, their lovers, their children, and the lives the two little girls will live during the next six decades. Bottom line, this is a fictional study of the kind of longtime friendship that can shape – for good or for bad - a person’s entire life. Even as children, Elena and Lila recognized in each other the best that their neighborhood had to offer. They were among the very brightest in their local school, they were often the most adventurous, and neither was much willing to put up with the foolishness of those around them. They simply could not imagine staying in the neighborhood forever, and they looked forward to the time when they could finally begin living their real lives.It would not, however, be easy for either of them to make their escape from the neighborhood. Elena and Lila were, as it turns out, as much rivals as they were friends. At times, it can even be said that they were more rival than friend to each other. Their competitiveness drove each of them to achieve more than likely would have been possible if they had never met, but it may have been at too great a cost for them to enjoy what they achieved. Only they can answer that question.Elena and Lila are two of the most memorable characters I have encountered in a long time, and their often-tragic relationship leaves the reader with a lot to ponder about life, fate, and trying to go home again after living in a bigger world.
    • 5/5
      What an astonishing achievement this series of books is.
    • 5/5
      The book is excellent, the quality of the audio book however not. It skips chapters all the time and I had to go back manually.
    • 5/5
      One of a 4 book set that I love. More than words can convey, this set of books is very important. The importance lie in the way that she views friendship and the way that women are perceived and how they perceive themselves. In addition this authors brilliance can be conveyed in the way she describes Naples and how that can reflect the whole world.