Reviews

Storia della bambina perduta by Elena Ferrante

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leajyshi's review against another edition

5.0

I am fascinated by the fact that this story is really a story about vanishing: erasing things, the senselessness of things, disappearance, disintegration, dissolving boundaries. (I'm thinking of Bachmann's Malina, at the end of which the narrator vanishes into the wall - "it was murder", just like that, short and abrupt, then nothing. I'm thinking of something I wrote more than a year ago - "she was nobody's wife, nobody's daughter, nobody's citizen, nobody's poet, smouldering in silence for madness, for disintegration, for offence, always unfazed, always afraid" - and how that line in particular came to me unstoppably in the dark. I'm thinking of this article from Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2016/03/the-vanishing-act. I'm thinking of Ferrante's own total anonymity, total excision of the life that orchestrates the literature, and what that could possibly, possibly mean, in a book that speaks of writing as a tool to win the "petty battle for social status", or as a vindictive weapon against those who do harm - absolute opposites of vanishing.) I wonder at how the self is annihilated in the face of obscurity, confusion and violence, and how, paradoxically, writing tries to achieve that annihilation and chaos, while containing things in a form that by its nature refuses to let the boundaries dissolve.

The previous three books, especially the first two, have cracks in them through which horror and complete disorder are glimpsed - that episode on the beach at night in Ischia comes to mind - and those moments feel like Lila's writing, or rather Elena's idea of the ideal sort of writing, the urgent, imperative, lucid kind, with a frightening purity that is utterly (mostly) unachievable. This book, however, truly felt like Elena, and Elena alone. It's analytical, honest, confessional as usual, but with a steady, solid language that tells things as they are, connects distant events in a tangle of premonitions, symbols, meaning. The other books were slower, the way things just seem to happen more slowly, and details take on distended proportions, when you're a child, but in this one events pass and pass and hurtle towards obscurity. The brutality of its candour, its unaesthetic bareness, that worn-out confusion about the world and old age and writing, made me very uncomfortable, and it was exactly what I needed, between all those beautifully experimental and existential novels that I like to read so much. It simultaneously made me despair at the futility, the complexity of human closeness and the incomprehensibility of the social space we inhabit despite lifelong attempts to understand or change it, and at the same time made me want to write torrentially and intensely, to learn, to subvert, most of all to give form to things - it took me quite some time to admit that this is an even more fearsome task than disintegration. I was obsessed with this book, it filled up my head while I was reading it, but I can’t say I liked it, exactly. It's inconsolable, it does not satisfy a single one of its desires or rages or loves. Which is brilliant.

I read this final volume in Naples. I came to Naples - why not, it’s true - because of these books, or at least partially. (They are ferociously close to my heart in a way different from my other favourite books.) I suppose I've always felt an irresistible attraction to a city whose relationship with the narrator felt so much like the one I have with the city I grew up in and then left. Elena, too, is a character unlike any other I've encountered in literature, she explains me to myself in a way that petrifies me sometimes, but I love her all the same. When this city emerged from the shimmer of imagination to envelop me in its noise and urgency and fierce life and still withheld the answers (to what?), it felt like I had settled a score. When

Spoiler

the dolls returned to Elena

at the end of the book I felt like weeping. Then I didn't anymore.