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nickartrip102 's review for:
The Lost Daughter
by Elena Ferrante
”The secret rage I harbored against myself I turned on her.”
I plucked The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante from my TBR Tupperware container and I was immediately thrilled when I saw the title and author on the slip of paper. Ferrante’s work has previously moved me in ways that I couldn’t imagine, so I was eager to climb back into one of her novels. Leda’s early admission of the liberty she felt once her daughter’s moved to Canada to live with her ex-husband set the tone for the novel, and also felt very similar. It’s easy to draw a comparison between this novel and Ferrante’s other works, but it seems to possess its own unique spirit. In this story we follow Leda, a forty-seven year English professor, who becomes fixated on a Neapolitan family (but primarily a young mother, Nina) she encounters while vacationing on the beach.
I love the way Ferrante is able to capture such an intense interior dialogue. Her approaches to what it means to be a mother or to be a daughter are raw and honest, and while these are realms that I don’t inhabit, Ferrante’s strength is forcing you to recognize and acknowledge these existences in all of their complexities. With her stories, she isn’t afraid to create a bruise and then spend the entirety of the work pressing against that bruise. She also isn’t afraid to make her characters harsh and seemingly unlikable. In the character of Leda I quickly identified the same issues I initially had with Elena in the Neapolitan Quartet. Her superiority often causes her to come across as abrasive and judgmental, but that is only a surface reading and perhaps a reflection of my own blind spots.
Leda’s expression of pleasure at the liberty she feels from the absence of her daughters is held in constant tension with the guilt she feels. Not much happens in this story, but not much needs to. As Leda encounters new sights and people she makes associations, through these associations memories and Leda’s character are revealed. The Lost Daughter works as an excellent character study and raises important questions about the suffocation of motherhood with carefully crafted juxtapositions that don’t feel forced or overwritten. The story allows the characters to be defined against one another, while avoiding any sort of sweeping judgment (narratively, at least — Leda is full of judgment.) Even as Leda seeks to shed her identity as a mother and disrupt the relationships around her, maternal ambivalence (and occasionally rejection) remain the central struggle of the novel (with a side dish of aging and sexuality!)
There’s an undercurrent of violence throughout the novel that also drives you to push through the pages. It is hinted that Nina’s husband is a bad man, although we never see any direct evidence of this except perhaps for some terse words exchanged at the beach (but even these we aren’t privy to.) Leda has her own “attack” and there were moments I was genuinely concerned the story could take a dark turn. Wounding imagery is repeated throughout the story and reinforced in the conclusion in a way that I cannot get out of my mind. I may not like her, but I want Leda to be okay. I want her wounds to be healed.
I loved this book. Leda isn’t someone you want to befriend, but she is someone who not only captures your attention, but seems to demand it as well. She is an unreliable narrator and it is often easy to get lost in her observations without considering what they say about her, even as she turns the magnifying glass on her own life and experiences. The symbolism with the doll and Leda’s theft is layered and rich, but I found myself reflecting more on the tension between escape and containment within the text. Like the doll we can be loved, cared for, stolen, cleaned, but we’ll still be full of that brown stuff.
I plucked The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante from my TBR Tupperware container and I was immediately thrilled when I saw the title and author on the slip of paper. Ferrante’s work has previously moved me in ways that I couldn’t imagine, so I was eager to climb back into one of her novels. Leda’s early admission of the liberty she felt once her daughter’s moved to Canada to live with her ex-husband set the tone for the novel, and also felt very similar. It’s easy to draw a comparison between this novel and Ferrante’s other works, but it seems to possess its own unique spirit. In this story we follow Leda, a forty-seven year English professor, who becomes fixated on a Neapolitan family (but primarily a young mother, Nina) she encounters while vacationing on the beach.
I love the way Ferrante is able to capture such an intense interior dialogue. Her approaches to what it means to be a mother or to be a daughter are raw and honest, and while these are realms that I don’t inhabit, Ferrante’s strength is forcing you to recognize and acknowledge these existences in all of their complexities. With her stories, she isn’t afraid to create a bruise and then spend the entirety of the work pressing against that bruise. She also isn’t afraid to make her characters harsh and seemingly unlikable. In the character of Leda I quickly identified the same issues I initially had with Elena in the Neapolitan Quartet. Her superiority often causes her to come across as abrasive and judgmental, but that is only a surface reading and perhaps a reflection of my own blind spots.
Leda’s expression of pleasure at the liberty she feels from the absence of her daughters is held in constant tension with the guilt she feels. Not much happens in this story, but not much needs to. As Leda encounters new sights and people she makes associations, through these associations memories and Leda’s character are revealed. The Lost Daughter works as an excellent character study and raises important questions about the suffocation of motherhood with carefully crafted juxtapositions that don’t feel forced or overwritten. The story allows the characters to be defined against one another, while avoiding any sort of sweeping judgment (narratively, at least — Leda is full of judgment.) Even as Leda seeks to shed her identity as a mother and disrupt the relationships around her, maternal ambivalence (and occasionally rejection) remain the central struggle of the novel (with a side dish of aging and sexuality!)
There’s an undercurrent of violence throughout the novel that also drives you to push through the pages. It is hinted that Nina’s husband is a bad man, although we never see any direct evidence of this except perhaps for some terse words exchanged at the beach (but even these we aren’t privy to.) Leda has her own “attack” and there were moments I was genuinely concerned the story could take a dark turn. Wounding imagery is repeated throughout the story and reinforced in the conclusion in a way that I cannot get out of my mind. I may not like her, but I want Leda to be okay. I want her wounds to be healed.
I loved this book. Leda isn’t someone you want to befriend, but she is someone who not only captures your attention, but seems to demand it as well. She is an unreliable narrator and it is often easy to get lost in her observations without considering what they say about her, even as she turns the magnifying glass on her own life and experiences. The symbolism with the doll and Leda’s theft is layered and rich, but I found myself reflecting more on the tension between escape and containment within the text. Like the doll we can be loved, cared for, stolen, cleaned, but we’ll still be full of that brown stuff.