The structure may owe something of its freedom to modernism, but Ferrante’s prose, perfectly translated by Ann Goldstein, is blunt and direct, the tumble of events worthy of the most lurid potboiler. “We’ll see who wins this time,” she thinks, as she begins to set down their story. She has vanished from Naples along with all her possessions, fulfilling a decades-old desire “to disappear without leaving a trace.” Lenù is infuriated by Lila’s attempt to eradicate their shared past and deny the significance of a life that has been a shadow sibling to her own climb into the middle class as a successful writer and feminist pundit. Elena Greco, known as Lenù, revisits those days, for which she has no nostalgia, provoked by her friend Lila (full name Raffaella Cerullo). My Brilliant Friend (2012) takes place during the 1950s, as the 66-year-old narrator looks back on her childhood in a violent, impoverished Neapolitan neighborhood. Yet her books are utterly contemporary, impossible to imagine before the feminist revolution encouraged women to write openly of their conflicted feelings about men, motherhood, and ambition and its attendant anxieties. Now published in English by Europa Editions, Ferrante’s unflinching anatomization of the complicated friendship across 60 years of two girls from Naples is set against a landscape of social upheaval counterpointed by the unyielding forces of the status quo. Reading The Story of the Lost Child, the final work of Elena Ferrante’s extraordinary quartet of Neapolitan novels, I was swept away as I haven’t been since I first read the great Victorians and Russians.
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