They practically can’t walk to the corner without running into someone they’ve slept with or beaten up.īut no two characters are more bound together than Lila, the shoemaker’s daughter, and Lena, the porter’s daughter. All these people are fantastically enmeshed. Ferrante supplies a dramatis personae at the beginning of the first volume-the shoemaker’s family, the Cerullos, Fernando, Nunzia, Lila, and Rino the mad widow’s family, the Cappuccios, Melina (the widow), Ada, and Antonio the grocer’s family, the Carraccis, Don Achille, Maria, Stefano, Pinuccia, and Alfonso the train conductor’s family, the Sarratores, Donato, Lidia, Nino, Marisa, et al.-and, apart from births and deaths, the cast hasn’t changed much by the fourth volume. Most of its characters come from a single cluster of working-poor families living in a noisy, hot slum on the outskirts of Naples between 19. Then she goes to her bedroom and packs the suitcase she will take when, a few days later, she drops the girls off with a neighbor, says she’ll be back shortly, and leaves for the train station.įerrante’s Neapolitan series, unlike other long historical novels we might compare it with (“Buddenbrooks,” “Remembrance of Things Past”), does not go to a lot of trouble to span generations or social classes. “I knelt down, I held them around the waist, I said: All right, I won’t go, you are my children, I’ll stay with you.” This calms them down. The little girls scream and weep and hang onto her skirt, begging her not to go. A few paragraphs into Elena Ferrante’s new novel, “The Story of the Lost Child,” the final volume of the writer’s so-called Neapolitan tetralogy-the first three volumes are “My Brilliant Friend,” “The Story of a New Name,” and “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay”-Lena, the narrator, says that now we’re coming to “the most painful part of the story.” Really? It’s going to get worse? When we last saw Lena, she was walking out on a decent husband and two daughters to run off with a man who we know is going to betray her.
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