It was the event that many readers were waiting for in 2018: the final volume of the Neapolitan saga of Elena Ferrante, the mystery writer that everyone has been talking about for three years, The Lost Child is unsurprisingly in the best sellers of this beginning of the year. A look back at a successful tetralogy.
The foundations of friendship
Launched in 2011 in Italy, this Neapolitan saga of love and friendship entitled "L'amica geniale" in its original version has been an unprecedented success worldwide. Elena, while still in primary school, crosses paths with Raffaella, who will become Lila, a brilliant but wild, even indomitable schoolgirl. The two little girls form a turbulent friendship , which we will follow throughout the saga in an Italy that is struggling to rebuild itself after the war. We follow the evolution of their Neapolitan neighborhood gangrenous by the Camorra, daily life is carefully depicted, organized around the family, governed by an implacable patriarchy, where women and girls have a hard time existing, and escaping submission to the father, even to the brothers. Because little girls always have a lot of imagination (and these two especially!), Lila invents a thousand trials, each more creative than the last, to test Lenu's friendship.
"She had what I lacked and vice versa, in a perpetual game of exchanges and reversals which, sometimes in joy, sometimes in suffering, made us indispensable to each other. »
The discovery of femininity
"The New Name " tells the story of adolescence and the beginning of the romantic difficulties encountered by the two young girls. While the first volume focused on the childhood and adolescence of the two young friends, its sequel traces the hard learning of life, according to roads that will soon separate them over their thwarted passions. If Lila the rebel, the skinned alive, the gifted, must quickly abandon school to help her shoemaker father, Elena, on the other hand, supported by her teacher, continues and emancipates herself through studies.Thanks to her perseverance and her academic curiosity, the heroine gradually becomes aware of her finesse of mind and her intellectual abilities. Lila, always so obstinate in her goals, once again leads Lenu into her adventures that distance her from Nino, her lifelong love. Driven since childhood by a feeling of inferiority vis-à-vis her greatest friend, the heroine discovers in this volume her own femininity, as well as the relationships of desire that can arise with men.
"We grew up thinking that a stranger should not even touch us while a parent, fiancé or husband could slap us whenever they wanted, out of love, to educate us or re-educate us. »
In search of freedom
At the beginning of The One Who Runs and The One Who Remains, we are on the threshold of the 1970s, and it seems that the friendship between Elena and Lila has shattered. Geographically and sentimentally distant, the two women now have diametrically opposed trajectories, even if their common desire for freedom remains as strong and as difficult to obtain.The two women are now in their thirties, at the age of the blaze of which they already perceive the slow extinction to come. The success of "the one who flies" is no more obvious than the failure of "the one who remains".Elena has become a writer, and she struggles to shine in all areas, the life of a married woman, her role as a mother, and Nino, her great love, who appears all smiles when she was no longer waiting for him! The one who has always doubted herself so much must now assert herself and show what she has in store, because she has big decisions to make in this volume 3 and her freedom is at stake.
"Maybe there is something wrong with this desire that men have to do our education. At that time, I was just a little girl and I didn't realize that, in her desire to transform me, there was proof that she didn't like me as I was. He wanted me to be another or, more accurately, he did not desire a woman, period, but the woman he imagined he could be if he had been a woman. »
The Lost Child
Following controversial and difficult life choices, Elena finds herself confronted with the harshness of the life of a single mother and writer, madly in love with a fickle man.
"At the thought of harming him and not seeing him again, it was as if I was suddenly "fading" and in pain: the free and cultured woman lost her petals, detaching herself from the woman-mother, the woman-mother distanced herself from the woman-mistress and the woman-mistress with the enraged shrew, and all seemed to leave with the wind… I was unable to be "my" own model, I did not know how to give myself consistency, I no longer had a base from which, from the neighborhood, to project myself towards the world: I was only a pile of rubbish. »
In order to fully assume herself as an independent woman, Lenu decides to return to live in Naples, in the neighborhood where she grew up, to find a certain atmosphere that inspires her. At the same time, she sees very close people disappear from her entourage, whom the reader has always known, like her. This return to her roots is marked as a real turning point in the friendship that binds her to Lila, essential to her success and fulfillment.
If the previous volumes also followed a historical framework that allowed us to immerse ourselves in Italy in the 60s and 70s, this last volume is the most "committed" in terms of feminism and politics. Through the eyes of a child, we did not necessarily distinguish "the bad guys". Here, it is a forty-year-old woman marked by her past who relates the sad reality of Neapolitan "thugs"; Whether they were camorrists, deputies, jurists or professors, all these men sullied the Italian society in which it had so much difficulty to emancipate itself.
