The story of the lost child

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The story of the lost child (original title: Storia della bambina perduta ) is the fourth and last volume of the novel cycle by Elena Ferrante, known in German-speaking countries as the Neapolitan saga . It was published in the Italian original in 2014 and in the German translation by Karin Krieger in 2018 . In 2016 he was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize .

The final volume of the tetralogy contains the eponymous story as well as “The Story of Bad Blood”, thus combining - like the first part - two stages of life in one book: “Reife” and “Age”. Starting in the late seventies of the last century, they extend over more than three decades; Around half of them live the two protagonists, Elena Greco and Raffaela (Lila) Cerullo, as close to each other as never before and are also connected through the birth of two girls, who they give birth almost simultaneously when they are almost 40.

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Via Tasso in the relatively posh Vomero district : this is where Elena lived with her daughters when she returned to Naples .
Naples National Library : This is where Lila spends whole days studying her hometown.

After traveling to Montpellier with Nino, Elena is determined to leave Pietro for him. At the same time she tries to establish herself as a writer. This makes your life more exciting, but also less constant; This affects her relationship with her daughters, who at times grow up with their in-laws in Genoa . It took three years for Elena to separate from Pietro by mutual agreement. Before she returns to Naples to be closer to Nino, Lila urgently warns her of his unreliability: Despite promises to the contrary, he has by no means taken the same step as her, the break with his family. But not even Nino's admission that he has no plans to do so and that he will soon be a father again does not deter Elena. Resigned, she decides to accept him for who he is. Together with her daughters, she moves into an apartment financed by Nino in Vomero , one of the upmarket areas of Naples. Soon afterwards she becomes pregnant, at the same time as Lila, who is expecting a child from Enzo. At the beginning of 1981 they both gave birth to a girl and named her after their mothers: Nunziatina (Tina) Cerullo and Immacolata (Imma) Greco.

One day Elena catches Nino in red-handed flinging with her housekeeper. Now she also believes Lila's accusations that he is notoriously cheating and even stalked her again. Elena breaks up with him. As a single mother of three children, the pressure on her becomes even greater, logistically and financially. The realization of a third book, which she promised her publisher, is less of a thought than ever. When he urged, she sent him an older manuscript without further ado, in the firm expectation that it would be rejected. Lila's offer to move into a vacant apartment directly through her, she accepts, as welcome as it is, reluctantly, as it means returning to the place she had wanted to leave forever: her Rione .

Lila, who had only left there for a short time and by necessity, changed him noticeably. Still working with Enzo in the computer industry, the Camorra , personified by the Solara brothers, seriously competes with her and is regarded as a bearer of hope, as she ensures “clean” jobs instead of the drug deals that are dominated by the Solaras and in them Elena's brothers are also involved. Lila now has her working hours as she likes, which gives her more space to look after the children, not least the Elenas. Their latest book is unexpectedly successful, but also leads to a trial of strength with fatal long-term consequences: First, a journalist uses the barely veiled information in the book for a revelatory story that reveals the illegal machinations of the Solaras, which they counter with a lawsuit, for which they use means Bringing a third person to blackmail. When Michele Solara also physically attacks Lila, she strikes back by “unpacking” for her part and recording all incriminating material in a newspaper article written together with Elena. Resigned to the fact that she cannot do anything with it, Elena wants to prevent its publication at the last second, but Lila has already arranged this - under her, Elena's, more famous name.

Elena's emotional state is no less ambivalent when she leaves her daughters in Lila's care. Sometimes she is grateful and relieved, sometimes offended by the loss of authority. She is particularly concerned about the development of her youngest, Imma, who grows up almost like a sister to Lila's daughter Tina, but is "second" in every respect and seems to suffer as much as she did decades ago. Since the little one is also bullied by her much older half-sisters - she is “not an Airota” - Elena hopes that she will get better by giving her father back to her, even if only as an occasional visitor. Nino agrees. After a brief appearance in Elena's apartment, during which he pays more attention to his daughter than usual, he invites all of the children to a little excursion. When Elena joins them, Lila and Enzo are also present, but one child is missing - Tina.

Tina's mysterious disappearance on September 16, 1984 remains unsolved. Some believe in the rumor of a mysterious accident truck, Enzo in a kidnapping by the Solara brothers (who die in an assassination attempt two years later), and Lila, in turn, in a mix-up - the kidnappers were actually after Elena's child. The hope of Tina's return, never completely fading, but never being redeemed, made Lila embittered and aged prematurely in the following years. In the Rione it is now more likely to be avoided and feared. Your relationship with Enzo falls apart. For days she completely submerges and discovers a new passion with which she also infects Imma at times - exploring her hometown of Naples. Elena tries not to lose contact with her and is otherwise fully occupied as a writer and mother. Her daughters are drawn to their fathers: Imma glorifies Nino, who as a parliamentarian is opportunistically moving to the right, to her idol; Dede and Elsa follow Pietro to the USA when they start their studies.

In the summer of 1995 Elena left Naples for good to take over the management of a small, respected publishing house in Turin . A decade later, she was ousted from the post, fell into a crisis of meaning as a writer and freed herself from it with the story A Friendship . Over the years she expects from Lila a much more original work, in which she connects Naples with her lost daughter Tina. When Elena has just finished this book, which she began after Lila's disappearance, a package from her lifelong friend indeed arrives: It contains the two dolls from their childhood together, believed to be lost.

interpretation

characters

With the introduction of the IBM 5120 computer , Lila and Enzo set up their own business and set up their own company, Basic Sight .
The Ponte Isabella in Turin , where Elena has lived with Imma since 1995.

As expected, in most of the reviews of Volume 4, the final judgments about both protagonists, the girlfriends Elena and Lila, are at the top. Their relationship, which is characterized by attraction and rivalry, is characterized several times as a “ complementary relationship”, as that of a duo, in which both characters can very well be understood as one, as “ dialectical facets of one and the same person”. Text passages from the novel serve as evidence for this, so Elena's statement: “It is always about the two of us, about her, who wants me to give what her nature and circumstances have prevented her from giving, and about me, who it does not succeed in giving what it demands. "

Ferrante also describes in an interview what connects the two, based on what, from her point of view, essentially distinguishes them: While Elena uses her will and mental powers with a view to her future, Lila is focused on the present; she tries to master what happens to her with her natural ingenuity, but never fully exhausts her potential - except perhaps with regard to the "only long-term project" that Lila is "really enthusiastic about": the life of her friend.

The fact that Elena - and thus also the reader - can never quite see through where and to what extent Lila influences, is one of the tension moments of the novel. In Volumes 3 and 4, the computer functions as the symbol of this thing . Through Enzo, Lila came into contact with IT technology when it was still in its infancy and, in the manner typical of her, quickly turned into a specialist; When the PC came up a decade later , she gave Elena one of the disused devices, which she, as an author, immediately uses with enthusiasm - with the restriction that Lila threatens to delete her texts if Elena writes about her. With the help of a computer and her possible ability to hack foreign systems, Lila has found a way to control or even manipulate the lyrics (and if you will, the thoughts) of her friend - a fact that Elena's authorship of the band 3 and 4 is just as unsafe as that of volumes 1 and 2 .

The question of whether Lila has such abilities and makes use of them leaves the novel open. At one point or another he gives information about what Elena suspects and expects on her part: “I don't know what Lila really thought about my behavior as a mother. She is the only one who could tell this, if she actually managed to penetrate this long chain of words, to change my text, to cleverly insert missing links, to discreetly remove others, to do more than I would like, To tell about myself more than I can tell. I've longed for her to interfere, have wanted her since I started writing our story. "

The main character among the minor characters, based on volume 4 as well as on the novel as a whole, is Nino Sarratore: He is the man for whom both Elena and Lila compete at times and with whom they have an "affair", which is the catalyst for the dissolution of their marriage - but not his own; he is (like his father, whom he despised for it at a young age) a notorious conqueror, but also a notoriously every decision and (fatherly) responsibility fugitive; just as notoriously, he amalgamates his personal conquests with speculations on social advantages (from Elena's point of view, his love for Lila was the only one on which he was not calculating); and finally, as a writer and politician, he is more concerned with validity than with the cause. As a “windy lover and agile intellectual”, Nino, according to one reviewer, “exemplifies Italy's political swaying”. Ferrante herself classifies him as a “type” she knows well: as a “man of class” who combines solid education and a certain intelligence with superficiality - the quality that Lila despises as the worst of all.

Themes and motifs

Naples

After Elena only experienced her hometown Naples as a visitor for a decade and a half, she returned there in her mid-30s - out of love not for her, but for Nino, her youthful crush. The separation from him (and his financial donations) takes her one step back: in her Rione , where she now spends another decade and a half next to Lila. Of course, she also has to deal with her city during this time - even if she tries to keep it at a distance and never really feels at home. Irritated but also curious, she pursues Lila's late awakening passion to explore Naples, which at times also infects her youngest daughter Imma. What is purple up to? Is she trying to find her missing daughter Tina? Is she preparing her own disappearance? Is it boredom? Or fear - fear and preparedness for the next natural disaster?

Completely unprepared, Lila and Elena, both pregnant at the time, were hit by the earthquake on November 23, 1980 , the worst natural disaster in Italian post-war history. At the moment of the outbreak, there are two of them in one room and completely dependent on each other. One of them really needs this assistance and pleads for it - Lila. Elena is deeply insecure. The transformation that happens to her friend terrifies her more than the destruction of the city. What Lila goes through and changes beyond recognition - to a woman who "seemed to come straight from the interior of the earth" - is a state of "dissolution". Lila herself calls him that, has been haunted by him in spurts since she was 14, and experiences how not only things “dissolve”, but also people, including herself. In Elena's perception, the earthquake night brings an elementary difference between her and Lila even more clearly to the light: While for her, even in an extreme situation like this, the world around her still exists, “[for Lila] chaos seemed to be the only truth and she - the active, the brave - erased horrified, became nothing ”.

Karin Krieger , the German translator, draws attention in this context to the special location of Naples - “sandwiched like an amphitheater by the sea between two volcanoes” - and emphasizes that they are “bad” volcanoes and not just Vesuvius , but also the solfatara belonging to the Phlegraean Fields , which makes the feeling of insecurity and threat for the residents permanent. Stefan Kister, quoting the first-person narrator Elena, refers to another peculiarity of this big city: "Naples was the European metropolis in which confidence in technology and science, in economic progress, in the favor of nature, in history, which inevitably developed for the better, and in the democracy with the greatest clarity and very early had proven to be completely unfounded. ”On one of the Naples clichés - that the city also has a special position in terms of violence - Ferrante, according to his own admission, believed myself for a long time; today, she says, she has the impression that “the whole world is Naples”, which means that Naples can at least be credited with “that it has never veiled itself”.

Disappear

With the motif of the disappearance (by Lila) the novel is opened in the prologue and concluded in the epilogue with a countermovement (the lost dolls reappear). It closely links the last volume with the first (through the disappearance of the dolls and a child), but also plays an important role in the other two. Semantically similar words that are important for the narrative such as “lose”, “leave”, “dissolve” or “delete” are close to “disappear” - and contrast with “remain” and “preserve”. Last but not least, the final volume offers an indirect justification for Ferrante's decision to disappear behind her work as a private person: She describes the life of her alter ego Elena Greco as a prominent author as one that she apparently rejects for herself: rushed by appointments, through Homestories exposed, distorted, used or even endangered.

The title of Volume 4, The Story of the Lost Child , also heralds the central motif. The reader already knows from the previous volumes that as he reads it gradually becomes more meaningful than the obvious one. Here is the obvious reference to Lila's daughter Tina, who mysteriously disappears at the age of three and a half. First of all, it has "only" disappeared. Only when all traces end in nothing, all research remains in vain, does it become the "lost child" advertised by the title. "Losing" is more permanent than "disappearing"; it weighs heavier on those whom it affects and also on those who sympathize - the reader. Ferrante, who is generally willing to provide information about her literary work, does not want to "substantiate" or revise this part of her narrative framework; She explains that he was one of the few who, even before she began to write, saw her as “unavoidable”.

Neither of them had any luck as mothers, lamented Lila one day in the presence of her friend. Elena doesn't want to accept that for herself. Lila's admonition “Remember what you do to your daughters with it” hovers like a bad omen, like the voice of her guilty conscience over her while she fights for fulfillment in love - fatally tied to the “cream puff” Nino. She pays for her older daughters, who temporarily grow up in someone else's care, with a loss of authority and trust. Lila loses her child from one moment to the next, Elena loses hers over many years. At the height of their painful estrangement - Dede and Elsa, having a real or imagined love rivalry over Lila's son Rino, announce their departure to the USA - Elena even speaks literally: "In just a few days I lost two of my daughters."

Lila points this out to her with good reason, since by this point she has already literally lost two children (the first was her miscarriage at a young age). With her tactful formulation that Elena should not use this "expression", she admits, however, that her complaint is justified in the figurative sense. In a figurative sense, however, Lila herself has long since lost her second child, her son Rino. Unlike her first, imposed by her unloved husband, this was a desired one - the (supposed) fruit of her passion with Nino. With this son, Lila left nothing to be missing: love, attention, guidance, encouragement. The reasons why she eventually "loses" him are numerous. The fact is what the prologue already suggests: Rino has neither energy nor intelligence, neither self-confidence nor independence - so is the complete opposite of his mother and of what she wanted.

Lila's package, which Elena tells about in the epilogue, contains not only the lost dolls from childhood, but also numerous messages. The first: Lila is alive; although it remains gone, it is not lost. The second: Even as a friend she is not lost; her surprise gift is a commitment to it. This strong positive signals are somewhat tempered by a few - for Lila typical mocking - I-messages that Elena the package may also draws as I have but the last word. - I know everything (for example that you have finished “your” book). - You do n't know everything (for example not how I solved the riddle about our dolls).

Ultimately, however, the positive signals predominate. What they once achieved together as children and later as adults is conjured up anew and linked by the dolls that function as a thing symbol : As little girls, they once willfully tossed their dolls into the “dark hole” of a cellar and then bravely caught the eye “To take the greatest possible risk at that time, to the boss of the Camorra ; Decades later they face the same opponent with no less courage, together again and risking a price for their resistance, which of course - as a possible consequence of this - is paid very high with the loss of a child.

Ferrante chose “ Restitution ” as the title for her epilogue - an ambiguous term. In the simplest sense of a "return" - Elena receives Tina (that was the name of her doll back then) - it is redeemed in full. In terms of a “restoration of an earlier state”, it can be read as a sign of faint confidence in relation to the missing child Tina: the child has disappeared, but hope is not lost.

literature

Text output

Secondary literature

  • Grace Russo Bullaro, Stephanie V. Love (Eds.): The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY 2016, ISBN 978-1-137-59062-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Marc Reichwein: The final girlfriend. In: Die Welt, January 27, 2018, accessed on February 24, 2018.
  2. ↑ a b Martin Ebel: Lila has lost her magic. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 2, 2018, accessed on February 24, 2018.
  3. ↑ a b c d Interview with Elena Ferrante. In: L'Obs , January 17, 2018 (German translation), accessed on February 24, 2018.
  4. ↑ Ulrike Sárkány: Finale in Naples. NDR, February 1, 2018, accessed on February 24, 2018.
  5. ↑ Franz Haas: Elena Ferrante holds the mirror up to Italy. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, February 1, 2018, accessed on February 24, 2018.
  6. ↑ Elena Ferrante: The Story of the Lost Child . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018, pp. 216–224.
  7. ↑ Interview with the translator Karin Krieger. Deutschlandfunk Kultur, January 26, 2018, accessed on February 24, 2018.
  8. ↑ Stefan Kister: The world is falling apart. In: Stuttgarter Nachrichten, February 2, 2018, accessed on February 24, 2018.
  9. ↑ Elena Ferrante: The Story of the Lost Child . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018, p. 540.