I read the last line of ‘The Lost Child’ yesterday, the last book in The Neapolitan quartet from Elena Ferrante. I refused to leave the world this series had created for me. The last time that happened was perhaps in the era of the Harry Potter series which I stopped reading when I was thirteen.
I have never been to Naples in the numerous times I visited Italy and fell in love with the vivacity, the loud freedom, the food, the beautiful people and the beautiful language of the land. I knew it had been on my mind ever since I began travelling within Europe. But amongst unfinished projects and relationships, I left behind a bunch of places that I had meant to explore, when I left the continent. It doesn’t matter. In this life of mine, I have arrived at a point where nothing really matters. Unsure if that’s a good thing or a flaw. It’s probably a good thing because I slip from one thing to the next with the ease of changing from one cloth to another. It’s probably a flaw because deep sentiments that make a human life rich and meaningful, are absent in mine. In any case, when it comes to places, I look back at my life so far and recount the kind of places I ended up seeing so randomly out of the blue, places where I ended time and again even though they seemed far and inaccessible. Extrapolating that, it is pretty obvious to me that it is never impossible that I’ll see a place in future – my life, by virtue of my work has become designed to be such. In any case, I don’t think I’ll know this place like I do from reading this quartet if I were to visit it for a week or two.
In the recent past, when I found some time to read and considered picking up my Kindle in which The Lost Child lived, my mind painted a picture of chaos. Violence, physical but also intense emotions of clashing personalities, of lives that have intermingled in a mess. My mind had grown accustomed to the world in the book, and could anticipate it and provided me with the setting prior to my actually opening the Kindle. Does this mean I regret reading these books? Absolutely not. To read a sentence, a paragraph, a story, a book that sucks you in in your entirety, making you frown and shake your head at the choices of the characters, weep for their pain, judge their internal world fiercely, gasp at certain things they do and agree with them on certain others – that fulfills my deepest needs from the act reading.
Occasionally I wonder how this book reads like in its original. Would I consider picking up the language with the goal of reading the book? I am confident I can – I am good with languages and have a natural affinity for Italian that will fuel my learning. I have a friend who, like me loves the language, and began reading these books in the original to enjoy it in its authenticity despite being non-Italian. He in fact suggested this book to me back in 2019. Now that I live in an English-speaking country new languages become a pleasurable intellectual pursuit as opposed to a necessity in life. German is present in my life through the podcasts I listen to obsessively and my occasional internal monologues in the language. Also, my conversations with my robotic vacuum cleaner are in German for whatever reason. I curse, wonder, and compliment the machine in this language while constantly deliberating on the rationale for the choice. Italian cannot be that hard.
I have wondered if Lila and Lenu are in fact good for each other. Life threw them together and it seemed like they had no choice. I have seen myself in the questioning of self worth that Lenu suffers from every once in a while, I relate to that, butI have also felt annoyed at her for feeling that way despite living a life that she wanted. I have particularly been annoyed by the way she slights herself in her comparisons to the hypothetical abilities of Lila. All that to say, I’d relate to the Lenu more than the Lila, and if I were a Lenu I might decide to cut such a friend out of my life. That sounds harsh. But I am adept at choosing and leaving out relationships based on how they make me feel. Would I be less without my friend Lila? Perhaps. But I would also not put myself through the intense torrent of scenarios I’d have in my life by virtue of vicinity to her.
Every character in the ecosystem has a place in my mind now. That is a natural repercussion of a multi-book series. For now I cling on to this world and its characters through the televised version of the story on HBO-Max.
Alleys 