Notes and Review - Lost Daughter (Ferrante)
29 Mar 2023 Tweet book-review · fiction · parentingRating: 5/5
One should never arrive in an unknown place at night, everything is undefined, every object is easily exaggerated.
This is a beautiful line. Every time I am booking a ticket to some new place, I remember this line. I remember the dread and uncertainty of arriving at night. Despite knowing that arriving at night is unwise, I arrived in Italy late one night in 2019. It was a timely reminder of my lack of wisdom; a line like this makes the lesson a memorable one. Seeing the confused characters in this book, my first instinct was to clamp down on their inability to decide and brand it rashly as immature indecisiveness; then, gradually, I would see the lens fog up and doubt creep in. Were they really indecisive, or do they appear unclear to us only in hindsight?
It was like a slight twinge that, as you keep thinking about it, becomes an unbearable pain. I was beginning to feel exasperated.
I watched the movie adaptation before reading the book. The movie was great. Dark and ominous right to the last scene, the unstated parts of the movie were exquisite; the setting was great and I felt the irritation caused by Nina’s family to Leda and Nina’s inexplicable presence among them. The first thing I noticed about the book was that all the characters are mothers, daughters, or soon-to-be mothers. Leda has 2 daughters Marca and Bianca. Leda talks often about her own mother. Nina has a daughter Elena. Elena thinks that her doll is her daughter, and she calls her various names. Nina’s sister-in-law is pregnant and expecting her first child. The doll is lost for a brief period of time; indeed, that is the central thread in the story. The doll is lost, and a long time later, it is found. During the intervening time, things get confusing. Leda is curious despite herself. She claims to have brought books and claims to want to read them, but she can’t take her eyes off Elena and Nina. Undoubtedly, Elena reminds her of herself: the young Leda; the unfulfilled scholar.
The one incident that haunts her is leaving her daughters for three years. She pursues the language of her scholarship, English. (There is an inversion in the setting of the movie and the book. In the book, Leda is an Italian woman and a scholar of the English language. In the movie, the situation is reversed: Leda is English and a scholar of the Italian language.) Recounting her experience of leaving her daughters, she thinks up this memorable paragraph:
After a while I heard a light knocking. Bianca came in, very serious, followed by her sister, timidly. Bianca took on orange from the tray of fruit, opened a drawer, handed me a knife. I didn’t understand, I was running after my own desires, I couldn’t wait to escape that house, forget it and forget everything. Make a snake for us, she asked then, for herself and Marta, too, and Marta smiled at me encouragingly. They sat in front of me waiting, they assumed the poses of cool and elegant little ladies, in their new dresses. All right, I said, took the orange, began to cut the peel. The children stared at me. I felt their gazes longing to tame me, but more brilliant was the brightness of the life outside them, new colors, new bodies, new intelligence, a language to possess finally as if it were my true language, and nothing, nothing that seemed to me reconcilable with that domestic space from which they stared at me in expectation. Ah, to make them invisible, to no longer hear the demands of their flesh as commands more pressing, more powerful than those which came from mine. I finished peeling the orange and I left. From that moment, for three years, I didn’t see or hear them at all.
The touching scene of separation is all the more jarring for we see her in the present, being treated coldly by her daughters, and we see the drive in her to continue her study. She doesn’t understand why she left them, and so she instinctively did not talk about it with her daughters. At the very beginning of the book, we encounter this sentence which explains why all she can do about this is write letters to her daughters:
At the origin was a gesture of mine that made no sense, and which, precisely because it was senseless, I immediately decided not to speak of to anyone. The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.
If leaving did not make sense, why did she return? We get only the faintest of hints.
[Nina asks] “If you felt good why did you go back?” I [Leda] chose my words carefully. “Because I realized that I wasn’t capable of creating anything of my own that could truly equal them.”
This is the driving force of this novel: characters who do not reveal much; characters who would rather speak in cliches and through letters; characters who talk about their own confusions. They remain shrouded in a veil and we get rare glimpses into what they really care about. Why should we get any clarity about what these characters want, when we can’t get that kind of clarity with anyone else? Why should we get any clarity about what they want, when we can’t even be sure that we can get that clarity with ourselves? Ferrante is soothing and brilliant.
Other memorable quotes:
That’s what I was, superficial. And then that remark: children are always cause for worry. Said to a woman about to bring one into the world: how stupid. Always words of contempt, skeptical or ironic. Bianca had cried to me once between her tears: you always think you’re best. And Marta: why did you have us if all you do is complain about us? Fragments of words, mere syllables. The moment arrives when your children say to you with unhappy rage, why did you give me life: I walked absorbed in thought.
That’s what I was, superficial. And then that remark: children are always cause for worry. Said to a woman about to bring one into the world: how stupid. Always words of contempt, skeptical or ironic. Bianca had cried to me once between her tears: you always think you’re best. And Marta: why did you have us if all you do is complain about us? Fragments of words, mere syllables. The moment arrives when your children say to you with unhappy rage, why did you give me life: I walked absorbed in thought.