The Lost Daughter

By: Elena Ferrante

Narrated by: Hillary Huber

From the author of The Days of Abandonment comes The Lost Daughter, Elena Ferrante's most compelling and perceptive meditation on womanhood and motherhood yet.

Leda, a middle-aged divorcee, is alone for the first time in years when her daughters leave home to live with their father. Her initial, unexpected sense of liberty turns to ferocious introspection following a seemingly trivial occurrence. Throughout the novel, Ferrante's language is as finely tuned and intense as ever, and she treats her theme with a fierce, candid tenacity.

©2006 Edizioni E/O. Translation ©2008 by Europa Editions (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Still not quite sure what to say about this book

I definitely feel some kind of way about this book—about Elena. But not quite sure what. It’s great, and dredges up a lot of emotions. Not a simple story, though.

Beautiful and Freeing

Oh my beautiful, would suggest a must read before a second child. The wording is deep of simple thoughts a mother has and feels…just fleeting thoughts that run in and out of your mind but you question how a mother thought them. Only to realize other mothers have thought them too. It doesn’t really make you a bad mother…the fact that you question yourself in itself allows you to see your were/are a good mother. Wow on to the Netflix movie (some may not like that sentence but I am interested to see maggie gyllenhaal version that Ferrante allowed. What a sense of freeing as a woman after reading. You wonder if you would not of been so hard on your younger self.

very interesting story

I enjoyed this book. It was very different then what I typically would read. I found the main character intriguing and the story well worth the time.

The Lost Daughter

Ferrante never disappoints and often challenges her reader to think of her story’s intentions and meaning long after
it is completed .
Hillary Huber’s delivery makes even the most mundane actions , exciting !

Fascinating story

Much food for thought in this exploration of mother daughter relationships and the ambivalence felt by many mothers.
Reader a bit nasal but tolerable.

Book Disappointment

This book was a pity story of a woman and her selflessness. She lost her emotional abilities to relate to her own family and tended to selflessly harm others mentally, emotionally and to her own desires.

Ferrante at her best

A remarkable turn of events, a devastating ending. And Ferrante's marvelous prose. Worth every page.

Ferrante's finest shorter work

A violent slap in the face of a book. This one is about the trauma of motherhood, which is both reveling and mysterious and leaves you feeling haunted by Ferrante’s undercurrents of hidden violence which pervade all her works.

If you’ve read the Neapolitan quartet, you’ll see familiar mirror components here and there. The more I read Ferrante, the more I get a sense of who she is. Her writing is vicious and completely compelling and forces you to reflect on your own truths and personal sense of morality. I liked this one best of all her shorter novels.

Hillary Huber, once again, captures Ferrante perfectly.

Disappointing at the end

The reader was really good. I liked the writer’s views on motherhood but the story was not good. The book ended abruptly without a conclusion or a moral lesson.

Fascinating and Psychologically Complex

Unlike many of the reviewers here, I didn't find the characters unlikeable. Rather, they reminded me very much of the cast of characters in Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, some even having the same names and traits. For example, Leda shares some commonalties with Lenu (her academic life, where she lived and her work as a writer, the same number of daughters, similar relationship with her ex husband, etc.) and Nina with Lila (who was both beautiful, elegant, but also coarse with her Naples dialect and violent tendencies).

The book delves into the private inner world of a middle-aged but youthful looking woman, Leda, who is ambivalent about motherhood. Leda experiences both tenderness and cruelty in relation to her daughters, Bianca and Marta and the Neapolitan mother Nina, her child Elena and the doll, Nene. I think this is the most interesting aspect of her character, that she has both tenderness / attraction and repulsion / irritability for the family on the beach. These are sentiments I'm sure many mothers would relate to, but very few would be honest about, which makes this book interesting. The sentiments also have a strong cultural flavour in the sense there's a "cult of the child" in Italy whereby children are adored but in private can experience cruelty and scorn from mothers who are overburdened.

The ending appears somewhat inconclusive and you're left wondering exactly what happened. That's where it's important to pay close attention to the opening chapter - which is actually the ending (but you don't realise it until the end). I had to go back and re-read it.

When I did re-read chapter 1 , I wondered about Leda's gift to Nina of the antique hatpin and her instruction to disinfect it when she got home. Did she or didn't she? I guess I'll never know! (P.S. You won't understand this part unless you get the book!).

As for the narration, it was rather nasally, which didn't seem to be the case when Hillary Huber read My Brilliant Friend. As such it seemed somewhat affected, which has put off some people but in the end didn't bother me too much.