On the last page of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Elena Greco, or “Lenu,” ascends in an elevator and closes herself in her apartment. There she examines the two dolls that she and her closest friend, Lila, played with as girls—objects once ablaze with meaning, now smelling of mold and seeming, to her eyes, “cheap and ugly.” Confusion surfaces from the dissolving vividness, the passing solidity, of the past. Ferrante, by way of Lenu, then observes: “Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.”
The Coherence of the Obscure
