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Dramatika asked this question about The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels, #4):
Do you think Lila could be trusted as a friend? Why Lina continues this toxic relationship with Lila, who to me is perfect illustration of the proverb with friends like this..Lila is complex character, manipulative yet selfless, evil yet kind at the same time, but too dangerous to have as a friend I think.
Roxie I feel exactly the opposite. I would rather have a difficult friend than an untruthful one.

To say it with Jane Austen:
One has all the goodness, and t…mǰI feel exactly the opposite. I would rather have a difficult friend than an untruthful one.

To say it with Jane Austen:
One has all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it.

I think Lila is a highly sensitive, highly gifted and brilliantly creative person who says and does whatever she feels like and whatever she feels to be right, no matter the consequences. I would describe her as fiercely truthful and loyal. Yes, this truthfulness makes her tactless and she can say hurtful things. But in a crisis, you can count on her. She would literally give her life to save Linù in a crisis.

Linù on the other hand is a very weak-minded and inconsistent friend.

She has no confidence whatsoever. To assert her self-image, she is incredibly dependent on the good opinion of others. To be liked by everyone, she will be nice and say nice things, which is why many people call her a nice person. But to me that is a varnish, an empty shell, a facade, a mannerism. Yes, she is inoffensive, not headstrong, calm, coquettish, but does that make her a good person or a good friend?

She has no strong opinions on politics, on people, on the mafia, etc. She picks up interests like a new fashion, like a hobby, but can you call them convictions? She is interested in political feminism and then gets involved with a man who thinks free love is great and keeps fathering children without caring what happens to the women and children he leaves in his wake. To me this is a sign of weak beliefs and principles on Elena's part.

Furthermore, she especially seems to want her relationship to work to prove that she is better than Lila, because Nino has preferred her to her friend. She defines herself through a man, a man moreover that has treated her friend despicably. To me she is a vapid narcissist, who admittedly has enjoyed a very good education, but can in no way be called an intellectual, because she has very few individual or original thoughts.

She does not see anything politically, whereas for Lila everything is politics. Lila is a whistleblower, a force of nature. To Lila a sausage in a factory is politics. Linù goes to political meetings of left-wing intellectual and still can't put the name of "Mafia" on the villains in her home town. She is almost blind. And I fear in part she is not intelligent enough to see everything, but also in part she often does not want to see what might cause her discomfort. She chooses to be blind.

She chooses to be selfish and run off with her lover, after telling her kids like five minutes before that she is leaving their father. I am all for leaving a man if you're not fulfilled, but tell him outright and don't cheat on him in the next room and don't make fun of him with your lover at the dinner table in front of his daughters. In that scene I found Elena to be a horrible opportunist. Alone, she was to cowardly to ever speak the truth to her husband about her own feelings. No, she had to wait for a notoriously unreliable playboy to find the courage to leave her cage. She lost all credibility to me at that moment. And from the description she gave, her daughters lost it too, but her own sex life was worth more to her than the relationship with her own daughters. I would have felt that was a sacrifice worth making, for a great man, maybe, but for a married coward? What a selfish choice.

And don't get me wrong, I don't like mother-bashing and I know she is far more responsible than any men in the book and does not have an easy life with her husband, nor did she have any role model in her own awful mother. By God, I would have left her husband a lot earlier, but I would have done it in better style and with less cruelty towards him and the children and for myself, not for a man. She is cowardly.

When Lila makes connections and sees things, other people have not picked up on, Linù mistrusts this intelligence she does not understand and speaks of it like black magic. She is dishonest not only to others, she also very consistently lies to herself.

To feel good about herself, she has to deny her friend's brilliance that far outshines any of her qualities. She is therefore morbidly jealous of Lila and keeps ascribing bad intentions to her actions.

I know people like this in real life, it is the sad case of someone with a very strong individual morality (Lila) rubbing people all the wrong way with their difficult behavior and therefor being thought a "bad" person. And the vapid smiler (Elena), the flirt, the nice girl, whose helpfulness stays on the surface and goes no deeper than a gesture, will always be assumed to be a more moral person, where she is only more dishonest, better at lying to everyone including herself and at controlling her feelings.

I would much prefer to have a difficult friend to an untruthful one.(less)
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Jasmine Thank you so much for this. You've hit the nail on the head. I was surprised to hear so many interpretations of Lila as "toxic" when she was always th ...more
Apr 18, 2022 06:14PM · flag
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The Story of the Lost Child
by Elena Ferrante
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