The Lost Daughter [Paperback]

Leda, a 47 year old English professor at an Italian university, decides to take a summer beach vacation in a small coastal town in southern Italy, after her two twenty-something daughters move to Canada to be near their father. Leda has been divorced for some time.

There at the beach she observes day after day, a large, boisterious and somewhat uncouth Neopolitan family. Leda is particularly drawn to Nina, the young mother, her small daughter Elena, Nina's somewhat malevolent husband, and Rosaria, Nina's pregnant sister in law.

A seeminly innocuous event draws Leda more intimately to this family. This event causes Leda to fall into a dark place in which she analyzes the choices she, herself has made as a mother.

This novel is beautifully written and disturbing in its brutally honest exploration of the powerfully conflicting emotions of motherhood.

It's a simple story, told by the main character. Leda is 47, divorced, an academic, mother of daughters who are now in their 20s and live in Canada with their father. She rents an apartment for a month in an Italian beach resort. She has no lover, she's completely alone. And so she falls into the habit of going to the same stretch of beach every day.

You know how it is when you're a stranger in a strange town? You make up stories about the people you see. Leda does this with a woman and her child who also spend their days at the beach. They're lined up like planets --- Leda, the "bad" mother, then the mother who "seemed to have no desire for anything but her child," and then the little girl, so secure in her mother's love that she gives all her attention to an old doll.

One day, the little girl gets lost. Leda --- who, as we know, long ago, lost her connection to her own kids --- finds her. And now the plot starts to circle itself, and tighten, forcing Leda to remember more of her own story. (To buy the book from Amazon, click here.)

On page two, Leda says that "the hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand." For her, that's abandoning her daughters, all those years ago. Her first explanation, to the mother on the beach: "Sometimes you have to escape in order not to die."

Believe that at your peril. There's much more. But what's compelling is how little it takes to lose your bearings --- a small burst of attention, modest encouragement, a bout of illicit sex. The next thing you know, you're a stranger to yourself, you're a foreigner in your own body. The scene when Leda leaves her kids --- it's not wrenching like "Kramer vs. Kramer," it's one matter-of-fact paragraph. In its way, that's more wrenching.

Which is not to say that this is a story by a woman who can do nothing but watch and think. Something happens midway through. It's simple, trivial, blatantly symbolic --- it's so obvious you grimace. Why is that? Because you haven't abandoned a child. And you never would.

So it is the astonishing triumph of this simple, short (125 page) novel that, slowly, you come to identify with a woman who has done the unthinkable. And, in the aftermath, you feel a bit unhinged.

"I had left my husband and my daughters at a moment when I was sure I had the right, was in the right," Leda says near the end of the novel. And as if you've been in the sun at the beach all day and have just returned to the shade and a breeze and a cool drink, you blink --- because you're just not sure if that would be your final answer. And, if it would be, what that says about you.

What a beautiful, disturbing, thought-provoking book.

this is a short novel. The prose is tight, clean and lacks any frivolous detail that does not add to the story. The writing reflects the characters voices and internal dialogue effectively. A young woman delves into her past as a mother and daughter, brining up painful, guilt-ridden memories. She comes across a mother daughter duo, at the beach where she is vacationing, who remind her of herself and what she feels is the 'ideal.' an interesting novel that explores being a mother, daughter and societal expectations of both. the characters conflict is clearly reflected and this book is most human. it has dimension and the characters incite emotion in the reader. you will be left pondering the themes long after you have finished reading.

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