Book review: “My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante

Perhaps the most important sentence in Elena Ferrante’s 2011 novel My Brilliant Friend comes when fifteen-year-old Elena Greco is spending her summer on the island of Ischia across from her hometown Naples.

Elena, the novel’s narrator, feels that she is falling in love with Nino Sarratore, tall and studious, two years her senior.  He is the oldest child of the family staying at the home where she has been working a very minimal job, one that has permitted her to take full advantage of the warm weather and sparkling beach. It is evening, and she is walking near that beach.

What was I, who was I?  I felt pretty again, my pimples were gone, the sun and the sea had made me slimmer, and yet the person I liked and whom I wished to be liked by showed no interest in me.  What signs did I carry, what fate?

It is then that she worries about that fate:

I thought of the neighborhood as of a whirlpool from which any attempt at escape was an illusion.

 

The story of a neighborhood

That sentence is important because — despite appearances, such as the wedding couple on the cover of the book — My Brilliant Friend is the story of a neighborhood, the rough-and-tumble, not-quite-poor but certainly not middle-class community where Elena has grown up and, except for this brief summer respite, has spent her entire life.

It is not for nothing that Ferrante, the pseudonymous author, has started her book with a three-page index of nine families and 44 individuals, all of whom thickly people My Brilliant Friend. (Originally published in Italian, the novel was translated into English by Ann Goldstein.)

This crowd of characters is reminiscent of the many figures who populate a Charles Dickens novel, such as David Copperfield.  However, in a Dickens book, the story stretches over time and geography so that a Wilkins Micawber has his star turn for a while and then, later, Uriah Heep shows up.

By contrast, Ferrante’s book — like the neighborhood she describes — is more than a bit claustrophobic.  All of her characters are crammed into each other’s stories over the period of a few years in a small postage-stamp sort of place where everyone knows everyone — and everyone’s business.

 

The story of Lila and Elena

But maybe that sentence about the neighborhood as a whirlpool isn’t the most important sentence.

Maybe the most important sentence comes at the end of the book when Elena, now 17, is helping her close friend Raffaella Cerullo get dressed for her wedding that day to Stefano Carracci, the 22-year-old grocer in the family store.

The two girls have known each other since they were six and have been close friends since they were eight.  Raffaella is called Lina by her family, but Elena addresses her as Lila.  To Lila, Elena is Lenu.

While My Brilliant Friend is the story of their Neapolitan neighborhood, it is also the story of their friendship.

Both are bright and are able to understand each other to a depth that no one else can reach.  Indeed, Lila is effortless in learning whatever she wants to learn, often able to employ intuitive leaps.  Lenu, by comparison, is more earthbound and yet still able to reach great intellectual heights at school.

Lenu is spurred on by Lila and, through the novel, finds great academic success.  Lila, more of an outsider and free spirit, veers away from the classroom.

 

“My brilliant friend”

Elena makes clear to the reader the great hero worship she has for Lila who is not only able to design new shoes for her brother Rino’s plan to expand their father’s business but who also blossoms as a sexy woman while Elena is still worrying about pimples.

Indeed, at this moment, Elena is helping Lila get dressed for the ceremony that will change her into a wife and, eventually, a mother, running a home in a new-built apartment. Meanwhile, Elena is still yearning for Nino.

Lila says to Elena, “Whatever happens, you’ll go on studying.”  To which, Elena says, “Two more years: then I’ll get my diploma and I’m done.”

No, don’t ever stop, Lila says, promising to give her friend money to enable her to keep studying.  But, Elena says, at some point, school must end.

“Not for you: you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.”

 

A single novel

I suspect that most readers who get to this point will be astonished — I was — to realize that the “brilliant friend” of the title is Elena.  For more than three hundred pages, the reader has seen the story through Elena’s eyes, and, for her, Lila is certainly “my brilliant friend.”

Yet, here, just as the novel is about to end, we suddenly see Elena from Lila’s eyes.

For reasons that are clearly complex, Lila is invested in Elena’s success.  In part, because of the affection they share.  In part, because of the history they share. But, as those hundreds of pages that have preceded this moment, there’s much more going on in the relationship of Lila and Elena.

Indeed, with this declaration at the end of the novel, the stage is set for the other three novels that, with My Brilliant Friend, make up Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet:

• The Story of a New Name (2013)
• Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014)
• The Story of the Lost Child (2015)

The series has been a wild international success, selling more than 10 million copies in forty countries, and it’s hard to think of a reader who, upon coming to the end of My Brilliant Friend, wouldn’t be chomping at the bit to get at the other three.

Ferrante told Harper’s Magazine that she considers the four books a single novel, albeit one that’s 1,700 pages long.  And that’s how it felt for me when I got to the final page of the first book — that there was a great deal more of the story to be told.

 

A world where the reader lives

With Lila and Elena’s neighborhood, Ferrante has created a world where the reader has become a resident, a world where the reader knows these dozens of neighbors, particularly the two girls at the story’s center.

She writes with an intensity of description and event that grips the reader from the start and never lets go.  There are no slack moments here, no rising and falling of tension.  Instead, there is a thick concentration with the present moment, a thick understanding that every moment is important.

That is a big part of why I will read the other three books.  Ferrante has infused every scene in My Brilliant Friend and every person with as dense vitality.  Each moment, as she writes it, is deep with its impact on future events.  Nothing is not important.

My Brilliant Friend is the story of the childhood and adolescence of Lila and Elena — and their friends and playmates in the neighborhood — from 1949 to 1960, from age six to seventeen.

But a five-page prologue, set around 2010, hints at what will come.  Or, better put, it hints that there is much to come, a full lifetime for both women.

 

“We’ll see who wins”

It opens with Lila’s son Rino calling Elena at her home in Turin in far northwestern Italy — at the opposite end of the country from Naples where Lila is living — to say his mother has been missing for two weeks.

Elena, who tells the reader that she and Lila have been friends for sixty years, is not concerned. But, then, she finds out that, in disappearing, Lila took all evidence of her life — her clothes, photographs, books, everything.  That’s different.

She wanted not only to disappear herself, now, at the age of sixty-six, but also to eliminate the entire life that she had left behind.

I was really angry.

We’ll see who wins this time, I said to myself.  I turned on the computer and began to write — all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory.

 

Questions

These four novels, it appears, are not just about the friendship of Lila and Elena but also about their competition.  “We’ll see who wins this time.”

How do the lives of these two intertwine over the half century following Lila’s marriage?

How does Elena escape the neighborhood?  She is, after all, living more than 500 miles away from Naples in the prologue.  And why doesn’t Lila escape?  Or maybe that’s what she has done to prompt Rino’s call to Elena?

Or maybe escape isn’t simply geographic?

And what of all those other forty-plus characters in the neighborhood?  What of the molester father?  What of the bully boy brothers?  What of the shoes designed by Lila and her brother?

It’s clear that hundreds of thousands of readers around the world know the answers to these questions — and know the questions that I should be asking.

I’ll soon be joining them because it’s not going to be long before I pick up the story of the neighborhood and the two friends in the second novel.  And then the third.  And then the last.

One of the beauties of reading is having such rich storytelling to look forward to.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

1.2.25