book review of my brilliant friend

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By Juliet Lapidos

Dec. 21, 2012

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND Book One: Childhood, Adolescence. By Elena Ferrante. Europa Editions, paper, $17.

Elena Greco, known to all as the porter’s daughter in her poor, 1950s Naples neighborhood, always liked school: “Right away, from the first day,” it seemed like “a much nicer place than home.” She’s the teacher’s pet, often asked to sit beside the maestra as a reward for her diligence. So it comes as a distressing surprise when Lila Cerullo, the shoemaker’s daughter, is invited to take the seat of honor instead. After this initial shock, Elena trains herself to accept Lila’s superiority. The charismatic and mysterious Lila is eminently crush-worthy, but it doesn’t take much hermeneutic detective work to see that Ferrante thinks her namesake protagonist is brilliant in her own right. She’s also more fortunate: Elena’s parents allow her to continue her education through high school, whereas Lila’s expect her to drop out and start working. By the end of this astute novel, which has been translated into lucid English by Ann Goldstein, these environmental differences have just begun to manifest themselves, setting up the next installment of a planned trilogy.

LOVE, IN THEORY Ten Stories. By E. J. Levy. University of Georgia, $24.95.

Nearly half the characters in this collection are graduate students or teaching assistants at Midwestern universities, fumbling through relationships that won’t pan out. And Levy keeps her focus on failed romance even in stories that don’t revolve around academic institutions. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with choosing a theme and sticking to it, but the sense of sameness here goes deeper than the outlines, down into the details. Near the beginning of the collection, two women “share rape stories.” Near the middle, another woman says she and a friend “swapped rape stories.” (That’s hardly an old standard in the girl-talk repertoire.) On two separate occasions, characters relate their latest ideas for New Yorker cartoons: a philosophy instructor proposes “If Philosophers Had Majored in Business, featuring Cartesian Waters (I Drink Therefore I Am),” and a writing instructor offers another in which “a man showing trophy fish points to one and says, ‘I caught that one in the stream of consciousness.’ ” The collection does include a few thematic outliers, like the story in which a former dancer dies of AIDS. Yet these are less psychologically coherent and less emotionally realistic, adding to the impression that Levy has a fairly narrow range.

THE WRITING ON THE WALL By W. D. Wetherell. Arcade, $24.95.

Vera needs to get away for a while, so she borrows her sister’s rundown second home close to the Canadian border and starts to strip off the wallpaper left by a previous owner. “The front rooms have something that resembles knotty pine,” and in the hall there’s “this hideous white velvet with blood-colored veins.” Lo and behold, after a few days of hard work she finds a message written on the wall, hidden for decades beneath that “hideous” paper. Two messages, actually: one from a woman named Beth, who took to the wall in the 1920s to tell the tale of her tyrannical in-laws, and another from Dottie, who discovered Beth’s note in 1969 and felt moved to share the story of her lazy but lovable AWOL son. When Vera is done reading, she makes her own contribution, revealing why she’s spent the last few weeks stripping wallpaper instead of hanging out with her husband and daughter. (Vaguely feminist or at least pointedly female concerns unite the three stories, suggesting that Wetherell had “The Yellow Wallpaper” on the brain.) The crucial trick with such multivoiced narratives is to make each one sound different, which Wetherell pulls off. The other trick is to make each character equally interesting, and in this he falls somewhat short. After Beth and Dottie, it’s a letdown to read Vera, whose secret anguish hinges on the biggest political news story of 2004.

PAINTER OF SILENCE By Georgina Harding. Bloomsbury, $26.

Shortly after World War II, in the Romanian city Iasi, a young deaf man shows up at the hospital. He can’t speak and he doesn’t have identity papers, but one nurse, Safta, recognizes him: he’s Augustin, the son of the cook at the manor house where she was raised. This reunion, soapy in concept though not in execution, sets up Harding’s sentimental third novel. Safta and another nurse use Augustin as a kind of safe deposit box for their depressing memories of the war and its aftermath, unburdening themselves to a man incapable of gossip. Augustin, naturally, has had horrible experiences of his own. He suggests them through his drawings (hence the novel’s title), and an omniscient narrator fills in the gaps. Despite the heavy subject matter, the story moves briskly, though Harding depends too much on coincidence. A long-absent father reappears at just the right moment; two acquaintances end up at the same work camp — such contrivances detract from the realism of an otherwise accomplished work of fiction.

THE 100-YEAR-OLD MAN WHO CLIMBED OUT THE WINDOW AND DISAPPEARED By Jonas Jonasson. Hyperion, paper, $15.99.

American readers expecting Scandinavian best sellers to star rapists and serial killers may be surprised to hear that the latest Swedish blockbuster, translated by Rod Bradbury, features a centenarian named Allan who, tired of living in a nursing home, escapes out the window. Then again, some of Allan’s slapstick adventures wouldn’t seem out of place in a thriller: after auto-defenestrating he steals a suitcase containing 50 million crowns, then eludes both a criminal gang and the police. Along with Allan’s present-day exploits, Jonasson fills us in on his protagonist’s last 100 years. As it turns out, Allan had a knack for meeting global leaders (Franco, Truman, Stalin, Churchill, Mao) and for involving himself in global conflicts (the Spanish Civil War, the cold war). Through all this, Allan remained staunchly apolitical and unrelentingly cheery. It’s a cute premise, but the right-place-right-time concept obviously isn’t original (see “Forrest Gump” and “Zelig”). Moreover, it’s easy to predict what will happen to Allan, since his life follows the course of a 20th-century history textbook. From 1943 to 1945, he’s employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A few years later, he finds himself in a Russian gulag. Where was the action in 1968? Why, Paris, of course. And Allan makes it there in time to witness the uprisings that nearly shut down the city. By then, the shtick has worn a little thin.

Juliet Lapidos is a staff editor in the editorial department of The Times.

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Theresa Smith Writes

Delighting in all things bookish, book review: my brilliant friend by elena ferrante, my brilliant friend….

Translated by Ann Goldstein

About the Book:

My Brilliant Friend is the gripping first volume in Elena Ferrante’s widely acclaimed Neapolitan Novels. This exquisitely written quartet creates an unsentimental portrait of female experience, rivalry and friendship never before seen in literature.

The story of Elena and Lila begins in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples. They learn to rely on each other and discover that their destinies are bound up in the intensity of their relationship.

Elena Ferrante’s piercingly honest portrait of two girls’ path into womanhood is also the story of a nation and a meditation on the nature of friendship itself.

My Brilliant Friend is a modern masterpiece, the work of one of Italy’s great storytellers.

My Thoughts:

I’m very late to the party on this one, although I have had a copy of this on my eBook shelf for a few years after reading an article on the series, I think, before the fourth book came out. Anyway, better late than never! As is my way of late, I’ve taken to watching before reading – I know! The horror, breaking the golden reading rule. I find though that this avoids that whole ‘it wasn’t as good as the book’ mentality. If it’s good to watch, it’ll be even better to read (usually) and pretty much so far this has been working out for me. So, I watched My Brilliant Friend (over two days) and as far as a TV series goes, that gets five stars. It was exceptional and I loved that it was Italian. I picked up the book straight away and read it in a day (very, very late into the night). I was immediately struck by how the TV series was almost exactly like the book, with a few chronological exceptions, and that hardly ever happens. Ferrante was one of the writers and maybe in Italy you have more say over what happens when your book is adapted than in America, Australia or the UK. Or maybe it’s just a perfect story that needed no extra handling. The emotional intensity of the story translated well onto the screen and the faithfulness to the novel must surely be a bonus to all fans. At least we don’t have to do a book versus the show comparison now. Moving right on.

I wish I could read Italian. The translation is excellent, don’t get me wrong, but when it came to the dialogue, I have this feeling that it would have had a whole other layer of emotional depth in its original Italian. This was evidenced within the show. At times, you could imagine that if people had been shouting those same words in English, the effect would not have been the same. But this is a minor quibble, thank goodness for the translation, allowing the rest of the world outside of Italy to enjoy this wonderful novel.

Elena Ferrante is some writer. This is more than a novel about friendship. The era in which she set the story plays just as much of a role in the telling as the characters. Italy’s turbulent history is evidenced within the very fabric of these characters, the community, and the codes they lived by. My Brilliant Friend is a coming of age novel not just for two girls, but for a nation, who had, in a relatively short amount of time, experienced extreme political turbulence under multiple political regimes, civil war, and two world wars. The characters wear this, they struggle with it, the younger generation want to break free from the fear and ways of the older generation. I absolutely love novels that explore society at such an intimate level like this. And it’s a tough read, at times. The normalised violence is shocking, particularly against children. The oppression is all encompassing, the lack of agency over ones own life, not just women and children, but men too. This is a community run by the Camorra, which is not fictional. It’s an Italian Mafia-type crime syndicate which arose in the region of Campania and its capital Naples and is one of the oldest and largest criminal organizations in Italy, dating back to the 17th century. The stranglehold the Solara family, and the Carracci family before them, had on the community was no exaggeration. The way Ferrante articulated that intergenerational fear was so telling in how a community can remain in a cycle of oppression and forced compliance. This was demonstrated over and over throughout the novel but perhaps the most powerful symbol of it was evidenced in that ending: the inevitable appearance at the wedding of the unwanted guest and those shoes, a forceful statement of exactly where and with whom the power lies. For a sociologist with a long-term interest in Italy’s history, this novel is a gold class case study.

Now, let’s talk about that friendship. While I was watching the show, I thought I just didn’t like the actress playing the teenaged Elena, but having now read the book, I realise that the actress was playing her role to perfection. It’s Elena I don’t like. For such a smart young woman, she is almost entirely devoid of emotional intelligence. She misreads every situation and ascribes her own bitter discontent onto all those around her. She is of course the product of her mother’s fears and anger, manifested into a childhood anxiety that grips her and increases in severity throughout her teenage years, again, demonstrating to us how cycles are perpetuated, Elena’s fractured only by the tenacity of a teacher not willing to see another woman wasted. But it’s in Elena’s friendship with Lila that I liked her the least. She was, I felt, disingenuous, too slated with envy and suspicion, unable to love without it always being tinged with hate. I tired of her, particularly as they got older and maturity should have been setting in. Elena was entirely incapable of considering any part of her life separate from Lila, but in a toxic comparative way. Did Ferrante miss the beat with Elena and overplay the whining and apathy? I don’t think so. We all know Lila should have had the educational opportunities that Elena received, but while Elena’s father had a job as a porter at the city hall, Lila’s was a struggling shoe maker. Neither family had much money but the job held by Elena’s father meant that he saw education in action on a daily basis, whereas for Lila’s father, it was unnecessary, an unwanted expense and a possible danger to the order of his household. Much like Elena’s mother’s view, but she was overruled by her husband. Lila, unable to go to school, taught herself. I don’t believe, if the situations were reversed, that Elena would have done that. Elena’s inferiority complex was too great and she’d never have had the will to overcome her anxieties and apply herself under her own steam. She was too much about the external gratification. It was in this jealous way that Elena begrudged Lila her independent learning and intelligence that Elena was at her worst. I hope Elena grows in maturity and emotional complexity over the next three books.

I adored Lila. She was ferocious, her own woman, trying her hardest within the limited confines of her life to go her own way. Marcello’s interest in her was frightening. I do believe he loved her, obsessively though. I don’t believe that she escaped his interest by marrying another man. In a society driven by retribution, she humiliated him too much for that, hence, the ending and that bold statement made by Marcello. Lila’s beauty came not only from her looks but from the fire within her, that dangerous mix that Alfonso pointed out to Elena. I feared for Lila for the entirety of the novel, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the beginning of the story introduces both of the women in their sixties, I felt certain on many occasions that Lila walked a fine line between life and death.

No story that rests on the shoulders of a community can exist without the creation of a colourful community. I loved the vast cast of characters within this story and I thought Ferrante distinguished each person enough for her readers to not lose track of who was who. There was a helpful cast list in the front of the book but I didn’t need to refer to it once I’d started. I think out of everyone, my favourite was Maestra Oliviero, a woman who was tirelessly teaching the girls at the elementary level in the hopes that she might rescue, through education, at least one of them and set them free from their plebeian existence. I haven’t mentioned Donato Sarratore and his presence within Melina’s life and later Elena’s. What a snake. I saw the writing on that wall right from the get go. I don’t think his son, Nino, was quite worth the mental and emotional energy Elena expended on him. I feel that he was a young man who closed himself off long ago as a precautionary measure against his father’s repeated misconduct. A complex young man, but devoid of any real emotional capability. Elena alludes to Lila’s panic attacks (not that they were called that back then) and Rino’s bouts of depression that would lead to sleep walking. We see through these conditions, as well as Melina’s mental illness, how people struggled, reliant on empathy and the protection of those around them. With Melina in particular, the community protected her, shielded her, did everything they could to keep her free of an asylum. This community had many characteristics defining it, but not all of them were negative, not by a long shot.

My Brilliant Friend is a five-star read for me, not just for the story and characters, but also for the thought provoking nature of the text. It’s a stimulating and lively novel and I could see at a glance on Goodreads that it’s one of those love it or hate it novels. This reader loved it and I highly recommend the TV series as well.

About the Author:

Elena Ferrante was born in Naples. She is the author of seven novels: The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, The Lost Daughter, and the quartet of Neapolitan Novels: My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child. She is one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors.

My Brilliant Friend trailer:

My Brilliant Friend Published by Text Publishing October 2011

The Sweet Linearity of “My Brilliant Friend”

By Emily Nussbaum

In one of the loveliest sequences in Elena Ferrante’s novel “ My Brilliant Friend ,” two girls read “ Little Women .” But Elena and Lila don’t merely read the book together. They recite it, they memorize it. They fantasize about emulating Jo March, who escaped poverty by writing. They wreck it with their love: “We read it for months, so many times that the book became tattered and sweat-stained, it lost its spine, came unthreaded, sections fell apart.”

This sequence is a delight in the TV adaptation, too, which is currently airing on HBO. On a bench in their grungy, violent Naples neighborhood, Elena and Lila lounge, bodies entwined, wearing shabby dresses, reading in unison, in Italian. (The show has English subtitles.) Excitedly, Lila recites a passage in which Jo herself reads out loud, from her first published short story, to her sisters, without telling them who wrote it. At the passage’s climax, when Jo reveals herself as the author, the two girls read Jo’s words together, their faces shining, as Lila pounds her chest: “ Vostra sorella! ” (“Your sister!”) It’s a thrilling moment, which threw me back to the wild vulnerability of childhood reading. The scene is dramatic, or maybe just specific and sensual, in a way that the version on the page can’t be, and really doesn’t try to be. There’s no dialogue in the book, no chest-pounding, no description of the girls’ clothes, and no quotes from “Little Women.” Ferrante’s book confides more than it describes—that’s both its technique and its insinuating power.

A few years ago, every discussion of television seemed to be framed as “Is TV the New Novel?” It was a rivalry poisonous to both parties, not unlike the one between Lila and Elena, the top girls in their class. Not that I don’t get it: in the past two decades, technological advances have altered television in a way similar to how the modern novel—which began as an episodic, serialized, disposable medium, derided for its addictive qualities—emerged as a respected artistic phenomenon. With whole seasons released at once, a television series is now a text to be analyzed. There’s a TV-writing class at the University of Iowa. The anxiety is palpable, on both sides. What kind of art do intelligent people talk about? What do they binge on, late at night? Which art form is capable of the most originality, the greater depth, the wider influence—and which one makes you rich? (Would Jo be a showrunner?) It’s enough to make you crave a broader conversation, with respect for the strengths of each art, an interplay that’s more than a simple hierarchy.

The fact is, as beautiful as the scene in the show is, it never captures (and, notably, doesn’t try to capture) the eerie meta quality of the source, its self-conscious textuality—Ferrante’s fluid, ticklish bookishness , that sense of a voice in our ear. In the book, we are aware at all times that we are reading a novel written by Elena—and we also know that, outside this frame, we are reading a book by the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante, an author who, like Jo, conceals her identity. That wobbly frame of authorship, and the nagging anxiety about who gets to tell the story, is what drives Ferrante’s four-volume series, known as the Neapolitan novels (“My Brilliant Friend” is the first), about two working-class girls, one of whom turns the other into a book. It’s no wonder that a cult following has emerged in the U.S., driven by bookish, Jo-ish, Elena-like, author-worshipping women, giving the books a reputation that has sometimes reduced them to a universalizing primer on female friendship. This mood has been intensified by Ferrante’s own Banksy-level mystique.

In the book “My Brilliant Friend,” Elena, the teacher’s pet, sees the exceptional Lila as not merely her competition but also her role model, her mirror, and, eventually, her subject. From Elena’s perspective, her own “goodness,” the passive-aggressive repression of the grade grind, comes alive only when it is placed next to Lila’s fiery, feral, at times malevolent creative genius. In adolescence, the two part ways: Elena stays in school, Lila drops out. “My Brilliant Friend” is a story about many things—left-wing politics, male violence, fancy shoes, the warping force of patriarchy on female creativity—but it’s centrally about class-jumping, through education, the kind that makes one aware of the origins of social class, including the ways it’s embedded in art.

I watched the show before reading the book. That seemed like the best way for a television critic to approach a television production, anyway—to take the work at face value. Seen this way, the show was uncomplicatedly enjoyable. Gorgeously lit, dreamily paced, “My Brilliant Friend” is directed by Saverio Costanzo, who collaborated, via e-mail, with Ferrante. (She had selected him for the task.) It captures, with a certain gloom and grit, the claustrophobia of Ferrante’s postwar Naples, but it also has the polish of certain well-funded historical portraits of poverty, an unfortunate but perhaps unavoidable side effect of cinematic beauty. The music is too much, manipulative and poncey. But, over all, the show is immersive and astonishingly well cast, fuelled by the joy of gazing into the eyes of the actors who play Elena and Lila—Elisa Del Genio and Ludovica Nasti, as children, and Margherita Mazzucco and Gaia Girace, as teen-agers—inexperienced performers whose spontaneity feels liberating. These pleasures (beautiful people, sunlight, historical voyeurism) might sound superficial, but they are pleasures anyway.

After I read the book, it was clear how closely the adaptation follows its track. The most exciting sequences—the fairy-tale-like trading of the girls’ dolls; a long, near-hallucinogenic walk out of town; the bullying boys who woo the teen-age Lila—are dramatized without being aggressively transformed. Some critics have called the show dutiful, with the implication that it is not especially interesting as art. And maybe that’s fair. Costanzo doesn’t blow the story open or reshape it. He also doesn’t find a visual rhetoric that’s analogous to Elena’s nose-tugging narrative, with its air of nerdish obsession and banked fury—as opposed to, for example, the way that “ The Wolf of Wall Street ” felt distorted to reflect its narrator’s mania, or Jennifer Fox’s “ The Tale ,” another story in which a woman examines her painful childhood, made theatrical the clash of past and present.

Instead, the show takes an old-fashioned approach, by sublimating itself to its literary source, like a caring translator who will illuminate but won’t impose. And putting events on film does bring out fresh angles. Among other things, the violence feels different. In the book, Elena describes, with dark wit, a child’s-eye awareness of impending death everywhere: “Being hit with a stone could do it, and throwing stones was the norm.” Men beat their families, by default. (If they don’t beat their kids, their wives nag them to do so.) Thuggish businessmen pummel their competitors. Lila gets thrown out a window, breaking her arm, for wanting to attend middle school. On film, these scenes feel scarier. This is not just because it’s harder to see bodies get hurt than to read about it; it’s also that, rather than just seeing torsos kicked, we linger on the faces of bystanders, who are often children looking on in genuine terror. The book is a meditation on the intellectual outcomes of childhood trauma, an unfolding map of minds changing; the show, so focussed on the body, feels as if it were happening now.

Because the story feels less abstract, it also feels in conversation with certain other television dramas about brilliant girls from smothering villages, set in communities where male violence is no more notable than bad weather. These include “ Top of the Lake ,” by Jane Campion, which was set in an isolated New Zealand town; “ Sharp Objects ,” set in a Missouri town full of batshit Southern belles; and the excellent “ Happy Valley ,” set in the depressed Yorkshire countryside. In each of these stories, smart women suffer a sort of cultural amnesia about the ugly past—about sexual violence, especially—in order to keep the world stable. “My Brilliant Friend” is often at its best when it invokes this same crisis of knowledge, of growing up where everyone knows your business and no one can admit the truth. It’s about the escape hatch that clever girls squeeze through, simply by refusing to forget. ♦

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HBO’s “My Brilliant Friend” Understands Its Source Material, But Its Diligence Feels Misspent

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Readers' High Tea

Based in Romania, reading all over the world. Mostly fiction, some memoires and a little bit of poetry.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (book review) – a coming-of-age story in Naples, Italy

What comes to mind when you think about Italy? La vita è bella, pizza, Vespa, Romeo & Juliet? After reading My Brilliant Friend, you can add something else to the list: Naples and the Neapolitan novels.

Neapolitan Novels – the quartet

“My Brilliant Friend” is the first book of the four Neapolitan novels (where Neapolitan refers to pertaining to Naples), written by Elena Ferrante*. The author mentioned in an interview that the four books come together as “a single novel”, published in multiple parts for reasons of length and duration ( Harper’s Magazine, 2014 ).

*I found it interesting that Elena Ferrante is actually a pseudonym, and the Italian novelist’s identity is still unknown despite the intense research done to unveil her identity.

readers high tea my-brilliant-friend-elena-ferrante-20170330

My Brilliant Friend in a nutshell

The novel follows the story of two friends, Lenù and Lila, who have an interesting friendship … let’s say it’s complicated . They both live in Naples (Italy), in a poor neighbourhood, in the 1950s. The whole story is narrated by Lenù, as she recounts their childhood (up to 16-ish years old):

“I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don’t recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad.” (Lenù)

Overall impression

While discovering the micro-cosmos of the Neapolitan neighbourhood, we are faced with interesting themes, just to name a few: family violence, parents’ lack of interest for their children education, jealousy, and the uncertainty surrounding teenage flings.

Although I do not find these themes particularly enjoyable, and also none of the characters was particularly charming, the novel was pretty engaging and it made me want to read the other novels of the series.

However, I found two aspects that can be improved: the translation and the cover design. Regarding the translation, I felt the language used was a bit unnatural (the book was originally written in Italian).

The book covers (around the world)

When it comes to the cover … I personally think that the covers of the whole series are so unattractive! If the book had not been recommended to me by a friend, I would not have been attracted at all to pick it up.

It got me questioning whether it’s the same in other countries, so I plan to do a “Book covers around the world” post about them, like the one I did for “The Pearl” by Steinbeck . [Later edit – here it is: Book covers around the world: The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante ]

My Brilliant Friend is an intriguing first book of the Neapolitan Novels quartet. It is the coming-of-age story of two Italian girls who learn to make their way through life, facing the ups and downs of their childhood. I recommend it if you’re into realistic novels or if you want to read what Fatema Ahmed called “ a feminist polemic ” story.

If you would like to buy books or other (non)bookish things, please consider using one of these links: Amazon | Waterstones | Carturesti . Thank you!

Till’ next time … happy reading!

Images from latimes.com | stephendaitergallery.com | znyata.com

Published by Georgiana

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4 thoughts on “ My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (book review) – a coming-of-age story in Naples, Italy ”

I’ve heard mixed reviews about this one, but I got a copy for Xmas so am intending to read it soonish.

Just finished this book. Took me a while to delve into it. Now look forward to the second book in the series.

I’m glad you liked it! Happy reading the second book 🙂

The Neapolitan Novels has become one of my favourite books ever. I absolutely loved the dynamic of the relationship between the two girls, the tension and passion stemming from their intertwined destinies.

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Review: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

I’ve only set foot on the outskirts of Naples, in the ruins of Pompeii, but even there it is clear there is something different about the ancient port city. Perhaps it is that the earth feels thinner there, under the shadow of Vesuvius, the boundary between the our world and the roiling fire beneath all too apparent. Touring around the Bay of Naples in his “intimate history” of the Earth, palaeontologist Richard Fortey writes that “Even the most apparently ephemeral of the earth’s memorials are a reflection of a deeper reality”. I have no image in my mind of the volcano, but it must have been there, maybe fading into the haze. The city and its people have a reputation for threat and combustion that is partly myth-making. But still. It is this volatile, tectonic atmosphere that pervades Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. La dolce vita this is not.

This first of four novels begins with a disappearance. Sixty-six-year-old Rafaella – Lila – Cerullo has vanished from Naples, again, leaving her son Rino in despair. He calls his mother’s old friend Elena Greco in Turin, who sharply rejects his pleas for help. This time, it seems, Lila has disappeared properly, taken all belongings, even cut herself out of photos. Hurt, vengeful, begrudgingly admiring, Elena begins to write their story. “We’ll see who wins,” she says.

The mystery of this disappearance is not solved in this first novel. Instead what follows are two almost discrete stories of Lila and Elena’s childhood and adolescence in a working class suburb of Naples in the 1940s and ’50s. In the first, The Story Of Don Achille, nine-year-old Elena finds herself drawn, almost unwillingly, to Lila, who is as headstrong as the neighbourhood boys, and therefore perhaps more dangerous. It is an almost fairytale world, haunted by artefacts of the war and the ogre-like figure of Don Achille. Theirs is a friendship founded on mutual rivalry, exploitation and admiration; they spend as much time wounding each other as lifting each other up. From the outset there is competition, Elena equally envious of and puzzled by Lila’s precocious capabilities and forthright sense of right and wrong.

The second, much longer Story Of The Shoes charts their adolescence and schooling, and their diverging paths. Elena goes to high school in the city to further her intellectual capabilities; Lila stays behind to initially help her father in his shoe shop, and later court the neighbourhood boys. It is an intensely drawn portrait of friendship and coming-of-age and a richly conjured setting of disperazione, “having lost all hope but also being broke”. Everyone is angry, the men explosively so, the women corrosively. They are the downtrodden, the powerless, the plebs. It is a tightly woven narrative, only occasional extending beyond the confines of the square where the characters live and the stradone they walk between school, work and home. I was impressed by its containment and Ferrante’s acuity on the way class and history shape relationships between people.

My Brilliant Friend conceives of friendship as a kind of Faustian pact, as suggested by the epigraph from Goethe’s translation. “It was as if,” Elena writes, “Because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other”. At its most pure, their friendship is ecstatic, evoking the pleasure and richness of finding an intellectual equal. “She took the facts,” Elena writes breathlessly, “And in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy … I get excited with her, here, at the very moment she’s speaking to me”.

This type of pact becomes more literal when Lila courts one of older boys in the neighbourhood. His family’s wealth, derived in part from organised crime and with possible links to Fascists, might enable Lila to secure her family’s future. What is the cost of escape, the novel asks, and Elena and Lila illustrate two pathways, both with their own pitfalls. The children’s neighbourhood rivalries fall along old schisms between families; as they grow up and the town changes they try to heal and overcome this past. Lila in particular becomes obsessed at one point with the weight of history, that “there are no gestures, words, or sighs that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that human beings have committed and commit”. The Aeneid, Virgil’s epic of the founding of Rome, is the other old story that pervades Elena and Lila’s; both coming to see in the neighbourhood the same lovelessness that led to Dido’s downfall after being abandoned by Aeneus. The novel has a similar classical chill; feels similarly foundational as it lays the grounds for a lifelong friendship, and the trajectory of Italy today.

For all its austere themes and grey setting, there are flashes of possibility and light. It is there in the sea that Elena visits for the first time as a teenager, it is there in the town changing around them, “everything … quivering, arching upward as if to change its characteristics, not to be known by the accumulated hatreds, tensions, ugliness but, rather, to show a new face”. It is there of course in the love that grows between Lila and Elena, the feeling of care and protection Elena feels towards Lila as she bathes her on her wedding day; the way Lila reads Elena’s textbooks as much to coach her friend as to expand her own knowledge.

Gay rating: not gay.

My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante Book Review

I loved My Brilliant Friend, it’s so beautifully written. The story telling feels like it’s from the heart without a care for what is expected. It feels like Ferrante is just telling a story how she wants to- that is to include all the elements she cares about. Women, society, intellect, class, relationships. Elena and Lila are coming into knowledge of the world with a compelling eagerness to learn. It’s unusual and refreshing! Intellect isn’t usually a focus in stories revolving around adolescents, especially not girls.

My Brilliant friend is the first of Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels . It’s based around the friendship dynamics of two girls growing up in a working class Italian town in the ’50s. Coming of age? Yes- but it is also really telling the story of a community. Im a fan of stories that chart the evolution of families and generations. It feels organic- clear that it wasn’t originally written in English. The rhythms are different, syntax is different. Also Noticed it while reading So Long A Letter and People From My Neighbourhood . I will definitely be adding more translated texts to my TBR

Female Friendships and Influence

I’ve never read anything like it before, it’s extremely introspective. Very dramatic. Elena is taking us through the dynamics of their friendship from her perspective. Through Elena’s eyes, their friendship is all consuming, sub consciously veering into all aspects of their lives and decisions. I’ve never read story in which the protagonist’s every move or decision is unintentionally(?) influenced by someone else. To the point where you wonder if the protagonist is really the person whose perspective we are not hearing.

I loved that Elena and Lila spur each other’s curiosity on. Elena is more introverted, cautious, eager to impress her friend. Lila is more confident, fiercely intelligent, charismatic, Alpha B from birth- It would appear. Lila effortlessly influences or enchants everyone who falls into her path . She isn’t a typical nice girl- she does what she wants. I like imperfect characters, although their relationship seemed worrying at times. If they were 30, we would call it toxic. Ferrante presents Elena as being in awe of Lila but I think they are b oth in awe of each other. Both in fear of not matching up- true to adolescent anxiety. I like that what binds them is a desire to know more about the world around them- knives sharpening knives.

Being life long friends with someone so enigmatic seems extremely tiring. Invigorating, stimulating but….TIRING. What is interesting is that it is clear at a point that Lila thinks just as highly of Elena. Who then, is the Brilliant Friend? What would the book sound like from the other end? If Lila had written it instead?

Does brilliance belong at home?

I’ve never read anything where all the young people were so self aware. So aware of where they stand in society. So aware of what they need to do to ascend. Who they need to love, to ascend. So aware of what is and isn’t permitted of someone of their class. The same goes for gender – both girls seem very aware of what is expected of young women- sometimes they fall in line, sometimes they are very happy to subvert the norm. My Brilliant Friend throws a light on the misogyny that can easily become accepted within small communities. You wonder how either girl became so brilliant in these surroundings. It’s clear that they a force destined to move beyond their restrictive, traditional boundaries. Do they belong there?

There is a romance and urgency throughout. Oh and that ending! Ferrante might get me reading the series which is something I never do! I haven’t read a series since Tracey Beaker or Naughts and Crosses! Don’t know if i should risk watching the HBO series!

I didn’t expect to read this and love it but I did. I can now see why people keep talking about it.

I listened to a lot of this as an audio book . The narration by Hillary Huber was excellent. Try and forget the American accent.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, Published 2020 by Europa Editions . Translated by Ann Goldstein First published 2012

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, my brilliant friend.

This portrait of camaraderie, community and a nation centers on the stories of lifelong friends Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, two Italian women who grew up together in the same small town just outside of Naples in the years immediately following World War II. The story of their childhoods is told here, reminiscent of a nation facing drastic change. The girls, in early adolescence, are forced down vastly differing paths due to very slight differences in their families’ economic status, leading one toward uncertainty while the other enjoys the unrequited benefits of higher education.

This first of a planned trilogy brings to life an old-world culture and fills readers with a passion for history and great storytelling. Elena artfully recalls her childhood, describing her earliest school days at a time when ordinary townsmen called for blunt action and despair. The neighborhood is consumed with a silent, inarticulate rage, shown toward rival families, by parents toward their offspring, and by neighborhood children toward one another. It was a common event of the age to witness a child being beaten by a family member or neighborhood kid, so no one interfered or paid much attention. Life was especially hard for young women and the poorer folks of small communities (which at that time seemed to be just about everyone).

"I would recommend this book freely to anyone who enjoys history of any kind or a well-written novel. The ending is entirely unconventional and unexpected, so creative that it takes the reader’s breath away and makes one hungry for the next installment."

The emphases for these families were dwindling resources, the simple ability to put food on the plate and pay the bills, and the need to provide cheap (child) labor. Women were expected to remain mute and meek always, and to further their families’ needs at the expense of their pride and feelings. Family feuds happened routinely; everyone knew about them. But Lila and Elena learned as children --- largely through the power and support of friendship, and due to the positive influence of an exceptionally shrewd and motivating female teacher --- to stand up for themselves, and against all odds, face their fears and find creative solutions to problems, starting with the most immediate one of what to do about their futures.

By embracing pure intellectualism, these girls find a way to cope with their existence and to gather a glimmer of hope. The age is ripe for the Maestro of the school to exert her powers over her pupils, by pitting them against one another, recognizing good work, and challenging all to rise above circumstance and need.

This is the basis of Lila and Elena’s early friendship: rivalry and competition. Lila happens to be the most gifted person in her class, and the most hated and taunted child at school. She brazenly flaunts her brilliance, and seems fierce and unafraid. Likewise, Lila seems to find in Elena the one person content and motivated enough to follow her, and the only one who can see clearly to the core of who she is.

Yet, as luck would have it, the girls’ paths seem fated to diverge early on. Once the time has come to advance in school, Lila’s father refuses to pay the necessary fees (either because he’s unable or unwilling,) whereas Elena’s father is a porter and so slightly better off. Because the Cerullos are shoemakers by trade, they’ve become a very despondent bunch, watching the family business slowly dwindle due to the advent of new technologies and factories. Lila’s father seems content to leave her laboring and virtually imprisoned in his shoe repair shop --- a situation she despises to the core and that offers no security. Lila also feels keenly the loss of any future for herself through a legitimate education, which to her equates to the loss of free will.

So it is that, by the end of this first installment, Lila becomes a young woman suffering very bitterly for her losses and her simple inability to change her life. The book moves very quickly from her earliest attempts to self-educate alongside Elena, toward other, less certain pursuits wherein Lila hopes to change her lot by influencing others she knows. Hoping for good things to happen, she makes some desperate moves that will clearly come back to haunt her. Her best intentions become twisted in the pursuit of happiness and success, and in the process, both Lila and Elena unwittingly give up on the possibility of real love or the self-empowerment that comes from genuine devotion. Ironies abound.

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND is an extraordinarily meaningful and absorbing read. I can really think of no better praise than to simply say I loved it, though that seems inadequate commendation for such a supremely talented author. I would recommend this book freely to anyone who enjoys history of any kind or a well-written novel. The ending is entirely unconventional and unexpected, so creative that it takes the reader’s breath away and makes one hungry for the next installment.

Reviewed by Melanie Smith on October 19, 2012

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Publication Date: September 25, 2012
Genres: Fiction
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN-10: 1609450787
ISBN-13: 9781609450786

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My Brilliant Friend : Book summary and reviews of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

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My Brilliant Friend

by Elena Ferrante

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Published Sep 2012 336 pages Genre: Literary Fiction Publication Information

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From one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila, set in a vibrant and colorful modern-day Naples. Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to this penetrating portrait of two marvelous women. Here, too, is the story of an entire nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets, Elena and Lila learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country undergoing momentous change. The first in a trilogy, My Brilliant Friend introduces readers to two unforgettable protagonists and to the famed and flawed beauty of modern Naples. Ferrante is the author of three previous works of critically acclaimed fiction: The Days of Abandonment , Troubling Love , and The Lost Daughter . With this novel, already a bestseller in Europe, she proves herself to be one of Italy's great storytellers. She has given her readers a masterfully plotted page-turner, abundant in its narrative details and characterizations, that is also a stylish work of literary fiction destined to delight her many fans and win new readers to her fiction.

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"Stunning…The raging, torrential voice of the author is something rare." - The New York Times "Ferrante's prose is stunningly candid, direct and unforgettable." - Publishers Weekly "Elena Ferrante will blow you away." - Alice Sebold "[ The Days of Abandonment & Troubling Love ] are tour de forces…They both confirm Ferrante's reputation as one of Italy's best contemporary novelists." - The Seattle Times "This piercing novel [ The Lost Daughter ] is not so easily dislodged from the memory." - The Boston Globe

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Elena Ferrante Author Biography

Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), which was made into a film directed by Roberto Faenza, Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), adapted by Mario Martone, and The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), soon to be a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. She is also the author of Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey (Europa, 2016) in which she recounts her experience as a novelist, and a children's picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night (Europa, 2016). The four volumes known as the "Neapolitan quartet" ( My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay , and The Story of the Lost Child ) were published in America by Europa between 2012 and 2015. The first season of the HBO series My Brilliant Friend , directed by Saverio Costanzo,...

... Full Biography Link to Elena Ferrante's Website

Name Pronunciation Elena Ferrante: EH-leh-nuh feh-RAHN-tay. Rolled "R" in "Ferrante."

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MY BRILLIANT FRIEND

The graphic novel from the novel by elena ferrante.

by Chiara Lagani ; illustrated by Mara Cerri ; translated by Ann Goldstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 10, 2023

Classics often pale in their retelling, but this homage to Ferrante’s epic shines with its own light.

Ferrante’s now-classic saga of an enduring yet complex female friendship shape-shifts once again, this time into a graphic novel.

In Lagani’s streamlined adaptation of the first of four Neapolitan novels, Ferrante’s original narrator, Lenù, does double duty as the (fictional) illustrator of the early years in her complicated lifelong friendship with Lila. “Her” drawings, maps, and illustrations trace the girls’ relationship from childhood through Lila’s marriage. Cerri, the actual illustrator, captures the girls’ environments and moods in gestural, atmospheric drawings that convey the menacing atmosphere of postwar Naples as well as the girls’ determination to move beyond the boundaries imposed on them by family, culture, and economic circumstance. This re-envisioned account necessarily telescopes some backstory and motivation but remains faithful to the broad outlines of the character development and Byzantine plot points found in the original. Readers unfamiliar with the works underlying this iteration of the story—Ferrante’s original books and the hit HBO miniseries from which Cerri drew visual inspiration—may find some incidents puzzling to parse, such as schoolgirl Lila’s apparent fall from an apartment window. (Ferrante’s legion of devoted fans will connect the dots between her father’s anger and Lila’s ejection from the window.) Aspects of the narrative that benefit from Cerri’s visual storytelling include the first episode of “dissolving boundaries” that will plague Lila throughout her life and Lenù’s competitive concerns about the differences between the girls’ maturing adolescent bodies. (Cerri previously illustrated Ferrante’s earlier “picture book,” the mordant The Beach at Night , but delivers less nightmarish visions here.) Goldstein, responsible for translating Ferrante’s prior works from Italian into English, continues that heroic undertaking with a sensitive translation of Lagani’s text consistent with the original.

Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023

ISBN: 9781609459468

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Europa Editions

Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023

GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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The Vietnam War Revisited, Through Fiction

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Film Adaptation of ‘The Women’ in the Works

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

More by Max Brooks

by Max Brooks

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Elena Ferrante

Author of the neapolitan novels.

My Brilliant Friend

The neapolitan quartet – book one, translated by ann goldstein.

2012, pp. 336, Paperback

$ 18.00 / £ 10.99

ISBN: 9781609450786

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila . Elena Ferrante ’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists, the unforgettable Elena and Lila. Ferrante is the author of three previous works of critically acclaimed fiction: The Days of Abandonment , Troubling Love , and The Lost Daughter . With this novel, the first in a quartet, she proves herself to be one of Italy’s great storytellers. She has given her readers a masterfully plotted page-turner, abundant and generous in its narrative details and characterizations, that is also a stylish work of literary fiction destined to delight her many fans and win new readers to her fiction.

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Recent reviews

The dartmouth:“neapolitan quartet” is an immersive look at a female friendship.

On The Dartmouth

Jan 1, 2018 – Isabelle Blank

Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s operatic Neapolitan Quartet, a series that spans four volumes and six decades of friendship, traces the intertwined lives of characters Lila and Lenù. The series begins with Lenù and Lila’s childhood as they grow up in a poor Neapolitan neighborhood and traces their subsequent lives as wives, mothers and ultimately lonely old women. The quartet is a series of cyclical events encapsulated in a larger cyclical narrative structure. The first book of the series, entitled “My Brilliant Friend,” opens at the fourth book’s close. Rino, Lila’s son, telephones Lenù to tell her that his mother has gone missing. At the end of the final book, entitled “The Story of a Lost Child,” there is no answer as to where Lila has disappeared. However, Ferrante writes such a thorough description of Lila’s character and psyche throughout the series that, in the final book, it makes sense as to why she erased herself. It seems not to matter where she’s gone. Lila is mean, whip-smart and down-trodden — how could she not want to disappear, how could she not want to melt into what she calls the “dissolving boundaries” of her complicated world?

Ferrante weaves an intricate cloth depicting detailed scenes and characters that repeat themselves over and over to construct a patterned, sprawling tapestry. These intimate, very often domestic, scenes that Ferrante writes involve only the characters introduced in a list at the beginning of each volume. Though the scenes are private and the characters insular, the story conveys broad-reaching meditations on class, femininity and politics.

Lenù and Lila are foils for one another. Lenù is blonde, studious, eager to please, self-doubting and ambitious, whereas Lila is dark, naturally brilliant, mercurial, mean and irresistible to those around her. The story is told from Lenù’s point of view, but the two friends understand one another on such a deep and complex level that the reader is often privy to Lila’s perceived inner thoughts. The two are paradoxically bound to, yet at odds with, one another. Lenù cannot resist Lila’s magnetism, her cutting intellect and her unbounded passion even when Lila is at her most cruel. Ferrante’s prose is cerebral. The reader is immersed not only in Ferrante’s cinematic scenes, but also in Lenù’s body and her psyche. Ferrante lays bare Lila and Lenù’s most unlikable traits: their respective failures as mothers, their self-absorption, their gnawing anxiety, their seeming inability to experience joy and their mutual jealousy.

San Diego Jewish World: Book Review: ‘My Brilliant Friend’

On San Diego Jewish World

Jan 1, 2019 – Dorothea Shefer-Vanson

This novel, the first of a quartet, has become an international bestseller and has been widely praised in literary circles. So I was overjoyed when I was able to pick up a copy someone had discarded at one of the airports I visited recently. I found it a wee bit difficult to get into at first, but once I had overcome that initial barrier I found myself entranced by the account of the friendship between two girls, Elena (Lenu) and Lila, in one of the poorer neighbourhoods of post-war Naples. The book starts with their childhood, when they both still played with dolls, continues with their teenage years and adolescent agonies, and ends with the wedding of one of them, though still a teenager.

The author manages to describe the feelings and experiences of those childhood years, with the close but fluctuating relationship between the two girls, as well as between them and the people around them, in a vivid and engaging way. The writing style does not always read smoothly, and at times there are too many jerky stops and starts in the narrative flow for my taste, but the intensity of the emotions and events described help the reader to overcome any reluctance he or she might have to continue reading.

The first few pages of the book provide an index of the various families who comprise the main characters of the neighbourhood and the book, and I found this very helpful, as the Italian names and surnames are sometimes difficult to differentiate and thus to imagine the characters. After all, when half the boys are called Gino, Nino, and Rino, that does not help the reader to distinguish between them.

and Try to Do Our Best" rel="bookmark" href="https://elenaferrante.com/reviews/my-brilliant-friend/elena-ferrante-interview-merve-emre/" id="4184" >We Tell a Story and Try to Do Our Best

Answers to questions from merve emre .

Dear Elena (if I may),

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. I am a great admirer of your writing. I am also grateful to you for writing the kinds of novels every literature professor dreams about teaching. For the past two years, I have assigned the Neapolitan novels in my class on contemporary fiction; it is rare to encounter novels that my students are desperate to keep reading and that also evoke so many urgent, illuminating conversations about genre, form, history, class politics, feminism—everything I want my students to enjoy thinking about in and out of the classroom.

On a more personal note, I have found myself returning to Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay many times since having my two children. No other novel I have read captures the vicissitudes of motherhood with such precision: the power and the vulnerability of caring for others, the intimacy and distance between mother and child. It was painful to realize when I became a mother that my mother had a separate life, a different self, before she became my mother; painful, too, to realize that my children might not appreciate this about me until too late. Your novels have helped me think with greater clarity about what it means to be a mother and what it meant to be a daughter. For that, I am grateful too.

Yours warmly,

Merve Emre: The television series My Brilliant Friend opens with a shot of an iPhone 7—Lenu’s cell phone—ringing in the dark. It was a shocking opening for me. The novels have very little engagement with media forms and technologies that are not books: no one sees a movie, no one listens to music, no one reads articles on the computer. What does reading mean to you?

Elena Ferrante : You’re right, the two friends belong to the world of print books, as do I, who invented them. Elena realizes late that she doesn’t have a musical education, for example. Her escape from the neighborhood is centered completely on literacy: reading and studying are the only tools available for breaking the boundaries within which she happened to be born. But don’t forget that Lila, although she’s the first to see the great value of books, will be a pioneer in electronic media.

ME: What does reading mean to you?

EF: Reading is an extraordinary exercise. It doesn’t come naturally; it requires commitment—you have to transform pages crammed with signs into worlds full of life. But once reading has become an intellectual necessity, you can no longer do without it. I’m a very involved, disciplined, collaborative reader. I never abandon a book; even if I don’t like it, I read it to the last line. I always learn something. And I get enthusiastic—perhaps excessively so—when a book is a happy surprise. I recently read a novel that I thought was excellent. I read it in Italian, but I’d like to try to read it in English; I liked its tone very much. It’s called Outline , by Rachel Cusk.

ME: There are moments in previous interviews where you betray an impatience toward literary criticism and, in particular, literary theory for its relentless drive to interpretation and argument. Yet you are an extraordinarily attentive and sensitive reader and strong interpreter of your own fiction and the writing of others. What are your ethics of criticism? How do you believe professionalized readers should write about or teach literature?

EF: I don’t like the impressionistic type of critical work. I don’t like it when a text is taken as an occasion for talking about something else. I prefer works that concentrate on the page, that rigorously analyze the expressive strategies of the writer. A good critical work says to the reader: here’s where the author started from, here’s where he wanted to take me, here are the means he used, here are the goals he was aiming for, here are his debts to tradition, here’s why I liked or hated it.

ME: In Frantumaglia , you hint at your disappointment with the film adaptations of your novellas. What made you decide to let RAI adapt My Brilliant Friend ? What kinds of audiences do you want the televisual adaptation of your work to reach?

EF: I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I had no role in the production decisions. The means by which a film comes to be made are unknown to me. But I’ve always been curious to see what happens to my characters and my stories when they leave the page and venture into other media. I like it when they become audiobooks, plays, films. In fact, the more they enter into people’s lives through these other media, the more it seems to me that they are alive and in good health. Naturally I reserve the right to have an opinion on the works that originate in my texts. But I have to say that, even when I don’t like the result, I don’t suffer. Books, once they’re written, can sustain anything: writing makes them in a certain sense invulnerable.

ME: Why did you choose Saverio Costanzo as the director?

EF: I didn’t choose in this case, either, I’ve never had that power. But I have to say that choosing would have been a real problem. I’m a devoted moviegoer, I love films, but I have no expertise in that area. I get excited about films that are very different from one another, films made by people who have nothing in common. If I really did have to decide I would never manage it. I merely proposed a list of names, directors whose work I have a lot of respect for. Among them was Costanzo. When I found out he’d been chosen, I was very pleased.

ME: When I spoke with Saverio last week, he described a process of creating characters on screen that he called “conveying density”: a way of representing a character’s consciousness without explicitly psychologizing her actions, so that a viewer could sense a great and unexplored depth to her every statement, glance, gesture. He suggested that this was a practice of character creation to which you also ascribed; indeed, a practice you had taught him to create continuity between the representation of characters in the novel and on the screen. Can you explain how density works in the novels and how you imagine it working on the screen? Or if “density” is not the right word, can you discuss the difference for you between representing consciousness and psychologizing it in your fiction?

EF: I fear that in a short space I’m in danger of appearing confused. The definition of psychologies is an essential part of the narrator’s work. They focus the motivations both superficial and profound that guide the actions and reactions of the characters in the course of the story. But what decides the success of a character is often half a sentence, a noun, an adjective that jams the psychological machine like a wrench thrown into the works and produces an effect that is no longer that of a well regulated device, but of flesh and blood, of genuine life, and therefore incoherent and unpredictable. In films that effect is produced, I think, by a flash in the gaze, by an involuntary grimace, by an unexpected gesture. It’s the moment when the psychological framework breaks and the character acquires density.

ME: There is an irritating tendency in contemporary writing on motherhood to position motherhood as a psychological impediment to literary creativity—as if a child must steal not only time and energy from his mother but also language and thought. Your novels are ambivalent on motherhood as a creative experience and an experience conducive to literary creativity. (For a short time, Lila transforms motherhood into an act of grace; Lenu’s greatest professional success comes after she becomes a mother even though she complains about her obligations.) How do you think about representing the interplay between (creative) production and (physical) reproduction? What is the relationship between time spent taking care with one’s words and time spent taking care of one’s children?

EF: I very much like the way you’ve formulated the question. But I want to say that it’s not right to speak of motherhood in general. The troubles of the poor mother are different from those of the well-off mother, who can pay another woman to help her. But, whether the mother is rich or poor, if there is a real, powerful creative urge, the care of children, however much it absorbs and at times even consumes us, doesn’t win out over the care of words: one finds the time for both. Or at least that was my experience: I found the time when I was a terrified mother, without any support, and also when I was a well-off mother. So I will take the liberty of asserting that women should in no case give up the power of reproduction in the name of production. Although the difficulties are innumerable, the two can coexist. “Giving birth” is our specificity, belonging only to women, and no one should dare to take it away from us. Men use the metaphor of birth to speak of their works. For us giving birth is not a metaphor—neither when we give birth to children nor when we give birth to books, ideas, images of the world. We know how best to do both.

ME: Can you say a little bit more about being a terrified mother? What is the nature of this terror for you?

EF: I’m afraid of mothers who sacrifice their lives to their children. I’m afraid of mothers who surrender themselves completely and live for their children, who hide the difficulties of motherhood and pretend even to themselves to be perfect mothers. I prefer mothers who proceed consciously through trial and error, looking for an equilibrium but knowing that any equilibrium is precarious.

ME: Despite the emphasis on female friendship in the reception of the novels, Lila and Lenù end up as singular, lonely characters. Yet the promise of literary and artistic collaboration between women—women reading together, women writing together—is a persistent and seductive fantasy across the novels. Collaboration emerges as a source of artistic bliss and temporary enchantment as well as an opportunity for solidarity among women. How have your experiences with collaboration across media (adaptation) and language (translation) approached or fallen short of this fantasy?

EF: Yes, and it’s not always easy. In general it seems easier for women to collaborate with men. There’s probably a very old habit of submitting to the authority of men, or of developing suitable behavior for pretending to accept it, and meanwhile pursuing our particular aims. Certainly it’s more complicated to recognize the authority of another woman; tradition in that case is more fragile. And yet the path is this: once the expertise of the other woman is recognized, we have to learn to collaborate. It works if, in a relationship between the person in charge and the subordinate, the first wants the other to grow and free herself from her subordinate status, and the second gains her autonomy without feeling obliged to diminish the other. Conflicts are inevitable, but we have to persist. It should never be forgotten that women are stronger together and can achieve astonishing results.

ME: Can you say more about why it is difficult to recognize the authority of another woman?

EF: Although things are changing, in some corner of our brain we continue to think that true authority is male, and that every woman with authority has it only because males have given it to her. It’s as if in that tiny corner we were saying to ourselves: why do I submit to a woman when I could replace her if I go to the true source of power? It’s a trend that should be fought against, by demonstrating through the excellence and force of our works that female authority isn’t a concession from men, doesn’t have value only in the women’s space to which they tend to relegate us, but is an autonomous quality and an asset that is fundamental for the whole human race.

ME: In a previous interview with the Times , you suggested that the children who showed up at the auditions for My Brilliant Friend were “spectators who hope to become actors, either for play or a shot at deliverance.” Last week when I spoke to Saverio, I also spent an afternoon with Ludovica, Elisa, Gaia, and Margharita, the four girls who play the parts of Lila and Lenu. Something that struck me about them is that they have all read your novels—I imagine they are among your youngest readers. For them, the experience of learning to embody your characters has also served as a literary education. (Elisa, for instance, is now reading Little Women; Margharita has moved on to Elsa Morante.) What might young readers—young women readers in particular—learn from the Neapolitan novels?

EF: I don’t know how to answer you. I hope the books communicate the urgent need for solidarity between women. Not only that. I’d like the youngest readers to take from them the necessity of being properly prepared: not in order to be co-opted into male hierarchies but in order to construct a world different from the one we know, and to govern it. Reading good books, always studying, regardless of the work she intends to do, should be a part of every girl’s plan for her life. The only way not to let what we’ve gained be taken away from us is to be smart and capable, to learn to design the world better than men have so far done.

ME: Your readers have an extraordinary desire to open imagined channels of communication with you; to write about their experiences reading your novels. (For example, I recently saw a play in which four Ferrante readers become so absorbed by the Neapolitan novels they start transforming into the characters and writing about their transformations—a kind of magical realist fan fiction.) How do you make sense of the fervor with which the Neapolitan novels have been greeted? Has the reception of the novels surprised you? Has it revealed to you anything you did not already know about their distinctiveness?

EF: I think that writers never really know what book they’ve written. We tell a story and try to do our best, pouring onto the page our experience, our literary sensibility, without sparing ourselves. I realized very slowly that the book contained in itself much more than what I thought I had written. Certainly I wished to describe a friendship that lasts a lifetime. Certainly I knew clearly that Lila would contain the worst and the best of what I know about my sex. But only in time, for example, did I discover how effective the neighborhood was, and the figures who populate it. Or the seductive banality of Nino Sarratore.

ME: The actresses wanted me to ask you a question on their behalf: Have you seen them on screen and, if so, did you glimpse the characters you created in their performances? Did they capture the sensibilities of Lila and Lenu?

EF: I’ve seen the first two episodes. The child Lila is perfect, which will make things hard for the actresses who have to continue the story. The child Elena also effectively sets up the character of the narrator, which is in many ways indecipherable.

ME: One of the most illuminating parts of Frantumaglia for me is your exchange with Mario Martone and the incredible detail with which you attend to the structure of individual scenes, lines, costumes, sets as they are described in his script for Troubling Love. Can you give me some examples of scenes, lines of dialogue, or actor directions from My Brilliant Friend that you discussed at length with Saverio? Were there instances where you resisted or vetoed his initial interpretation of a scene? (In our conversation, Saverio mentioned the beginning (the frame narrative) and the end (the banquet).)

EF: My experience with Martone was brief. He sent me the screenplay, I sent him my impressions on reading it. I did the same thing with Costanzo, in the same way, but the work went on much longer, the exchanges of letters were more numerous. My task was to read and annotate the eight treatments and the eight screenplays that Costanzo and his collaborators were writing. I confined myself to saying what I thought when I felt that the story wasn’t working. Maybe in more than a few cases I was overly frank. Maybe I intervened, with some presumptuousness, in irrelevant details. The problem is that I’m not an expert, and I thought the whole time that stories and screenplays were the film, that every line was therefore crucial. In reality the set is really the important place. The work of writing is a point of departure, it merely traces a map that is to help the director give form—an enormous amount of work—to the story through images.

ME: People frequently ask you about your literary-historical influences, but I am curious about your engagement with contemporary art and literature. What living writers do you enjoy reading? What films do you enjoy watching? What music do you enjoy listening to?

EF: I would have to give a very complex answer, talking about various stages of my life. I’ll answer you some other time.

ME: The novels are not written in Neapolitan dialect. Lorenzo Miele (the executive producer) and Saverio described a densely mediated process of reconstructing and translating the dialect for the television show: hiring a historical linguistic to recreate the 1950s idiom, sending the script to you to check it, then sending it to Ann Goldstein to translate it into English for HBO. Can you talk a little bit about the complications—and perhaps the betrayals—of this layered translation? From the perspective of an Italian spectator, does dialect offer new possibilities for representation?

EF: Yes, in the book there is no dialect but a dialectal cadence strengthened at times by brief insertions of Neapolitan. The film, on the other hand, needed the dialect of the neighborhood, that is, a dialect that was harsh, pre-television, and that in Elena, and also in Lila, would later yield to average educated Italian. That work was done in the screenplay and gives, at least to the Italian viewer, the opportunity to rediscover what impoverished, essentially dialect-speaking Italy was like.

ME: Were there any subplots you discarded from the novels? Were there characters you initially thought you would develop as more rounded, substantial presences that you relegated to a minor status?

EF: No. The book kept all the elements that were present in the first draft. It was a very rare instance, for me, of a story written without structural reconsiderations.

ME: For the past two months, my son has developed an obsession with The Beach at Night despite my sense that he was not the target audience for it. Why did you decide to write a children’s book? How did it differ from writing a novel like My Brilliant Friend , which is focalized through a child’s point of view?

EF: I wrote The Beach at Night for a four-year-old friend of mine who, to her great disappointment, had just had a little sister. It originated in a book I had just finished, “The Lost Daughter.” I was very surprised that my little book was considered unsuitable for young children—my friend had liked it. I’ve always believed that stories for children should have the same energy, the same authenticity, as good books for adults. It’s a mistake to think that childhood needs syrupy fables. The traditional fairy tales weren’t made with cotton candy.

ME: My son also just had a little brother. He is also disappointed by it. Perhaps he’s a better reader than I’ve given him credit for.

Elena Ferrante’s answers translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

In its November 4 issue, the New York Times Magazine published a feature by Merve Emre on the novels of Elena Ferrante and the HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend . Emre’s article included excerpts from an interview with Ferrante—the only interview the author has granted to an English language outlet on the occasion of the TV series premiere on November 18. Below, by agreement with Ms. Emre, is the complete text of their exchange, conducted over email in September 2018.

TV Review: ‘My Brilliant Friend’ on HBO

The many admirers of Elena Ferrante’s novel “ My Brilliant Friend ” — the first in her smash series of four books about a pair of Neapolitan women moving through life — likely have two questions about the Italian-language TV adaptation. The first is how faithful it is to the source material, and the second is how well it matches the novel’s effortless ability to move within its protagonist’s mind, tracking subtleties of emotion.

The answers are mainly good news: In the limited series’ first two installments, screened at the Venice Film Festival Sept. 2 before a November bow on HBO , the story closely tracks the movement of the novel. And while achieving the internality of the book is too high an order for this series, its ability to conjure up the world of children confused at the happenings around them is its own achievement. “ My Brilliant Friend ” is an impressive effort, a translation of novel to screen that preserves certain of its literary qualities while transmuting others into moving and effective TV.

Elena (Elisabetta De Palo), seen briefly in a framing device, receives a call that her old friend has gone missing, and, knowing that this disappearance had been a long time coming, finally sits down to write the story of their intertwined lives. We shift back in time to the dusty and sun-drunk Naples of the 1950s, where Elena (played as a child by Elisa Del Genio) spent her girlhood, in the perpetual company of the bright but troublesome Lila (Ludovica Nasti). Later in the series, we’ll see them as teenagers.

As we see young Lila throwing crumpled paper at teacher’s-pet Elena, De Palo’s voice intones, “She impressed me at once because she was so bad.” The voice-over device seeks to accomplish the same thing as did the narration of the novel, documenting every childish thought with the wisdom of adulthood. But this device is less than necessary. Young Del Genio and Nasti have the unforced chemistry of the kids from “The Florida Project,” the last great entertainment about kids left largely unsupervised. And their frolics in a community whose rules they barely understand make far more potent points about the innocence of youth, and how it falls away, than the voice-over ever could.

In one striking scene, the pair are reading “Little Women” together as a fight breaks out; the viewer has been able to track the complicated social dynamics leading up to it, but to the children, it’s just noise, one among many interruptions that must be endured as a part of a childhood ending too quickly.

32 Books That Changed the World – BookBub

My brilliant friend by elena ferrante.

Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost 60 years, as its protagonists, the fiery and unforgettable Lila, and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflictual friendship. Book one in the series follows Lila and Elena from their first fateful meeting as 10-year-olds through their school years and adolescence.

Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists.

“An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends,” writes Entertainment Weekly . “Spectacular,” says Maureen Corrigan on NPR’s Fresh Air. “A large, captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman,” writes James Wood in The New Yorker.

Ferrante is one of the world’s great storytellers. With My Brilliant Friend she has given her readers an abundant, generous, and masterfully plotted page-turner that is also a stylish work of literary fiction destined to delight readers for many generations to come.

In a rare interview, Elena Ferrante describes the writing process behind the Neapolitan novels – Los Angeles Times

Seven years ago, it took just one book for an as-yet-unknown Italian novelist to become one of the most prominent personalities of the early 21st century. What made the phenomenon even more unheard of was that it involved an author who had written an epic with undeniable literary ambitions, not a book for young readers, like the “Harry Potter” series. It was a saga with numerous allusions to Italian history, anchored by geography to a small corner of Naples, and these facts seemed to condemn in advance its success as an export.

But the triumph of “My Brilliant Friend” is also stupefying because its author does no promotion at all. Elena Ferrante is a woman without a face, whose identity is known only to her Italian publisher, E/O. Her name is a pseudonym, its sound a discreet homage to the great Italian novelist Elsa Morante, author of “Arturo’s Island” — whose work, Ferrante says here, she has always appreciated. No one has ever succeeded in revealing Ferrante’s true identity, although certain names have circulated in the press: Domenico Starnone, a Neapolitan screenwriter and novelist, and winner of the Strega Prize in 2001; or Anita Raja, a Roman translator. Nearly two years ago, Italian journalist Claudio Gatti published a scoop, identifying Raja as Ferrante, after having scoured her tax returns and deciding that her assets exceeded that of the average income of a person in her profession. Against all odds, the supposed revelation of the identity of Ferrante provoked a worldwide scandal.

For her readers, Ferrante must be allowed to remain anonymous, should she wish to be. An international outcry rose up, from enraged readers who sought to protect the writer they love, and whose anonymity they wish to preserve. Nothing of the like had ever been seen before.

The series that begins with “My Brilliant Friend” has sold more than 5.5 million copies in 42 countries, with more than 2 million copies sold in the U.S. Published in America by Europa Editions, the books are the successful result of an editorial policy that favors demanding work and patience over instant gratification. For literary professionals, it is a sign that in a time of faint-heartedness, there is still another path to follow: Rather than publishing feel-good books for silly entitled people, you can reach a wide audience betting on real literature.

Where does the great enthusiasm for the tumultuous portrait of Lila and Elena (also called Lenù), the products of an underprivileged neighborhood of Naples, whose friendship begins in the late 1950s, come from? Aside from the thirst for long narratives, which we also see in the incredible boom in TV series, readers of the world seem to want to read about genuine feelings. Who among us has not dreamed of living the complex and spellbinding relationship of these “brilliant” friends? Lila gives up her studies to work in the family shoe factory, while Elena decides to receive a classical education and ends up leaving Naples to seek her professional fortune elsewhere. The proliferation of plot points and the multitude of characters, at a time when the hallmark is simplicity, is a further enticement. The fact remains that the book is first and foremost a war machine: It seduces slowly and possesses a hitherto unseen power of attraction and that irresistible je ne sais quoi that makes an overnight success.

And Ferrante? Behind her mask, the novelist distills her public statements with the stinginess of a pharmacist. The interviews she has given may be counted on one hand, and they have been exclusively conducted via email, with her Italian publisher as intermediary. Her desire for anonymity is non-negotiable. For her, once a book has been finished, it must stand on its own. Breaking her near-constant silence here, she explains how she conceived “My Brilliant Friend” in secrecy. She confides the profound joy she gets from writing and speaks of the pleasure she feels in responding to the curiosity of her readers through the volumes she writes. Far from having shut herself in an ivory tower, she discusses #metoo and launches a stirring appeal for the enduring gains of feminism. She compares the experiences of the great Hollywood actresses to those of the poor women of Naples, in a particularly stirring defense. Finally, she gives some unprecedented clues that may help us understand not who she is, but something that all in all is the same: why she writes.

Do you recall when you first had the idea for “My Brilliant Friend”?

I can’t give you a precise answer. It may have had its origin in the death of a friend of mine, or in a crowded wedding celebration, or perhaps in the need to return to themes and images of an earlier book, “The Lost Daughter.” One never knows where a story comes from; it’s the product of a variety of suggestions that, together with others that you are not aware of and never will be, excite your mind.

Did you know from the beginning that the complete work would require four volumes?

No. In its first rough draft, the story of Lila and Lenù fit very easily into a single, substantial volume. Only when I began to work on that first text did I understand that there would be two, three, four volumes.

Was the whole story planned in advance before the actual writing started?

No, I never plan my stories. A detailed outline is enough for me to lose interest in the whole thing. Even a brief oral summary makes the desire to write what I have in mind vanish. I am one of those who begin to write knowing only a few essential features of the story they intend to tell. The rest they discover line by line.

The first book of the series was published [in Italy] in 2011, the last in 2014 — a short period of time for such an ambitious endeavor. Had you written most of the series before the publication of the first volume? Can you tell us about the timing of the writing/publication of the novel?

I started in 2009 and spent a year, more or less, completing the entire story, with its various turning points. Then I began to revise, and I discovered with great pleasure that from the first page, the text was expanding; it grew and grew, becoming more detailed. At the end of 2010, given the mass of pages that had accumulated merely for telling the story of the childhood and adolescence of Lila and Lenù, the publisher and I decided to publish it in several volumes.

I imagine that when the first novel of the series was published, you were able to write in tranquility. Then came the novel’s extraordinary success, which could have jeopardized your writing. How were you able to keep your work from being disrupted by that overwhelming success?

It was a completely new experience for me. As a child, I liked telling stories and finding effective words for the small audience of kids of my age who gathered around me. It was electrifying to sense their encouragement, to feel that my listeners wanted me to continue, to pick up the story again the next day, the next week. It was a thrilling endeavor and an exciting responsibility. I think I felt something similar between 2011 and 2014. Once I was cut off from the media clamor — which was possible thanks to the absence that I chose starting in 1990 — that childhood pleasure returned: of giving form to a story while an increasingly vast and attentive audience wants you to tell more and more. While readers were reading the first volume, I was refining and finishing the second; while readers were reading the second, I was refining and completing the third; and so on.

Looking back, how would you describe the writing process? Was it effortless and smooth from the start? Or, on the contrary, did you have moments of doubt? Did you go through many drafts, with a lot of cutting and editing?

In the past, I’ve had a lot of problems with writing. I’ve always written, ever since adolescence, but it was a struggle, and I was generally dissatisfied with the result. The consequence is that I’ve rarely been convinced that I should publish. In the case of this very long story, things went differently. The first draft rolled along without running into any obstacles: The pure pleasure of telling a story dominated. Also, the work that ensued in the following years was surprisingly easy, a kind of permanent party. The honing of the four volumes, their polishing for publication, was essentially faithful to the first rough drafts and at the same time expanded and complicated the material. No crisis, in other words, no doubts, very few cuts, few rewritings, a cascade of new inserts. In my mind, there remains the impression of a tidal wave, and when it’s gone, you’re happy that you’re still alive.

In a letter to Mario Martone, you said that any distraction could make writing seem unnecessary, pointing out the fragility of it all. However, no writer seems stronger than you are, and more capable of building a colossal work of fiction. Would you agree that this combination of fragility and strength is essential to your writing?

My greatest fear is of suddenly feeling that to devote so much of my life to writing is meaningless. It’s a sensation that I’ve felt very often, and I’m afraid that I will again. I need a lot of determination, a stubborn, passionate adherence to the page, not to feel the urgency of other things to do, a more active way of spending my life. So yes, I’m fragile. It’s all too easy for me to notice the other things and feel guilty. And so it’s pride that I need, more than strength. While I’m writing, I have to believe that it’s up to me to tell this or that story, and that it would be wrong to avoid it or not to complete it to the best of my abilities.

Where does the vital energy of your writing come from?

I don’t know if my writing has the energy you say it does. Of course, if that energy exists, it’s because either it finds no other outlets or, consciously or not, I’ve refused to give it other outlets. Of course, when I write, I draw on parts of myself, of my memory, that are agitated, fragmented, that make me uncomfortable. A story, in my view, is worth writing only if its core comes from there.

In your description, Naples is rough, violent and unpleasant, and even more so in the second half of the fourth volume, where Lila and Lenù have to confront violence on every side. Have you witnessed acts of extreme violence in Naples yourself? How have Neapolitans been able to cope with violence over the years, and have they developed a particular understanding of the violence innate in human beings, and do you perhaps share that?

One has to be very fortunate not to be touched even slightly by violence and its various manifestations in Naples. But perhaps that’s true of New York, London, Paris. Naples isn’t worse than other cities in Italy or in the world. I’ve spent a lot of time coming to an understanding of it. In the past, I used to think that only in Naples did the lawful continuously lose its boundaries and become confused with the unlawful, that only in Naples did good feelings suddenly, violently, without any break, become bad feelings. Today it seems to me that the whole world is Naples and that Naples has the merit of having always presented itself without a mask. Since it is a city by nature of astonishing beauty, the ugly — criminality, violence, corruption, connivance, the aggressive fear in which we live defenseless, the deterioration of democracy — stands out more clearly.

Lila and Lenù suffer a lot throughout the books. Why did you choose to subject them to so many tragic experiences of all kinds?

It doesn’t seem to me that their sufferings are very different from those which women endure every day in every part of the world, especially if they’re born poor. Lila and Lenù fall in love, marry, are betrayed, betray, search for a role in the world, face discrimination, give birth, raise children, are sometimes happy, sometimes unhappy, experience loss and death. I do use the novelistic, but relatively sparingly. The emotional bond we establish with characters is generally what makes their story seem like an endless series of misfortunes. In life, as in novels, we are aware of the pain of others, we feel their suffering, only when we learn to love them.

In the fourth volume, why did you choose to make Nino so cruel and superficial?

I wanted to describe the effects of superficiality when it’s combined with a good education and moderate intelligence. Nino is a smart but superficial man, a type of man I’m very familiar with.

Why did the narrative require the traumatic and nightmarish disappearance of Tina, in the fourth volume, near the end of the story?

Here I will decline to give you my reasons — I prefer that readers find their own way. I can only emphasize that that event was always, even before I began to write, one of the few definite and inevitable stops on the narrative journey that I had in mind.

In life, as in novels, we are aware of the pain of others. We feel their suffering only when we learn to love them. Elena Ferrante

Lila is enthusiastic about new electronic tools, like PC computers. She seems to be driven by an instinctual brilliance, and yet, surprisingly, she understands these logical machines. Is she more unpredictable than Lenù, or is it the other way around?

Lila, in my intentions, is never enthusiastic. She applies her intelligence to whatever, for one reason or another, comes into the field of action that she herself is given, starting from the moment she is forced to leave school. It’s because her father is a shoemaker that she designs shoes. It’s because Enzo is taking correspondence courses from IBM that she becomes involved with electronics. Unlike Lenù, who uses education to force the boundaries of the neighborhood and escape, eagerly aspiring to write, Lila acts brilliantly on what turns up, without using up her own capacities in any of the things she happens to get involved in. If one wanted to put it schematically, the only long-range project that really excites Lila is the life of her friend.

In the book, women struggle. Men often take advantage of them. How do you feel about the #MeToo protests throughout the world?

I believe that they have put a spotlight on what women have always known and have always been more or less silent about. Patriarchal domination, even — despite appearances — in the West, is still very entrenched, and each of us, in the most diverse places, in the most varied forms, suffers the humiliation of being a silent victim or a fearful accomplice or a reluctant rebel or even a diligent accuser of victims rather than of the rapists. Paradoxically, I don’t feel that there are great differences between the women of the Neapolitan neighborhood whose story I told and Hollywood actresses or the educated, refined women who work at the highest levels of our socioeconomic system. And raising one’s voice, saying, “Me too,” seems a good thing, but only if we maintain a sense of proportion: Just causes in particular are damaged by excesses. Even though the power of [offenders] large and small at the center of the world or on its peripheries lies in not being ashamed of the various forms of rape they subject us to and, by means of a repulsive stratagem, in making us think that it is we who should be ashamed.

Would you predict — and would you call for — a new feminism to emerge from #MeToo?

A certain disdain for the feminism of mothers and grandmothers has spread among the younger generations in recent years. There is a conviction that the few rights we have are a fact of nature and not the product of an extremely hard cultural and political battle. I hope that things change and that girls will realize that we have millenniums of subservience behind us, that the struggle should continue and that if we lower our guard, it won’t take much to eliminate what, at least on paper, four generations of women have with great difficulty gained.

Would you agree that your novel belongs to a tradition of popular narratives (such as those of Alexandre Dumas), with a lot of action and characters, rather than to a modernist, more minimalist approach to storytelling?

No. I can decide to reuse some of the powerful devices of popular literature, but I do so, like it or not, in an era completely different from the one in which that literature performed its task. I mean that with some regret, I can in no way be Dumas. To draw on the great tradition of the popular novel doesn’t mean creating, for better or for worse, that type of narrative but rather using it, distorting it, violating its rules, disappointing its expectations, all in the service of a story of our time. Rummaging in the great historical warehouse of the novel and the anti-novel is today, in my opinion, a duty for anyone who is by profession a narrator. Diderot could write “The Nun” but also “Jacques the Fatalist.” We can erase the boundary between literary experiences that are different from one another and use them both, at the same time, to give a shape to this historical moment. A lot of action, many characters or the minimalism you allude to, taken separately, don’t carry us far today. Let’s try to get out of useless cages.

You once said that you discovered Flaubert when you were quite young, in Naples. When did you first fall in love with a book, or with a character, and also with literature?

Yes, I really loved “Madame Bovary.” As I girl, when I read, I dragged the stories and the characters into the world I lived in, and “Emma,” I don’t know why, seemed close to many of the women in my family. But long before “Madame Bovary,” I loved “Little Women,” I loved Jo. That book is at the origin of my love for writing.

Have you been influenced by women writers (possibly French, like Colette, Duras, etc.)?

As a girl, I read all kinds of things, in no particular order, and I didn’t pay attention to the names of the authors — whether they were male or female didn’t interest me. I was enthralled by [the characters] Moll Flanders, by the Marquise de Merteuil, by Elizabeth Bennet, by Jane Eyre, by Anna Karenina, and I didn’t care about the sex of the writer. Later, in the late ’70s, I began to be interested in writing by women. If I stick with French writers, I read almost all of Marguerite Duras. But the book of hers that I’ve spent the most time with, studied most closely, is “The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein”; it’s her most complex book, but the one you can learn the most from.

How do you feel about female writing? Do you believe that the category exists — that there is female writing and male writing? For example, Elsa Morante versus Hemingway? As for your own style, would you say it’s a combination of both male and female?

Certainly, female writing exists, but mainly because even writing is powerfully conditioned by the historical-cultural construction that is gender. That said, gender has an increasingly wide mesh, its rules have been relaxed, and it is more and more difficult to reconstruct what has influenced and formed us as writers. For example, I learned from the books I loved and studied, by male and female authors, and I could easily name them, but I’ve also been deeply affected by sentences whose provenance I no longer remember, whether it was male or female. The literary apprentice, in short, passes through channels that are hard to identify. So I would avoid saying that I was formed by this or that author. Above all, I would avoid saying that I was formed essentially by women’s writing, even though I very much loved and still love “House of Liars,” by Elsa Morante. We are in a period of great change, and the presentation of gender is at risk of being not only unconvincing but not really valid.

Living is a permanent disruption for writing, but without it, writing is a frivolous squiggle on water.

When you read a book, what do you appreciate most?

Unexpected events, meaningful contradictions, sudden swerves in the language, in the psychology of the characters.

In the book, motherhood is an enemy of writing (Lenù is so busy bringing up her daughters that she can’t get the concentration she needs). In your own experience, how is it best to write? Alone? Seeing no one? Living a secluded life? Or, on the contrary, going out a lot, drawing inspiration from meeting people, possibly being in love?

When one is in love, one writes very well. And, in general, if someone does not have experience of life, what does he or she write about? Spending one’s time focused only on writing is the ambition of an adolescent, of a sad adolescent. Living is a permanent disruption for writing, but without it, writing is a frivolous squiggle on water. That said, life, when it has the force of a tidal wave, can devour the time for writing. Motherhood, in my experience, is certainly capable of sweeping away the need to write. Conceiving a child, bringing it into the world, raising it is a marvelous and painful experience that over a fairly long span of time — especially if you don’t have the money to buy the time and energy of other women — takes away space and meaning from all the rest. Naturally, if the need to write is strong, you sooner or later find an arrangement that leaves you some room. But that holds for all the fundamental experiences of life. They hit us, they overwhelm us, and then, if we don’t end up dead in a corner, we write.

Was it hard to wake up one day thinking, “The story of Lila and Lenù is over. I’m finished with it.” Like giving birth and suddenly feeling empty in some way?

The metaphor of birth applied to literary works has never seemed convincing to me. The metaphor of weaving seems more effective. Writing is one of the prostheses we have invented to empower our body. Writing is a skill, it’s a forcing of our natural limits, it requires long training to assimilate techniques, use them with increasing expertise and invent new ones, if we find we need them. Weaving says all this well. We work for months, for years, weaving a text, the best that we are capable of at the moment. And when it’s finished, it’s there, forever itself, while we change and will change, ready to try out other weaves.

Have you possibly considered writing a sequel, or side stories (the way J.K. Rowling did with Harry Potter)? The ending does allow it, doesn’t it?

No, the story of Lila and Lenù is over. But I know other stories and hope I’ll be able to write them. As for publishing them, I don’t know.

Your novel values friendship more than anything else, even more than love, which is unpredictable and can vanish. Do you value friendship in that way, in your own life?

Yes, friendship has to do with love but is less at risk of being spoiled. It’s not constantly threatened by sexual practices, by the danger that exists in the mixture of feeling and the use of bodies to give and be given pleasure. Sexual friendship is more widespread today than in the past, a game of bodies and elective affinities that tries to keep at bay both the power of love and the rite of pure sex. But with what results I don’t know.

I have been asking many writers about where they write. The most recent was Tom Wolfe, describing his desk and the colors of his office walls — blue. Could you describe the place where you write (or, if not, can you tell us about some objects that you care about and which are around when you write)?

I write anywhere. I don’t have a room of my own. I know that I’d like a bare space, with white, empty walls. But it’s more an aestheticizing fantasy than a real necessity. When I write, if it’s really going well, I soon forget where I am.

This interview originally appeared in the French newsmagazine L’Obs in January 2018. Jacob is a L’Obs staff writer covering books and is the author of a nonfiction book “La guerre littéraire” (Héloïse d’Ormesson publishing).

The New Vanguard – The New York Post

Our critics chose 15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century..

By Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai

March 5, 2018

In 2016, the feminist press Emily Books held a panel in Brooklyn titled, a bit cheekily, “What Is Women’s Writing?” There was no consensus, much laughter and a warm, rowdy vibe. Eileen Myles read from a memoir in progress and Ariana Reines read a poem, wearing a dress with a pattern of a city on fire. All of this felt exactly right.

But even if it puts your teeth on edge to see “women’s writing” cordoned off in quotes, you can’t deny the particular power of today’s women writers — their intensity of style and innovation. The books steering literature in new directions — to new forms, new concerns — almost invariably have a woman at the helm, an Elena Ferrante, a Rachel Cusk, a Zadie Smith.

For Women’s History Month, The Times’s staff book critics — Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and myself, Parul Sehgal — sat down together to think about these writers who are opening new realms to us, whose books suggest and embody unexplored possibilities in form, feeling and knowledge.

As we put together a reading list, we introduced a few parameters, for sanity’s sake. We consigned ourselves to books written by women and published in the 21st century. And we limited our focus to fiction, but not without some grief. Memoir has emerged as a potent political and literary force in recent years (see the terrain-shifting work of Maggie Nelson, for example). And poets like Claudia Rankine, Solmaz Sharif and Tracy K. Smith are some of the most distinctive voices working today.

The books we selected are a diverse bunch. They are graphic novels, literary fiction and works inflected with horror and fantasy. They hail from Italy, Canada, Nigeria and South Korea. They are wildly experimental and staunchly realist.

Any list, especially one as idiosyncratic as ours, is bound to leave off some worthy contenders, like “Wolf Hall,” say, or “Gilead” or “A Visit From the Goon Squad” (to name just a few). This is not a comprehensive list, far from it. We hope it will be seen as a start — a way to single out these extraordinary books and the ability of fiction to challenge and reimagine the world. Some of the books we selected, like “Americanah,” bring a fresh slant to the novel’s natural concerns about character and fate and belonging. Others, like “How Should a Person Be?,” pluck new questions out of the air, in this instance about authorship and authenticity. They ransack classic stories (“American Innovations”) and invent genres out of whole cloth (“Her Body and Other Parties”).

Every one of these books features a woman at the center. She is brainy (Rachel Cusk’s “Outline” trilogy), grimy (“Homesick for Another World”), terrorized (“The Vegetarian”) and all of the above (the new mother in “Dept. of Speculation”). Each book’s utterly distinct style emerges as its women try to invent a language for their lives.

You could say these books are on the vanguard, but to suggest just one vanguard feels so insufficient. What makes these books so rich is their plenitude, the variety they contain and embody. “My story flows in more than one direction,” Adrienne Rich once wrote. “A delta springing from the riverbed/with its five fingers spread.” — Parul Sehgal

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante’s blockbuster novels, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, follow the entwined lives of two childhood friends with an intensity and psychological acuity that put contemporary fiction on notice. The books are also social novels of remarkable and subtle power, offering a history of postwar Italy and the terrorism of the Camorra. But everything comes filtered through the personal lives of Lila Cerullo and Elena Greco, ordinary women who would never make it into the history books. Lila and Elena grew up in the slums of Naples, in a clinch so ardent and dangerous that to call it friendship feels hideously inadequate. The series carries us through 50 years, as the women rescue and betray each other, struggle to escape the slums and their mothers, and become mothers themselves. Ferrante captures the barely contained violence of domestic life and is taboo-shattering in her unsparing and relentless exploration of the secret lives of women — their ambivalence and shame. Like Lena, these books give off “an odor of wildness.” Their intelligence cuts into the skin. — Parul Sehgal

Full article

Love Letters to Authors – Elena Ferrante – Tattered Cover

Dear Elena,

Many love you because you’re unavailable. Despite international acclaim, you have firmly chosen to remain out of the public eye, concealing your true identity and writing under a pseudonym. You choose this in part because, as you’ve said, “Books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.” How can we not be intrigued and seduced by you?

Your Neapolitan novels focus on the lives of two girls, Lenu, our narrator, and her brilliant friend, Lila. Both grow up poor in Naples, Italy during the aftermath of WWII. The books follow the pair’s divergent paths to adulthood; one becomes upwardly mobile through education and the other struggles for autonomy and a better life in their poor neighborhood. The book is just as much about the shifting political, economic, and cultural forces at play in Italy during this period. These potentially intimidating themes are brought back to earth by delivering them through the lives and experiences of the two extraordinary characters and their evolving relationship.

Your work is enormous in its scope and deeply layered, while still managing to be relatable. The Neapolitan Novels are about the nuances of friendship and intimacy between women as much as they’re about the epic struggle for autonomy and agency in a deeply unequal and shifting society. You have written a book that is unsentimental yet has a great, bursting heart, a series that explores the light and dark of friendship and the machinations of power. You capture the intense interior experiences of living in a society that works to confine you, and you also beautifully articulate the divine rage and rebellion which seethes within those subject to these oppressive experiences. You have written a ‘serious’ piece of literature with cover art that is unapologetically feminine.

Elena Ferrante, I love you because your work is transcendent. You defy definition and you irreverently rebel against attempts to categorize your writing. You gave me a new understanding of what art can be.

THE HOLD LIST: BINGE-READ A NEW SERIES

Posted by Cat, Deputy Editor on January 01, 2018

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante There’s a good chance you’ve already received recommendations for Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet from gushy friends, fervent booksellers and rhapsodic librarians. So no more excuses: Read it now, because chances are, you’ll love every soapy Italian moment. Plus, Ferrante is handling the screenplay for HBO’s forthcoming adaptation, so your Neapolitan infatuation may continue indefinitely.

Little Buddha Blog

My 2017 in fiction. neil gaiman, elena ferrante, graeme simsion and others, elena ferrante – the neapolitan novels.

Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym, not a real name. And that mystery brings up a lot of emotional discussions about the real person behind it and the nature of the books. Some think it’s an autobiography, some even argue that the writer is male, which I find hard to believe having read her books. But everybody agrees that once you start reading her Neapolitan Novels, it’s impossible to break away.

The beginning of the first book disappointed me as it is written in kind of a crude childish manner. The story is set in a poor and run-down neighbourhood of Naples, full of violence. Two friends, the schoolgirls Elena Greko and Lila Cerullo, dream, read books and plan their way out of this little and limited community, they were born into.

The protagonist, Elena Greko, annoyed me all the way to the middle of the first book. She didn’t have any self-esteem, didn’t defend her personal borders, her best friend Lila manipulated her every way possible. But the style of storytelling changed as the heroines grew up and their view of the world developed. The deep voice and the great narration of Hilary Huber, reading the text of English translation of the novel, also dragged me in.

Only much later, when I read about the earthquake in Naples I realised why so many things in this book attracted me and pushed me away the same time. I saw the scenes of the earthquake for real – the crowds of people, the destruction, the overall life put to halt for a long time – I saw it all in Armenia when I was a little child. This whole environment in the book reminded me the small town in Armenia where I spent the first years of my childhood. I was lucky in a way. Having been born to an academic family, I didn’t have to fight for the right to get an education as Elena did. But a lot of the attributes of the environment seemed familiar either from my own memories or from stories told by my parents and relatives.

So the days passed, and I couldn’t get myself away from the audiobooks, listening every moment in the car, every second when my little one was asleep or played on his own on the playground. 4 books, almost 70 hours of audio, I fully immersed in the world of Elena and I realised, why it attracted so many readers. It shows naked feelings, feelings that hurt deeply and keep alive. The heroine has an amazing understanding of those feelings, her own and other people’s. She doubts herself all the time, but at the same time, she is brave enough to write about corruption and crime without having a second thought about the criminals who can recognise themselves in her writing. I am sure, this book could be an excellent subject for a dissertation on shame and vulnerability if Brene Brown got to it. But I am also sure that it’s a book that you couldn’t stay indifferent to. You either love it or hate it.

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My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Publication Date: September 25, 2012
Genres: Fiction
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN-10: 1609450787
ISBN-13: 9781609450786
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Paperback fiction choice October: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Join the Shelf Improvement newsletter to be kept up to date with the books we’re talking about each month, or see how you can give new life to your shelves with our Shelf Improvement book subscription packages.

When we make our Shelf Improvement selections, we always try to draw out something different, something new. Invariably this means that the choice itself is a brand new title. Sometimes though, the release of a new book gives us the chance to help you discover something older. So it is with this month’s novel. The publication in September of Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child, marked the culmination of her Neapolitan quartet.

My Brilliant Friend is the novel that began the quartet. An international bestseller, it has had a ‘slow burn’ amongst British readers. For those who have discovered it, reading it is a dazzling experience. But with a reclusive author – more of whom overleaf – the book has relied on word of mouth recommendations. We sincerely hope that you are one of the many who have not yet read Elena Ferrante, and we hope that you love her work as much as we do.

My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship.

What the Guardian thought:

Elena Ferrante is an Italian novelist who was born in or near Naples. She seems once to have been married; she may have lived in Greece; she appears to be a mother. Or so we think. In our self-promoting, Twitter-saturated age, Ferrante is an outlier, an author who wishes to remain totally private. She refuses face-to-face interviews, has only given a handful of written ones (a few of her letters have been published), and makes no personal appearances; no photographs of her have been published. In 1991, shortly before the publication of her style-defining first book, Troubling Love, Ferrante sent a letter to her editor, explaining that she would not be promoting it: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.” Anonymity, she thought, would preserve “a space of absolute creative freedom”, a freedom all the more necessary because her books stick “a finger in certain wounds I have that are still infected”.

That absolute creative freedom has resulted in a series of brilliant novels. (Six are now available in English, all exquisitely translated by Ann Goldstein, an editor at the New Yorker.) Ferrante’s project is bold: her books chronicle the inner conflicts of intelligent women (professors, novelists) who, having made their way to Florence or Rome and to good jobs, find themselves confronting memories of the crude violence and misogyny of their youth. Shaken by a surprising event, they lose their grip on reality, lapse into a Neapolitan dialect full of obscenities, and are drawn into hallucinatory quests to heal old emotional injuries. The books’ taglines might be “No self can be left behind”: in Ferrante’s world, no character can escape her past.

Partly because her work describes domestic experiences – such as vivid sexual jealousy and other forms of shame – that are underexplored in fiction, Ferrante’s reputation is soaring, especially among women (Zadie Smith, Mona Simpson and Jhumpa Lahiri are fans). Her writing has a powerful intimacy – as if her characters, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, are the lenses through which we read our own minds. The novelist Claire Messud emailed, “When you write to me and say you love her work, I have a moment where I think, ‘But … Elena is my friend! My private relationship with her, so intense and so true, is one that nobody else can fully know!’ It’s strange – and rare – to feel proprietary of a book, or a writer, in that way.” Ferrante’s most recent project, known as the Neapolitan series – four novels that make up a single book – is a kind of quasi-feminist bildungsroman that also happens to be a history of Italy in the late 20th century. Nothing quite like it has ever been published. With the UK and US publication last month of the series’ third volume, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and the publication this week in Italy of the series’ much-heralded conclusion, The Story of the Lost Child, Ferrante is becoming a bona fide literary sensation – the famous writer nobody knows.

Meghan O’Rourke - Read the full review

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My Brilliant Friend: A Novel (Neapolitan Novels, 1) Paperback – September 25, 2012

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Now an HBO series: the first volume in the New York Times –bestselling “enduring masterpiece” about a lifelong friendship between two women from Naples ( The Atlantic ). Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its main characters, the fiery and unforgettable Lila and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflicted friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between two women. “An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends.” ― Entertainment Weekly “Spectacular.” ―Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air “Captivating.” ― The New Yorker

Book 1 of 4 Neapolitan Novels
Print length 331 pages
Language English
Publisher Europa Editions
Publication date September 25, 2012
Dimensions 5.34 x 0.97 x 8.22 inches
ISBN-10 1609450787
ISBN-13 978-1609450786
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Spain "Elena Ferrante's female characters are genuine works of art . . . It is clear that her novel is the child of Italian neorealism and an abiding fascination with scene." -- El Pais

About the Author

Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), which was made into a film directed by Roberto Faenza, Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), adapted by Mario Martone, and The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), soon to be a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. She is also the author of Incidental Inventions (Europa, 2019), illustrated by Andrea Ucini, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (Europa, 2016) and a children’s picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night (Europa, 2016). The four volumes known as the “Neapolitan quartet” ( My Brilliant Friend , The Story of a New Name , Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay , and The Story of the Lost Child ) were published by Europa Editions in English between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend , the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Europa Editions; First Edition (September 25, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 331 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1609450787
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1609450786
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.53 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.34 x 0.97 x 8.22 inches
#298 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
#523 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
#941 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Book One of a memorable quartet

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About the author

Elena ferrante.

Elena Ferrante is the author of seven novels, including four New York Times bestsellers; The Beach at Night, an illustrated book for children; and, Frantumaglia, a collection of letters, literary essays, and interviews. Her fiction has been translated into over forty languages and been shortlisted for the MAN Booker International Prize. In 2016 she was named one of TIME’s most influential people of the year and the New York Times has described her as “one of the great novelists of our time.” Ferrante was born in Naples.

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Foreword Reviews
Comics & Graphic Novels / Translations

My Brilliant Friend

The graphic novel.

Chiara Lagani Elena Ferrante Mara Cerri (Illustrator) Ann Goldstein (Translator) Europa Editions ( Oct 10, 2023 ) Hardcover $26.00 ( 256pp ) 978-1-60945-946-8

Two friends share their dreams and troubles in Chiara Lagani and Mara Cerri’s graphic novel adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend .

Elena and Lila have known each other for decades, so Elena is not surprised when Lila goes missing. Over the course of their long friendship, they fought, got into trouble, watched dreams come and go, and pushed each other farther than they ever would have gone alone. But in spite of Lila’s cleverness, drive, and ruthless streak, freedom proved more elusive than she ever expected.

Lila, a bright girl stifled by her unsupportive parents, takes her frustrations out on Elena with cutting remarks and cruel gestures. But even when they hate each other, the girls are never far apart, bound by what they have in common: their shared terror of Don Achille, a mysterious neighbor shrouded in frightening rumors; their changing bodies; and their desire to escape their insular, oppressive neighborhood.

A muted palette and faded colors evoke a sense of unhappy nostalgia similar to looking at a water-stained photograph. The scenes of Elena’s summer in Ischia are rendered in bright blues and yellows—a stark contrast to the terrible event that befalls her there. Frequent close-ups of people’s faces show subtle but deep emotions during intense moments.

The story culminates at Lila’s wedding. The occasion she anticipated as her long-sought escape route to a better life turns sickening because of betrayal, which is depicted with minimal text and stark shades of white, black, and yellow. But as the opening pages show, hope does not vacate a person’s life: it merely waits for the right moment to break free.

My Brilliant Friend is a graphic novel about the ups and downs of a lifelong, life-changing friendship.

Reviewed by Eileen Gonzalez September / October 2023

Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

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10 Facts About ‘My Brilliant Friend’

R eaders around the world were transported to post-war Naples by My Brilliant Friend ( L’amica Geniale in Italian), the first entry of Elena Ferrante’s sprawling but intensely personal Neapolitan quartet. Though the novel’s famously anonymous author can be taciturn and even contradictory in interviews, we can glean some insights about the book from her limited public words and those of her collaborators.

1. Author Elena Ferrante considers it part of a larger novel.

Many readers of My Brilliant Friend were happy to learn Elena and Lila’s story doesn’t end with the novel’s last page. The book is the first of a four-part series (collectively known as the Neapolitan Novels ) that follows the contentious friendship of two Italian women from girlhood to late life. Though they were published separately, Ferrante has stated she considers My Brilliant Friend , The Story of a New Name , Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay , and The Story of the Lost Child four parts of “a single novel .”

2. My Brilliant Friend is hailed as a modern classic.

My Brilliant Friend was published in Italy in 2011, and it’s already regarded as a modern classic. Entertainment Weekly declared the four Neapolitan Novels to be the best book series of the decade in 2019. Other publications have gone further with their praise; according to lists from Vulture and The Guardian , My Brilliant Friend ranks among the best books of the 21st century so far.

3. It’s been translated into 45 languages.

In addition to praise from critics, My Brilliant Friend has received massive financial success. Less than a decade after its release, the first installment of the Neapolitan Novels series had sold more than 5 million copies. The series has been published in 45 languages .

4. The author’s true identity is a mystery.

Reading the richly rendered account of a decades-long friendship between the two main characters of the books that make up her Neapolitan quartet, many readers felt they knew Ferrante themselves. That literary intimacy was complicated by the fact that Ferrante’s true identity remains unconfirmed ; “Elena Ferrante” is a pen name.

Frantumaglia (a “jumble of fragments”) is a collection of Ferrante’s ostensibly non-fiction writing. Despite her self-professed goal “to orchestrate lies that always tell … the truth” in interviews, those fragments offer an opportunity to draw conclusions about the “real” Ferrante. Naples apparently holds a central place in her life, though she “ran away as soon as [she] could.” She loves to write, but is beset by fear and self-doubt. The book offers numerous explanations for Ferrante’s anonymity, including “a somewhat neurotic desire for intangibility” and a lack of “physical courage.” These self-deprecating remarks surely represent a facet of Ferrante’s reluctance, but she suggests a deeper current guiding her decision: “Writing with the knowledge that I don’t have to appear produces a space of absolute creative freedom. It’s a corner of my own that I intend to defend.”

5. The cover is intentionally cheesy.

My Brilliant Friend is regarded as a modern literary classic, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it based on its appearance. The covers used throughout the series, which feature heavily edited photographs of faceless stock models, have been compared to those of supermarket romance novels . The publishers claim the incongruous cheesiness is intentional. Ferrante’s art director told Slate in 2015, “many people didn’t understand the game we we’re playing, that of, let’s say, dressing an extremely refined story with a touch of vulgarity.”

6. The first draft let both friends narrate.

One of the driving tensions of My Brilliant Friend revolves around identifying the eponymous brilliant friend. Readers might easily imagine the title being spoken by the novel’s narrator, Elena “Lenù” Greco. She describes her friend Lila as “the best among us” while calling herself “second in everything.” And though the book revolves, in many ways, around the ever-changing perceptions the girls have of themselves and one another, it still can feel revelatory to read, for the first time, the moment when Lila tells Elena (emphasis added), “you’re my brilliant friend , you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.”

This sudden yet seemingly inevitable upending of our expectations may not have landed with the same weight if the narrative wasn’t told completely from Elena’s perspective. Interestingly, the choice to tell the story in this way wasn’t always clear to Ferrante.

She told an interviewer that “there were long episodes” written by Lila in the first draft of the novel. Ferrante eventually decided that the book required a single narrator, leaving readers to wonder what Lila might have written about the moment her formal education ends, or imagining the prose she may have crafted in writing her story of The Blue Fairy .

7. It was adapted into an HBO series.

Following their massive critical and commercial success, it was only a matter of time before Ferrante’s Neopolitan Novels were adapted for the screen. The first season of the television series My Brilliant Friend, a co-production from HBO and Italian broadcaster Rai, premiered in 2018 . Though it shares a title with the first book in the series, the show will eventually cover all four novels, with each season adapting a different installment. The third season aired in 2022, and the release date of the fourth and final season has yet to be announced.

8. Ferrante can’t pin down the inspiration for the novel.

My Brilliant Friend’s Italian director Saverio Costanzo reportedly faced budgetary and schedule restrictions, and he nearly removed the novel’s culminating wedding scene from his adaptation. Ferrante, whom he collaborated with through email, apparently pressed upon him : “Listen, the first moment I thought about My Brilliant Friend , the first image I had was a banquet, a very vulgar banquet of Neapolitan life. Please put the banquet back in.”

Costanzo acquiesced, but he would perhaps not be entirely surprised to learn that his enigmatic colleague has told different versions of the novel’s inception. In an interview , Ferrante declared that she’s unable to give a “precise answer” identifying the original idea for the book, mentioning a friend’s death, a wedding, and even her own novel, The Lost Daughter , as possible kernels that would eventually develop into the four-part story.

9. A graphic novel adaptation is coming October 2023.

Since being adapted for the screen, My Brilliant Friend has been reimagined as a graphic novel. The new book from Europa Editions features Mara Cerri’s illustrations and text adapted by Chiara Lagani from Ferrante’s original text. Ann Goldstein, who translated the novels, also translated the illustrated adaptation for English readers. It’s slated to hit shelves in October 2023, and is currently available for preorder .

10. My Brilliant Friend is a literary funhouse mirror.

Events and identities seem to echo throughout Ferrante’s work, not just within individual novels but through wide swaths of literature. Ferrante has said that she “read[s] a lot, but in a disorderly way,” and one can imagine her writing, among other things, serving a kind of organizing and complicating function as she traces and retraces memories, real and literary.

Elena is the name of the narrator in My Brilliant Friend , and of the main character’s child in Ferrante’s earlier book, The Lost Daughter . It’s also the first name in her nom de plume, of course, an identity with its own echoes of the Italian author Elsa Morante , whose work Ferrante has expressed admiration for on numerous occasions. From Virgil to Louisa May Alcott to Lenù and Ferrante themselves, writers seem to float in and out of the book’s margins, influencing the author and characters all at once.

This article was originally published on mentalfloss.com as 10 Facts About ‘My Brilliant Friend’ .

IMAGES

‎My Brilliant Friend on Apple Books
My Brilliant Friend
My Brilliant Friend: Series Three
My Brilliant Friend: Book Review
My Brilliant Friend
My brilliant friend

COMMENTS

'My Brilliant Friend,' by Elena Ferrante, and More
Dec. 21, 2012. MY BRILLIANT FRIEND. Book One: Childhood, Adolescence. By Elena Ferrante. Europa Editions, paper, $17. Elena Greco, known to all as the porter's daughter in her poor, 1950s Naples ...
My Brilliant Friend (The Neapolitan Novels, #1)
Elena Ferrante, Ann Goldstein (Translator) 4.04. 334,644 ratings30,315 reviews. A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women ...
Book Review: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
My Brilliant Friend is the gripping first volume in Elena Ferrante's widely acclaimed Neapolitan Novels. This exquisitely written quartet creates an unsentimental portrait of female experience, rivalry and friendship never before seen in literature. The story of Elena and Lila begins in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood on the ...
The Sweet Linearity of "My Brilliant Friend"
By Emily Nussbaum. December 3, 2018. Illustration by Gérard Dubois. In one of the loveliest sequences in Elena Ferrante's novel " My Brilliant Friend ," two girls read " Little Women ...
Review: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
My Brilliant Friend is the first book out of four in the Neapolitan Novels written by Elena Ferrante. Similar to the author of the series The Series of Unfortunate Events uses the pen name Lemony Snicket, the author of the Neapolitan Novels, employs the pen name, Elena Ferrante.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (book review)
"My Brilliant Friend" is the first book of the four Neapolitan novels (where Neapolitan refers to pertaining to Naples), written by Elena Ferrante*. The author mentioned in an interview that the four books come together as "a single novel", published in multiple parts for reasons of length and duration ( Harper's Magazine, 2014 ).
Review: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
My Brilliant Friend conceives of friendship as a kind of Faustian pact, as suggested by the epigraph from Goethe's translation. "It was as if," Elena writes, "Because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other". At its most pure, their friendship is ecstatic, evoking the pleasure and richness of ...
My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante Book Review
The same goes for gender - both girls seem very aware of what is expected of young women- sometimes they fall in line, sometimes they are very happy to subvert the norm. My Brilliant Friend throws a light on the misogyny that can easily become accepted within small communities. You wonder how either girl became so brilliant in these surroundings.
My Brilliant Friend
My Brilliant Friend. by Elena Ferrante. Publication Date: September 25, 2012. Genres: Fiction. Paperback: 336 pages. Publisher: Europa Editions. ISBN-10: 1609450787. ISBN-13: 9781609450786. Growing up on the tough streets of Naples in the 1950s, friends Elena and Lila learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else.
Book Marks reviews of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
[Ferrante's] talents are in full force in My Brilliant Friend, which follows the relationship between two women: studious, quietly determined Elena, who narrates, and the canny, enigmatic Lila, beginning with their girlhood outside Naples in the aftermath of World War II …Their stories, we understand, are irrevocably intertwined, as are their certain-to-be-divergent paths; the mystery of ...
My Brilliant Friend
My Brilliant Friend. by Elena Ferrante. Publication Date: September 25, 2012. Genres: Fiction. Paperback: 336 pages. Publisher: Europa Editions. ISBN-10: 1609450787. ISBN-13: 9781609450786. From one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, comes this ravishing and generous-hearted novel about Elena and Lila, two girls who learn to rely on each ...
All Book Marks reviews for My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
[Ferrante's] talents are in full force in My Brilliant Friend, which follows the relationship between two women: studious, quietly determined Elena, who narrates, and the canny, enigmatic Lila, beginning with their girlhood outside Naples in the aftermath of World War II …Their stories, we understand, are irrevocably intertwined, as are their certain-to-be-divergent paths; the mystery of ...
Summary and reviews of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Book Summary. From one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila, set in a vibrant and colorful modern-day Naples. Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to this penetrating portrait of two marvelous women.
My Brilliant Friend review
A dapting much-loved books for the screen is risky and can be fraught, especially if a series has been as adored as Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels.The characters live so vividly in readers ...
MY BRILLIANT FRIEND
The book is full of action and just as full of plot holes, including scenes that are illogical or disconnected from the main narrative. Secondary characters are ignored until a scene requires them to assist Violet or to be killed in the endless violence that plagues their school. Unrelenting, and not in a good way. 0.
My Brilliant Friend
The Neapolitan Quartet - Book One . Translated by Ann Goldstein . 2012, pp. 336, Paperback. $ 18.00 / £ 10.99. ISBN: 9781609450786. A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Elena Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these ...
My Brilliant Friend
This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week. Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
7. It can be assumed that Elena's voice is behind the title of the novel, referring to Lila as "her brilliant friend.". However, toward the end of the girls' story, it is Lila who praises Elena, and encourages her to be "the best of all, boys and girls" (pg. 312). Is this dialogue between the two girls symbolic of Lila's surrender?
My Brilliant Friend review
M y Brilliant Friend (Sky Atlantic) never quite had the breakout moment that a series of its quality deserved. Perhaps this second series will bring it the audience to match the acclaim. The ...
Paperback fiction choice October: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
To buy My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante for £9.59 (RRP £11.99) visit bookshop.theguardian.com My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous hearted story about two friends, Elena and ...
My Brilliant Friend: A Novel (Neapolitan Novels, 1)
I enjoyed reading My Brilliant Friend. I gave the book five stars. The novel involved the lives of Elena Greco (Lenu), and Rafaela Cerullo (Lila). The girls resided in a poverty-stricken area of Naples, Italy, post Second World War, early 1950s. The Black Market was still in existence and some families gained power and status in their neighborhood.
Review of My Brilliant Friend (9781609459468)
Hardcover $26.00 ( 256pp) 978-1-60945-946-8. Two friends share their dreams and troubles in Chiara Lagani and Mara Cerri's graphic novel adaptation of Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. Elena and Lila have known each other for decades, so Elena is not surprised when Lila goes missing. Over the course of their long friendship, they fought ...
10 Facts About 'My Brilliant Friend'
1. Author Elena Ferrante considers it part of a larger novel. Many readers of My Brilliant Friend were happy to learn Elena and Lila's story doesn't end with the novel's last page.The book ...

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San Diego Jewish World: Book Review: ‘My Brilliant Friend’

and Try to Do Our Best" rel="bookmark" href="https://elenaferrante.com/reviews/my-brilliant-friend/elena-ferrante-interview-merve-emre/" id="4184" >We Tell a Story and Try to Do Our Best

TV Review: ‘My Brilliant Friend’ on HBO

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In a rare interview, Elena Ferrante describes the writing process behind the Neapolitan novels – Los Angeles Times

Do you recall when you first had the idea for “My Brilliant Friend”?

Did you know from the beginning that the complete work would require four volumes?

Was the whole story planned in advance before the actual writing started?

The first book of the series was published [in Italy] in 2011, the last in 2014 — a short period of time for such an ambitious endeavor. Had you written most of the series before the publication of the first volume? Can you tell us about the timing of the writing/publication of the novel?

I imagine that when the first novel of the series was published, you were able to write in tranquility. Then came the novel’s extraordinary success, which could have jeopardized your writing. How were you able to keep your work from being disrupted by that overwhelming success?

Looking back, how would you describe the writing process? Was it effortless and smooth from the start? Or, on the contrary, did you have moments of doubt? Did you go through many drafts, with a lot of cutting and editing?

Where does the vital energy of your writing come from?

Lila and Lenù suffer a lot throughout the books. Why did you choose to subject them to so many tragic experiences of all kinds?

In the fourth volume, why did you choose to make Nino so cruel and superficial?

Why did the narrative require the traumatic and nightmarish disappearance of Tina, in the fourth volume, near the end of the story?

Lila is enthusiastic about new electronic tools, like PC computers. She seems to be driven by an instinctual brilliance, and yet, surprisingly, she understands these logical machines. Is she more unpredictable than Lenù, or is it the other way around?

In the book, women struggle. Men often take advantage of them. How do you feel about the #MeToo protests throughout the world?

Would you predict — and would you call for — a new feminism to emerge from #MeToo?

Would you agree that your novel belongs to a tradition of popular narratives (such as those of Alexandre Dumas), with a lot of action and characters, rather than to a modernist, more minimalist approach to storytelling?

You once said that you discovered Flaubert when you were quite young, in Naples. When did you first fall in love with a book, or with a character, and also with literature?

Have you been influenced by women writers (possibly French, like Colette, Duras, etc.)?

How do you feel about female writing? Do you believe that the category exists — that there is female writing and male writing? For example, Elsa Morante versus Hemingway? As for your own style, would you say it’s a combination of both male and female?

When you read a book, what do you appreciate most?

Was it hard to wake up one day thinking, “The story of Lila and Lenù is over. I’m finished with it.” Like giving birth and suddenly feeling empty in some way?

Have you possibly considered writing a sequel, or side stories (the way J.K. Rowling did with Harry Potter)? The ending does allow it, doesn’t it?