My Brilliant Friend

What's the title?

My Brilliant Friend

Who wrote it?

Elena Ferrante, tr. Ann Goldstein

When was it written?

2011

What star rating would you give it?

4.5/5

Would I recommend it?

Yes, absolutely.

What's it about? (non-spoilers)

In the 1950s, in a poor neighborhood of Naples, two girls named Lila and Elena form a complex and intimate friendship. Told from Elena’s perspective, the novel follows the two girls’ coming of age, the evolution of their friendship, and their better acquaintance with the ways of the world.

What did you think? (spoilers)

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels have been massively popular for quite some time now. They’ve been optioned for a TV series. An expose circulated speculating as to the identity of the author behind Ferrante’s nom de plume. The backlash against that expose made its own headlines for a while. And through it all my name languished on my library’s hold list – just waiting to get my hands on the novel behind the phenomena. Finally, after literal months of waiting – occasioned by what I can only assume was some patron’s negligent loss of my library’s first copy – my hold arrived.

It was worth the wait.

My Brilliant Friend is not the best book I’ve ever read, nor is it my favorite book I’ve ever read. But, my god, is it beautiful. Readers read for lots of reasons – for world-building, for characters, for plot, for escapism, for prose, for examining the human condition. I read for story. My Brilliant Friend is not a story book. It is literature – it is art. And I absolutely loved every second of it.

Each sentence feels like a delicacy or a blown-glass sculpture. Ferrante draws her characters with so much complexity and depth they feel real. Obviously, her two main characters, Elena and Lila, receive the lion’s share of her focus and consequently the audience are allowed to explore more of their psyche – but even minor characters are bestowed with fully-realized personalities, desires, and flaws. These characters don’t follow any prescribed logic besides their own internal compasses. The characters flow into each others’ lives in messy, unpredictable ways.

I enjoyed Elena as an unreliable narrator. We only hear the story from her perspective, and I enjoyed the challenge of picking apart her friends’ and family’s behavior for myself when she was incapable of or disinclined to figuring it out herself.

The time of My Brilliant Friend, both the childhoods of our main characters and the 1950s, is never romanticized. The world our characters inhabit is dangerous and systemically unjust. Poverty and domestic violence are pervasive, and those difficulties are compounded by the misogyny lobbed at our protagonists.

I loved that what connected Elena and Lila were their minds. There’s more to their friendship, obviously. They first connect on account of childhood bravery. As they grow older and the men in the neighborhood force the girls into a premature awareness of their sexuality, their comparative desirability/experience becomes a method of competition between each other but also a strange basis for a new kind of intimacy with each other. It’s as though their mutual experiences give them a new level of understanding of each other. But more than juvenile courage and more than adolescent awakenings, the thing that bonds Elena and Lila is their intelligence. In their small neighborhood, they two alone seem capable of recognizing and valuing the other’s mental capabilities. They are both each other’s brilliant friend. For intellectual enterprise to serve as the foundation of their complicated female friendship rang true to me.

All of My Brilliant Friend rang true to me. Reading this novel felt somewhat like reading a documentary crossed with a book of poetry. There is a story in My Brilliant Friend, and the end of the novel has one of the more gasp-inducing cliffhangers I’ve read. But My Brilliant Friend is less of watching a film and more of viewing a landscape painting, less going on a quest and more taking a stroll through a garden. It may not be what I normally go for, but, oh, is it lovely.

Images: Goodreads

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