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My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante
2012, 331 pages
Fiction
In 2011, celebrated Italian novelist Elena Ferrante – author of The Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter – published this stark and stunning tale of life in an impoverished Neapolitan suburb during the 1950s. The first in a trilogy, My Brilliant Friend was translated into English in 2012.
The story is narrated by Elena Greco, an intelligent and observant girl maturing under the scornful eye of her crippled mother. As a child, Elena strikes up a friendship with Lila Cerullo, a girl with an exquisite intellect and a talent for crossing lines. My Brilliant Friend follows the girls’ friendship through the first 15 years of their lives, and captures their development with a keen and penetrating prose. As they mature, Lila and Elena face many of the same obstacles as their neighbors: violence, poverty, love, relationships and a pervading disdain for education. More crucially, the girls find that their paths, which have always been in perfect synchronicity since childhood, seem very likely to perge.
Alongside this story, Ferrante captures with admirable skill the intense and often brutal atmosphere of Naples after the war, at a time when the black market prospered, men were expected to return every insult with blows, and education was nearly non-existent. Ferrante places her timid protagonists into a country teeming with anger, and the result is memorable.
If you enjoy this novel, the library also owns the next two books in the series: The Story of a New Name (2013) and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014).
