Discover new books on Goodreads
Meet your next favorite book

Kelly's Reviews > My Brilliant Friend

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Rate this book
Clear rating

by
94602

When did we all start talking about Elena Ferrante, guys? I can’t remember- was it last year? Maybe 2013? I know she’s been writing for far longer than that, but it was definitely only recently that she became A Thing. Whenever it was, we should have been talking about her sooner.

And with different words. Better words. Words whose value hasn’t been sucked out by the marketing blurbs they’ve been a part of, with the same accompanying modifiers (if I never hear “compulsively readable” again that would be okay with me, marketing departments). Too many eyes will glaze over when I use these words that would once have excited the grab-the-keys-and-run-to-the-bookstore response this book deserves. And that might make you, like me, not pick this up for absolutely years after you read this.

So I need better words. Words that will make you pick it up tomorrow. Because I still can’t believe I somehow developed the impression that this was a book that I could miss. How did I somehow think this wasn’t a series of books that I should have had on pre-order every time like it was Game of Thrones? (… or, you know, something better than that given the quality of the last installment.)

But in the absence of an unused vocabulary floating around somewhere I’ll try to convince you with the words I have, because- and please read this in the tone of your dad giving advice at a crucial life moment-I don’t want you to make the mistakes that I did, sonny boy.

How do I love this novel? Let me count the ways…

* * *

My Brilliant Friend is the first installment of Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy. It is an old woman’s memories of her friendship with a girl named Lila in the slums of 1950s Naples. They are both clever girls growing up in the midst of a grinding cycle of poverty and isolation generated by the problems of the post-war, post-Fascist Italian state (and the pre-war, mostly-in-name-only Italian “unification”). Both of them, along with the other children of the neighborhood, have a possibility of escaping the cycle and breaking out into the new Marshall Plan supported dolce vita- and some of the story is about that. But not mostly. Mostly it’s about what it’s like to be blessed/cursed enough to have a childhood friend who is the center of your universe, and how that friendship can literally change all the things in your life, and make you the person that you are in the process of becoming.

Straightforward enough, yes? You’ve read that before. Sure…but then why is it so poignant? Why did I spend hours upon hours with this book yesterday, unable to put it down? How did such an ordinary story work such undeniable magic?

There are many answers to that, but let’s start with this: The story. The plot was the most natural, organic thing I’ve ever read. She started telling it and kept on doing it without pauses for literary reflections or metaphors, or for pretty much anything that might send the “oh right, this is fiction,” signal to your brain. She let the damn thing be and run its course without interfering. She didn’t shy away from having her character be involved in all the quotidian things of childhood or adolescence- zits, dresses, best friends, boyfriends, finding out what bad words mean, and endless status competitions. But never once did she make it feel tired or like something I’ve read a zillion times. Nobody came equipped with signifier clue words or pre-packaged, recognizable YA storylines, with immature emotional truths being repeated in italics, in between descriptions of clothing and hair. And you know what was fascinating? There totally was a popular girl everyone wanted here, there were mean bullies, nerdy intellectuals, hot jocks, slutty cheerleaders, apparently motivationlessly awful villains, and our heroine was even intellectual and had glasses. But that never occurred to me until I started to write this review.

This is mostly because Ferrante allows her characters a kind of full, honest emotional range of expression that I’ve rarely seen in books about children and teenagers. She conveys the pettiness and center-of-the-universe feeling that characterizes childhood without ever quite making you detach from or become disgusted with the characters involved. When someone’s doll is thrown away, and another character retaliates, instead of rolling her eyes and refereeing whose fault it is, Ferrante just keeps staring at both characters and watching them go through that moment and what happens afterwards. There’s no adult intervention, whether that’s with an adult character or with an adult narrator.

As is typical with Ferrante, this is deliberate a choice that serves several purposes at once. One of which is to highlight the lack of fully developed adults anywhere in these children’s lives. This is one of the many effective ways Ferrante finds to seep you in the atmosphere of the Naples neighborhood where this all takes place, right from the beginning, but beautifully, dropping it in between the cracks of action and thought:

“I waited to see if Lila would have second thoughts and turn back. I knew what she wanted to do, I had hoped that she would forget about it, but in vain. The street lamps were not yet lit, nor were the lights on the stairs. From the apartments came irritable voices. To follow Lila, I had to leave the bluish light of the courtyard and enter the black of the doorway. When I finally made up my mind, I saw nothing at first, there was only an odor of old junk and DDT. Then I got used to the darkness… We kept to the side where the wall was, she two steps ahead, I two steps behind, torn between shortening the distance or letting it increase. I can still feel my shoulder inching along the flaking wall and the idea that the steps were very high, higher than my own apartment across the way… There was an odor of sautéing garlic. Maria, Don Achille’s wife, would put me in the pan of boiling oil, the children would eat me, he would suck my head the way my father did with mullets…”

Never once does she need to set aside pages and pages of description as some authors do, because it’s given to us in pieces like that, while we’re following the action, until we have a full picture of a crumbling courtyard of a creaky old apartment building on a beaten down street in a bad part of town without ever really knowing how we got there.

She also does a lot, effectively, with repetition. Repetition shows us a lot about why the characters are the way that they are. The violence of the neighborhood, in particular, is depicted with a frighteningly normalizing banality. We see violence happen over and over again- not as an isolated, cinematic horror, the fright of one’s life- as something mentioned as an afterthought, “they argued, and then sometimes, after dinner, he beat her.” The deliberate use of “sometimes” was chilling, like we’re not even hearing about all the other times when it happens. It’s not even worthy of comment. What’s even more terrifying is the dispassionate, impartial gaze turned on it by a narrator who has never known anything different. It only occurs to the sixty year old character who is the actual narrator of the story about two-thirds of the way through to get outside of herself and mention that she realizes now that her neighborhood was not the norm- it’s like in telling the story she put herself back under the spell and forgot that herself. It takes something 2015 Hollywood-level cinematically, publicly violent for anyone to feel the slightest bit bad about something that happens-(view spoiler) The pernicious, weed-like growth of a particularly violent form of aggressive masculinity is at the root of most of the problem, but its societal reinforcement and indeed, the respect shown for those who display it, is shown, through this enforced repetition, to be the true cancer that not even young boys with the best of intentions and a deliberate intent to break the cycle seem to be able to escape. (Not to mention the girls who never had a chance to begin with.)

Something that further increased the powerfully true impression I got from her writing was her gentle use of not-quite chronological time. Time in the novel wavers into being, then very slowly circles back to its origin point until you’ve almost forgotten where you started. But even this tried and true literary device never felt like a literary device. Again, it was so well and seamlessly executed it felt like a natural, organic process that was necessary to telling the story. It was like what happens when someone is telling you a story and realizes you don’t have the context to understand it, so they back it up and up until they feel they’ve given you the whole story, and then only just remember why they were telling you the story in the first place.

But beyond that, the prose itself: Ferrante has that magical Tolstoy thing. The power of it isn’t in the individual sentence, which I guarantee you will be perfectly ordinary, but a string of sentences put together in just the right order. It is almost never going to be a striking word choice that nabs you, but rather a continuous flow that lulls you into its depths so that you’re surprised awake occasionally, just realizing that it’s happened to you. I honestly can’t think of anybody else except Tolstoy when he’s not ranting or religious, or Austen when she wasn’t being mischievous or clever, who can give the impression of being so utterly absent, as if someone simply left a kind of recorder on that would let you see what was going on inside and outside of the characters’ heads.

But while the plot is compelling enough, the hot, poisonous atmosphere and her rare gift for naturalistic, barely-there powerful writing are more than enough reason to show up, that's what you notice later, after you’re done and you can breathe normally again.
At the time all you really notice are these girls. It’s Lila. Lila, Lila, Lila. If you’ve ever been friends with someone who was demonstrably smarter than you (or you were so convinced they were as to make no difference), then you know Lila. You know what it’s like to know that no matter what you do you’ll always feel inferior- whether they praise you or encourage you or not. It makes so much sense to me that Lila was the transformative experience for Elena. She’s a heady thing for a child to experience. She is a person who is seemingly born free of gaze. She’ll process what you say for the words you actually use- not the social status you have while you say it, not the yearning she has to be like you or not like you at all, nor does she care about the image she is projecting to you. One of the things the narrator worries about in Lila in 1950s Italy is that she doesn’t have the instinctive, eyes down response that the other girls do when they are getting harassed on the street. Lila threatens people with a knife, or simply asks them curious questions about what on earth they’re talking about when they do that to her. She literally stares down or completely ignores a gaze that is the all-encompassing foundation, path and walls of all the women (and, to be frank, most of the men) around her. That’s an intoxicating cocktail of a thing to be around. A possibly dangerous, even ruinous thing to be around, if you’re a smart, insecure teenager with an imagination and a constant societal message that you are not good enough.

Like Elena, the narrator. Her character development was very cleverly done. She had us, and Elena, so focused on her friend that her own story seems to happen under the radar, in asides, as if just necessary for context and to get us to the next Lila story. Which is a brilliant way to depict someone with the kind of self-esteem issues and brewing existential problems that are the major driver of most of Elena’s choices. She becomes a person somewhere along the way, without even realizing it- she builds an entire personality around Lila, the only thing she can see as worth motivating herself for in her horrible little dirty world. But it makes her beautiful moment of self-awareness at the end of the novel all the more poignant. She is shocked to discover that a disappointment she has in her own life, unrelated to Lila in any way, is important to her. This realization of her own, independent being as a person means she is able to have her first out of body experience, and look beyond the isolation and suffocation of her neighborhood to see herself with a gaze that might actually benefit her, in the end:

“I discovered that I had considered the publication of those few lines, my name in print, as a sign that I really had a destiny, that the hard work of school would surely lead upward, somewhere, that Maestra Oliviero had been right to push me forward and to abandon Lila. “Do you know what plebs are?” “Yes, Maestra.” And at that moment I knew what plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts. The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and was now leaning against my father’s shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, at the sexual allusions of the metal dealer. They were all laughing, even Lila, with the expression of one who has a role and will play it to the utmost.”

But most of all there is the friendship between these two girls. The content of it is some of the most honest that I’ve seen. It’s neither a sentimental Victorian ode to sisterly support nor is it as cynical as some more modern reinterpretations of female friendship would suggest. It trusts you to understand that these are real people and to acknowledge that because you are willing to acknowledge it within yourself without ever telling you to acknowledge it. We know that the narrator doesn’t mean it maliciously, necessarily, when she needs a boyfriend because she thinks her friend has one, that she throws her friend’s doll down a hole because her friend did, that she feels better if she looks a little better than her sometimes. We also see that whenever something truly bad happens to her friend she notices it and she helps- she gets her through some tough situations when she has no obligation to. We also see how fixated she is on her friend, and how nothing is really worth it to her if she doesn’t share in it with her: she shows us what it means when your life is really, as literally as possible, almost entirely about your perception of another person. We see this so often in the context of romantic literature, but almost never in the context of friendship. I think the latter is far more common

I do not claim the novel is faultless. There were two moments where her assured voice broke and she fell down into the exaggerated metaphorical exercises I was so happy to see absent from most of the book. (Though one of those times is forgivable, because it came from a dramatic adolescent who dramatically drew out the metaphor herself in the weird, obsessive way that teenagers do. I also did wish that we might have spent slightly more time with the narrator herself, in her own home and her own life so that we might have gotten to know her better. But that was a reader’s wish for a sympathetic character to know herself better, mostly- that’s not what this story was about. It would have been the poorer for following what I wanted it to do. The faults were mostly the faults of the character, put there deliberately to emphasize a character trait.

So perhaps it is nearly faultless after all. What did I miss? Maybe someone else can tell me where she went wrong, because I can’t find it. Or I probably could, actually, but I think I’ll be much too busy reading the next installment: The Story of a New Name. Which, I predict, is exactly what you’ll be doing as soon as you finish this book.

Go on. I’ll get you started…..

“My friendship with Lila began the day we decided to go up the dark stairs that led, step after step, flight after flight, to the door of Don Achille’s apartment. I remember the violet light of the courtyard, the smells of a warm spring evening. The mothers were making dinner, it was time to go home, but we delayed, challenging each other, without ever saying a word, testing our courage…..”


(This book originally appeared on my blog at: http://shouldacouldawouldabooks.com/2... )
219 likes · flag

Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read My Brilliant Friend.
Sign In »

Reading Progress

February 20, 2015 – Shelved
February 20, 2015 – Shelved as: to-read
June 20, 2015 – Started Reading
June 21, 2015 –
page 88
26.59% "You guys I really like this book. Not even all "oh this is so brilliant, look at the craft and wordsmithing!" I honestly like the story and am intrigued by the characters. I expected this to be an obligation. Instead I now expect it to be a pure pleasure."
June 22, 2015 –
page 300
90.63% "In the end she read it. It seemed to me that she shrank, as if I had unloaded a weight on her. And I had the impression that she was making a painful effort to free from some corner of herself the old Lila, the one who read, wrote, drew-the naturalness of an instinctive reaction."
June 22, 2015 – Shelved as: 20th-century-postwar-to-late
June 22, 2015 – Shelved as: examined-lives
June 22, 2015 – Shelved as: identity-crisis
June 22, 2015 – Shelved as: its-the-quiet-ones
June 22, 2015 – Shelved as: fiction
June 22, 2015 – Shelved as: owned
June 22, 2015 – Shelved as: shes-quite-an-original-my-dear
June 22, 2015 – Finished Reading

Comments Showing 1-45 of 45 (45 new)

dateDown arrow    newest »

Kalliope Waiting for the review... I still have to read my first Ferrante.


Kelly Oh you should. I'm so glad I did. Review later today or tomorrow.


Agnieszka Oh , I really liked this one . Will be curious what you think of it .


Kelly And there's the review! Done! I obviously had a lot to say.


message 5: by Cheryl (new) - added it

Cheryl "Ferrante has that magical Tolstoy thing. The power of it isn’t in the individual sentence, which I guarantee you will be mostly perfectly ordinary, but a string of sentences put together in just the right order."

And this is what sets certain authors apart...you make me want to read this sooner, Kelly, because after The Days of Abandonment, I'm definitely at the Ferrante bus stop. I also like the seemingly seamless present-past mingling you mention. This was a very informative review.


Kelly Thanks and you really should read this! By all accounts, I've heard that the Neapolitan trilogy is even better than her earlier work. So if you liked Days of Abandonment, I'm sure you'd love this.


Kelly The time aspect, also, added some suspense and was part of the framing of the novel. But it's done so naturally that I never feel like I'm being manipulated or that she's showing off her literary devices. It just feels like what it's like to remember, and what you do when memories affect you that powerfully.


message 8: by Cheryl (last edited Jun 23, 2015 02:27PM) (new) - added it

Cheryl Kelly wrote: "It just feels like what it's like to remember, and what you do when memories affect you that powerfully."

Hmm, yes that stylistic maneuver is appealing to me - one that comes naturally...(or seems to, at least).


Kelly It's really excellent. Woolfian in idea, if not in actual style.


message 10: by Fionnuala (new) - added it

Fionnuala This is mostly because Ferrante allows her characters a kind of full, honest emotional range of expression that I’ve rarely seen in books about children and teenagers.

Exactly the way she handles Olga in The Days of Abandonment, and which really, really impressed me.
And that story wasn't new either - as you point out, it's the way she tells her 'old' stories that is new and original - the themes themselves are as old as Time.


Kelly True! I've come to the conclusion that that is usually where the most powerful storytelling lies- you can draw on the deep emotional well of the story's type but find a way to get there that doesn't put up the walls people have out up around it. Which makes it sound easy and of course it isn't! There are so few who can do it.

Sounds like I should read Days of Abandonment! That's my third recommendation in a row!


Dolors "The story. The plot was the most natural, organic thing I’ve ever read." and that "Tolstoy thing" are reasons enough for me to itch to read Ferrante asap. Her novels have become viral of late and all my GR friends seem to rave consistently about her works. I am currently reading Banville and Ferrante's writing style seems to be at the other end of the spectrum, but there is a saying that opposites attract, right? Super review, Kelly, thanks for the thumbs up!


Kelly That itch to read her is exactly what I wanted to create, so thank you! Please make it happen, I don't see how you could regret it!


Kelly And for anyone still not convinced for her amazingness, I give you proof in book 2: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...


message 15: by Lori (new) - rated it 5 stars

Lori Aaaahhh when I saw you were reading this with the seemingly flippant comment, let's see what all the fuss is about, I was dreading we'd have a major disagreement. Did you know no one knows who the author is? And many think it's a male? AS IF this could be male! Btw it's not a trilogy, the final book will be out in Sept. I've preordered it.


Kelly I thought it had been pretty much settled that she was a woman? Since she made the comment once about being a "mother" in an interview? Perhaps I am wrong? But perhaps that is just to throw us off.


message 17: by Lori (new) - rated it 5 stars

Lori Oh I must have missed that interview, I thought I read them all!


Kelly It was an observation that James Wood made in the New Yorker: "Speculation about Ferrante's identity is rife. In an article for The New Yorker James Wood pointed out that in her written correspondence with journalists Ferrante has referred to herself as a mother, implying that she is indeed a woman.[5]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_F...


message 19: by Lori (new) - rated it 5 stars

Lori Ahh now I remember. Even without, this writer is so definitely a woman it's crazy to think otherwise. Any woman can recognize it.


Kelly I think it would be really hard for a man to have come up with Elena's thoughts-particularly regarding what close female friendship is like and how you feel about your best friend. At least in this totally organic way.


message 21: by Fionnuala (new) - added it

Fionnuala Kelly wrote: "I think it would be really hard for a man to have come up with Elena's thoughts-particularly regarding what close female friendship is like and how you feel about your best friend. At least in this..."

Interesting debate - I hadn't come across this theory about Ferrante - I don't read much about writers lives - their writing is what really interests me. But judging by the way Frerrante got inside the mind and grasped the typically female dilemma of Olga in The Days of Abandonment, I'd be inclined to think that the person who created her was a woman. On the other hand, Olga is not exactly maternal...


Kelly Well there are a lot of actual women who aren't especially "maternal" in the traditional sense, either, and there are lots books about those women by women too (Mommie Dearest anyone?).

But I think it would have to be a very observant man to write this, one who would definitely be a great example of that whole Virginia Woolf thing where she says you should be in touch with both your stereotypically feminine and masculine sides to produce the best writing.


message 23: by Fionnuala (last edited Jun 26, 2015 07:13AM) (new) - added it

Fionnuala Kelly wrote: "Well there are a lot of actual women who aren't especially "maternal" in the traditional sense, either, and there are lots books about those women by women too (Mommie Dearest anyone?). ..."

Oh, I agree, Kelly, I mentioned 'maternal' simply to underline the complexity of the Olga character in Days - that anyone, male or female, invented her is mind-boggling - she's more like a force of nature, something elemental that was spewed out of the earth itself.

On the difficulty of men creating women characters and women creating men, writer Christine Brooke-Rose has this to say: It is very difficult to imagine yourself as totally other, but if you can’t do that you don’t even begin to be a writer.

On any theory that men and women read and write differently, she says: Both should read as both, just as both should write as both...I am absolutely against the notion of segregation...These categories (gender, colour, class) are not right. For the writer they are mutilating, they are debilitating.
Those quotes are from essays by her in Verbivoracious Festschrift: Christine Brooke-Rose - I used them in my review of that book a few months ago so remembered them clearly. And I agree with her that segregating women writers by placing them on any variation of 'women-writers' shelves, etc, does them no service. I see you have avoided that problem very cleverly. I'm sure you have a 'he's-quite-an-original-my-dear' shelf too ;-)


Kelly Cool! Thanks for sharing the Christine Brooke-Rose quotes, I've never heard of her. I agree that the whole "woman writer" label instead of people just saying "writer" really does suck, particularly if it comes with the attendant marketing.

But of course writers have to write characters of both sexes and there are writers who can write the opposite sex well. I do think that Ferrante did go very deep into the female psyche in these books, in a LOT of detail, from childhood through late middle age- I guess it is such a tribute to her as a writer that I think that she must be a woman to really understand so much about what it is like in such minute detail to go through each stage of life as a woman in such a deeply gendered society like 1950s/60s Italy.

So basically this just brings me back full circle to my original point: Ferrante is amazing.


message 25: by Taylor (new) - added it

Taylor Loved this. The best thing I could think of to say about my Ferrante experience was that everything about her writing felt so natural. Not sure how else to put it. The only reason I haven't started this series is because I have a feeling I won't be able to stop!


Kelly You won't! I devoured all three books in ten days. Would have been less if I hadn't had writing to do. The fourth and final one comes out in September (in English anyway), so maybe you should at least wait until then so you aren't tortured by waiting like I am now!! Choose a weekend with nothing going on to start this- you'll realize it's already Monday without it ever seeming like time passed.


Angela Paolantonio Great piece on Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend - now keep going!


Kelly Thanks! I appreciate it! :) I've written reviews of all the other three, I really loved them.


Nancyrhm Beautiful review, Kelly. You capture what I loved about the book and the whole quartet. I finished the fourth book last night and having spent the last 4 months immersed in the world of Lenu and Lila, I'm bereft.


Kelly I wish I could read Italian! Life goals!

And thanks, Nancy! I'm so glad you feel the same way I do about Lila and Elena. What an unforgettable experience these books are.


Renata I loved the book and was so grateful that I paid attention to all of the buzz about Ferrante. I'm not generally drawn to female friendship books as a genre books, but this was truly extraordinary. Your review was magnificent and expressed so many of my own reactions. It is sure to inspire many other readers. Now that I've given myself a few days to absorb the many layers of thoughts and feelings it left me with, I'm ready for the second book.


Kelly Thanks and I hope you love the second book like I did. It was my favorite of the four, really hit me hard. In such an amazing way.


Melanie I just started the second book but having read the first one in 2014, I found your review when I was trying to reacquaint myself with the first book. I love your review!! I loved this... "She'll process what you say for the words use, not the social status you have while you say it, not the yearning she has to be like you or not like you at all, nor does she care about the image she is projecting to you." This part of your review made my mouth dropped open in awe!! Wow, perfectly stated! Excellent review. Thank you!!


Kelly Thank you!! I hope you love the second one as well. It is my favorite of the four.


Maria Bravo!!!! Loved your review! Loved this book (series of books)! I, too, became obsessed with the story!


Kelly Thanks and yes it's wonderful! I read them all as soon as possible after this one!


message 37: by Tibor (new)

Tibor Merlak haven´t read it yet. Keep asking myself if the name ferrante is a reference to a book by Eco, where "Ferrante " is the name he gives his dark twins (who acutally doesn´t exist and is himself) . Probably not but would be an interesting hint, given the struggle between Elena and lila, could be a way to interpret them as the same person - probably not though...


message 38: by Mark (new) - rated it 5 stars

Mark Great review, Kelly, and like you I think this is pretty much the perfect novel, and I agree part of the wonder is how Elena is 'so focused on her friend that her own story seems to happen under the radar.' Re-reading the quartet and loving the stories even more, despite the brutality of the setting.


Kelly Thanks! I am jealous you are re-reading right now. It’s such an amazing experience. I almost feel like I need to clear a block of time to devour it whole and be prepared to live in that brutality, like you describe.


Harini This is a wonderful review!! You put into words what i was having difficulty articulating. I absolutely loved this book as well!


Kelly Thanks! Ferrante was just one of those visceral experiences for me


Dariko I’ve read all four books and watched 3 seasons of the film adaptation which didn’t disappoint, quite the contrary (here in UK it was on SKY Atlantic TV). This is one of those stories which stays with you and never fades from your memory. Thank you Kelly for writing such a beautifully worded review. 👏👏👏


Kelly Thanks!! I only watched the first season but I really liked that too! They did seem to understand the atmosphere of the thing very very well


Cecily What an impressive review analysis. Just what the book deserves. I think you've nailed one of its rare features: the natural, organic nature of the story, aided by "her gentle use of not-quite chronological time".


Kelly Thanks! Ferrante is so amazing, her use of tools like that really expertly puts you into the headspace of the characters


back to top