My Brilliant Friend

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

The first installment in an extended, four-part bildungsroman, My Brilliant Friend tells the origin story of the friendship between Elena “Lenú” Greco and Rafaella “Lila” Cerullo. Lila and Lenú, who narrates, grow up in a slum neighborhood of Naples, Italy, where violence, patriarchal gender roles, and poverty are seen as practically inescapable facts of life, but as soon as Lenú meets Lila—when they are mere children playing in the street—she perceives that Lila is somehow exceptional. Their uneven, often competitive friendship is cemented when they attend school together. In school Lila proves herself a prodigy, effortlessly mastering new subjects, but it is Lenú whose family allows her to continue on past an elementary education; Lila turns to working in her family’s cobbler shop. Despite its seeming normalcy, the friendship is enveloped in a halo of the erotic (in the sense of Eros the Bittersweet) that will feel familiar to anyone who has experienced relationships where unconsummated and even unmoored yearning is omnipresent. While Lenú and Lila meet at the crux of manifold yearnings—the yearning for knowledge, for economic success, for escape from their present circumstances, for romantic love—their almost gravitational tending towards one another is the focal point of a novel that is also peopled with a vivid neighborhood of passionate, violent, energetic people; set during an era of extreme modernization and change; and stylistically striking with its alternating distance and specificity. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others may be thrilled to find sensitively discussed in their literature): Violence including domestic violence, sexual assault.

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