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My Brilliant Friend

(L'amica geniale #1)

Elena Ferrante,

Ann Goldstein (Translator)

really liked it 4.00 · Rating details · 262,099 ratings · 22,971 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 that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship.

The story begins in the ...more

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Paperback, 331 pages

Published 2015 by Europa Editions (first published October 19th 2011)

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Jan 11, 2015 Kinga rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: pub-2011

I received this book as a Christmas present from my boss over a year ago. In fact, everyone in the office received a copy – that’s how much our boss wanted us to read it. Before you start wondering what sort of wonderful place I worked at, let me clarify it was a literary agency, so such things were totally commonplace. So despite the terrible cover, and a rather idiotic blurb I knew it would be a fine book.

No review of Ferrante’s book is complete without a mention of how no one knows who Ferran I received this book as a Christmas present from my boss over a year ago. In fact, everyone in the office received a copy – that’s how much our boss wanted us to read it. Before you start wondering what sort of wonderful place I worked at, let me clarify it was a literary agency, so such things were totally commonplace. So despite the terrible cover, and a rather idiotic blurb I knew it would be a fine book.

No review of Ferrante’s book is complete without a mention of how no one knows who Ferrante is or even if she exists as an individual woman at all. Personally, I find this whole mystery of little interest as I share her view that all that the author wants to say she should say in the book and there is no need for the entire marketing circus.

Ferrante’s Naples novels have been compared to Knausgaard’s magnum opus because both authors can be characterised by their hyperreal scrutiny which seemingly can only be achieved in autobiographical novels. The autobiographical component is official in case of Knausgaard and alleged in Ferrante’s. Additionally, Knausgaard has happily joined the marketing circus, which is why I find Ferrante’s presumed exhibitionism a lot more palatable.

These books defiantly ignore all creative writing advice and cheerfully tell and not show, abandon all sensible plot structure and introduce as many characters as they feel like, not really caring whether that whole cast is in any way necessary. Neither do they have time for stylistic flourishes. Ferrante’s prose is bare; the language takes a back seat and is nothing more than a tool to the narrative that is pushed forward by its own urgency. What we are left with, though, is so vivid and authentic that no carefully polished novel could compete with it. This is great news. Rejoice, people, because in the age when it is possible to get a DEGREE in novel writing (without having to write anything of significance), comes a book which just doesn’t give a shit and still manages to steal the hearts of thousands.

I don’t suppose I have to explain what this book is about, because you have other reviews for that. But in short it’s about the intense friendship and rivalry between two girls growing up in the impoverished outskirts of Naples. You might argue it’s a book about female experience, and to an extent it certainly is, but judging by how much men love this book, I’d say it’s rather universal. But then, I generally feel female experience, once stripped of all telling signs could be pretty universal, because, you know, women are people too. Anyway, to me this book was more about class than gender. That constant anger, violence, the ‘let’s get them before they get us’ feel permeates the novel. And the moral, if ‘My Brilliant Friend’ has a moral at all, is that you can take a girl out of the Naples slums, but you can’t take the Naples slums out of the girl. Make no mistake, though. This is by no means an emotionally manipulative misery memoir. This is a story of childhood that simply doesn’t know it’s underprivileged.
...more

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Dec 28, 2015 Rick Riordan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I have been studying Italian in my free time and so decided to try reading one of the most popular Italian writers of today: Elena Ferrante. There have been many articles about this author's mysterious anonymity. Her real identity is unknown except to her publisher because she wishes to have a normal life. I get that. Still, it only adds to the intrigue, as you can't help but wonder who writes these marvelous books. My Brilliant Friend is not the sort of book I would normally pick up as I prefer ...more

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Sep 13, 2014 Rebecca rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2014-read

I tried. I tried. I tried. For 200 pages I tried to see what it is about this writer that gets such acclaim, but with 130 pages to go, I abandoned it - there are just too many other books in my waiting pile that I want to read.
This book was chosen for book club which is why I persisted so long (I normally stop reading a book pretty quickly if it doesn't engage me).
I didn't develop any concern for the characters, and found it really repetitive - different stage school/same response from parents ...more

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Nov 05, 2021 Maggie Stiefvater rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: recommended, adult

Anne of Green Gables if it was set in a rough Italian neighborhood and written by Donna Tartt.

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Sep 08, 2015 Fionnuala added it · review of another edition

Shelves: cop-out-review, translated-from-italian

type, edit, delete,

undo delete,

type, edit, delete..

deep breath

start again

type, edit, delete…

make a coffee

type, edit, delete…

pour a drink

type, edit, delete..

desperation sets in

~~The dog ate my review!~~

………………................................

Why, why, why can’t I find any words to say about this book?

The problem is I don’t know what I feel about it. In fact, the book has left me without any feelings, good or bad. It has left me blank. I’m not used to feeling blank after reading.

I read Ferrante’s ...more

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Apr 26, 2015 Glenn Sumi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: not-usa-can-uk

UPDATED November 2018: here’s my review of the new HBO miniseries. Hint: It’s just as good as the book!

https://nowtoronto.com/movies/reviews...

*****

My Brilliant Friend, a.k.a. My Brilliant New Obsession

Believe all the hype. This is a rich, immersive, deeply satisfying book that, like many great novels, captures a particular time and place with complete authority. I can’t wait to read the other books in the series.

In a dirt poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples in the 1950s, bright work ...more

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Jan 31, 2018 Jaidee rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: under-two-stars-books

1 "sweet Jesus...this is the first of four books" stars !!!

2018 Read I was Most Afraid to Hate Award

First of all a bit of translation

In English we say blahblahblah. In Italian they say blablabla.

Ms. Ferrante separates this book into two sections: Childhood (18 chapters) and Adolescence (62 chapters)

Childhood Ch 1 to 9

Ms. Ferrante writes: blablablablablablablablablab and blablablablabla

Jaidee: God I hope this gets better

Childhood Ch 10-14

Ms. Ferrante writes: blablablablabla and blablablabl ...more

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Aug 28, 2012 Lucie Cavaroc rated it it was ok · review of another edition

The entire time I spent reading this book I asked myself "What is wrong with this book? Why am I having so much trouble getting into it?". It is incredibly slow-paced, but I also believe the Italian-to-English translation must be flawed. Many of the sentences were confusing and even contradictory. The redeeming factor, and the reason I gave it two stars instead of one, was that the Italian atmosphere was strongly prevalent and somewhat enjoyable - I learned what living in Naples in the 50s mus ...more

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May 17, 2022 Emily (Books with Emily Fox) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I haven't read literally fiction in a while and wow I had missed it!

Complex female friendship, great writing and... one hell of an ending.

I need to continue ASAP. ...more

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Aug 13, 2015 Maxwell rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: translated, owned

[4.5 stars]
If I were to describe Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend in one word it would be 'mythic.' The minutiae of Elena and Lila's lives into which Ferrante dives takes on these mythic proportions, pulling the reader along on a tense and frightful story. But at first glance, the story is anything but tense and frightful. It's a story of female friendship, between two lower-class girls in Naples following WWII. Ferrante, with precision and passion, recounts the lives of these girls as anyth [4.5 stars]
If I were to describe Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend in one word it would be 'mythic.' The minutiae of Elena and Lila's lives into which Ferrante dives takes on these mythic proportions, pulling the reader along on a tense and frightful story. But at first glance, the story is anything but tense and frightful. It's a story of female friendship, between two lower-class girls in Naples following WWII. Ferrante, with precision and passion, recounts the lives of these girls as anything less than ideal. There's an underlying push and pull to their friendship that goes against the expected narrative of girlhood. It's compelling and constantly teetering on the edge of disaster, again bringing back this theme of myth and how each detail lends itself to something greater, something disastrous.

We learn as the characters learn. Ferrante excels at establishing a tone fit to the story. When Elena, our narrator, is unsure, we are unsure. When she's jealous, we're jealous. She's spiteful at times, and compassionate at others. It all builds upon itself to create a vivid atmosphere that is only enhanced by the gritty Neapolitan setting.

I wasn't convinced by the first half of the book. But the second part really sold me. And I think that if I were to go back now and re-read the beginning, I'd be much more comfortable with the characters, the setting and the narrative structure. It's disconcerting and disorienting at first, getting thrown into a world with so many characters and so little hand-holding. But I appreciate Ferrante's confidence in the reader. She gives you more than you might handle, but once you get a grip on it, it's incredibly satisfying. I'm intrigued to see where the story goes, so much so that I ordered the next book in the series immediately after finishing this one. I only expect the books to get better and better; and based on what Ferrante's proved with this one, I'm sure I won't be disappointed.

First read: January 14-23, 2016
Second read: December 23-26, 2016
Third read: October 3-7, 2018 ...more

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Sep 02, 2013 Diane rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club, audiobooks, italy

This novel has so much violence that it should come with some kind of rating. Seriously, I had no idea it was so dangerous to grow up in Naples.

"I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence."

My Brilliant Friend is the story of two childhood friends, Elena and Lila. It is the first in a series, and I confess that when I started reading it, I did not intend to continue with them — I was just going to read this first one to see what all the fuss over Ferrante was about.

It took me This novel has so much violence that it should come with some kind of rating. Seriously, I had no idea it was so dangerous to grow up in Naples.

"I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence."

My Brilliant Friend is the story of two childhood friends, Elena and Lila. It is the first in a series, and I confess that when I started reading it, I did not intend to continue with them — I was just going to read this first one to see what all the fuss over Ferrante was about.

It took me a while to get into the book; there are so many families in the neighborhood, and everyone has nicknames that it was tough to remember who was who and who did what to which relative. (There is a cast of characters listed at the front of the book, but it's still confusing.) About midway through the book, I really connected with the two main characters, especially after they started going to school. I could relate to Elena's jealousy about Lila, and how she admired and imitated her strength. Occasionally Lila opens up and admits how important Elena is to her, and those moments are lovely. Ferrante's descriptions are so good that eventually it felt as if I had been living with these families.

But what exactly is the story, you ask? Well, there are lots of them. There are stories about cruel boys in the neighborhood. There are stories about Lila's dream of making it rich by designing special shoes to sell. There are stories about the competitions at school, and how Elena and Lila would push each other to learn more. There are stories of Lila's family, and how her father would abuse her when he lost his temper. There are stories about the men who pursued Lila when she became a beautiful teenager, and how she risked offending a powerful family. There is the story of Elena's first boyfriend, and how she has to navigate high school. And finally, there is the story of a wedding.

The wedding scene is what closes out this first novel, and something happens there that convinced me to read the second book. You win, Ferrante.

Update: A Few Weeks Later
I have gotten so involved in this series that I am reading Book 3 and have already ordered Book 4. My advice to those starting out is to be patient with this first novel -- a lot of the events that happen in Elena's childhood have long-lasting effects, like seeds that had to be planted so they could sprout later on. The more I read about these two women, the more I admire them. I highly recommend these Ferrante novels.

Favorite Quote
"Right away, from the first day, school had seemed to me a much nicer place than home. It was the place in the neighborhood where I felt safest, I went there with excitement. I paid attention to the lessons, I carried out with the greatest diligence everything that I was told to carry out, I learned. But most of all I liked pleasing the teacher, I liked pleasing everyone."

A Disturbing But Incredible Passage
"We lived in a world in which children and adults were often wounded, blood flowed from the wounds, they festered, and sometimes people died. One of the daughters of Signora Assunta, the fruit and vegetable seller, had stepped on a nail and died of tetanus. Signora Spagnuole's youngest child had died of croup. A cousin of mine, at the age of twenty, had gone one morning to move some rubble and that night was dead, crushed, the blood pouring out of his ears and mouth. My mother's father had been killed when he fell from a scaffolding at a building site. The father of Signor Peluso was missing an arm, the lathe had caught him unawares. The sister of Giuseppina, Signor Peluso's wife, had died of tuberculosis at twenty-two. The oldest son of Don Achille — I had never seen him, and yet I seemed to remember him — had gone to war and died twice: drowned in the Pacific Ocean, then eaten by sharks. The entire Melchiorre family had died clinging to each other, screaming with fear, in a bombardment. Old Signorina Clorinda had died inhaling gas instead of air. Guanine, who was in fourth grade when were were in first, had died one day because he had come across a bomb and touched it. Legion, with whom we had played in the courtyard, or maybe not, she was only a name, had died of typhus. Our world was like that, full of words that killed: croup, tetanus, typhus, gas, war, lathe, rubble, work, bombardment, bomb, tuberculosis, infection. With these words and those years I bring back the many fears that accompanied me all my life." ...more

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Feb 20, 2015 Kelly rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: examined-lives, identity-crisis, fiction, 20th-century-postwar-to-late, shes-quite-an-original-my-dear, its-the-quiet-ones, owned

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 ...more

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Oct 30, 2017 Manny rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: children, received-free-copy, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, spanish-and-italian, older-men-younger-women, french

From the age of two until twelve, I lived in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. During the Industrial Revolution, Merthyr had briefly been the iron capital of the world, but things didn't work out; iron ore became harder to mine, the people running the refining works didn't adopt modern methods quickly enough, the town was too far from the sea. Everything fell apart, and by the 1930s unemployment was running at 80%. When I arrived with my parents in 1960, things had become a little better, but the town was From the age of two until twelve, I lived in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. During the Industrial Revolution, Merthyr had briefly been the iron capital of the world, but things didn't work out; iron ore became harder to mine, the people running the refining works didn't adopt modern methods quickly enough, the town was too far from the sea. Everything fell apart, and by the 1930s unemployment was running at 80%. When I arrived with my parents in 1960, things had become a little better, but the town was still one of the poorest in Britain.

Why did we move there? It was the time of the counter-culture: some idealistic peace protesters had decided to found a commune - I still have no idea why they chose Merthyr - and my parents wanted to join them. The members of the commune didn't get on, the usual story, and after a couple of years they disbanded. We were stuck in Merthyr, and that's where I grew up. I attended primary school at Heolgerrig, a little village just outside town. In summer, I walked to and from school, a pleasant trip that lasted about forty minutes. In winter, my siblings and I took the bus.

There were two kinds of children at Heolgerrig. The smaller group was the contingent of middle-class kids, most of whom lived on the new estate just down the road from the school. They spoke normal English, though with a Welsh accent, and their parents had white-collar jobs. A couple of other kids also belonged to this group; the one I remember best was Avril Griffiths, the vicar's daughter. Avril was a fat, priggish girl with an annoying manner, whom I hated for all of the five years we were in the same class together. Her younger brother, Wayne, was a bully, and I hated him too. But the majority of the class was quite different. They were the children of the local working class, spoke Welsh by preference, and were poor, dirty and violent.

Violence was an integral part of school life. There were fights all the time in the playground, and they weren't friendly; the kids generally wanted to hurt each other. The teachers made frequent use of physical punishment when they thought things were getting out of hand, or sometimes, I thought, just because they were crazy too. There was one particularly dangerous teacher called Mr Haines. He would yell at us when we didn't understand his questions: his favorite expression was "Blocks of wood!" I can hear him yelling it now. He liked to use his cane. The boys, even at age eight or nine, were already fond of playing sexual games. One day, the biggest gang started a game called "Kiss chase", which involved kidnapping girls and dragging them back to the boys' lavatory. I never learned exactly what happened to them there, but when Mr Haines found out he completely lost it and thrashed all the boys who had taken part. I now realise that he only hit the poor, Welsh-speaking boys. I never got hit.

But this kind of violence was only a kind of muted background noise behind the real incidents, surprisingly many of which involved permanent disfigurement or death. One boy in the class above me managed to put an eye out using some wood-carving tools; another was killed when he was showing off by the side of the road and fell in front of a car. A particularly memorable and gruesome story started when the school decided to retire the ancient classroom furniture, units which had the seat attached to the desk with a heavy cast-iron frame, and replace them with modern tubular steel tables and plastic chairs. We didn't much like the change, but the upside was that the old desks had not been taken away. They were stacked in a shed out at the side of the yard, and they made a great climbing-frame. Unfortunately, they had not been stacked very carefully. One day a pile collapsed and killed a young child, not one I knew. A couple of weeks later, a fire started during the middle of the night and burned down half the school. It only occurred to me much later that these two events might have been linked. All of the foregoing, however, were still comparatively minor incidents. The big one happened at 9.15 am on October 21 1966 in Aberfan, a few miles down the road from us. A large slag-heap, which hadn't been properly maintained, suddenly turned into a landslide as a result of heavy rainfall. It buried the local school and killed (I just looked it up in Wikipedia) 116 children and 28 adults. My father wanted to go and help with the search and rescue effort; we started crying and made such a fuss that we managed to dissuade him.

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that I liked this novel very much. It reminded me of my childhood.

[To Le nouveau nom] ...more

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Jan 24, 2015 Violet wells rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: faves, italy, 21st-century

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.” So said Virginia Woolf and this, the forging of identity in relationship, is very much the theme of Elena Ferrante’s compelling novel. Elena, the narrator of the novel, is in first grade when we first meet her. She lives in a violent and impoverished working class district of Naples where kindred spirits or role models are hard to find. Certainly not her mother – “My mother did her best to make me understand that “I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.” So said Virginia Woolf and this, the forging of identity in relationship, is very much the theme of Elena Ferrante’s compelling novel. Elena, the narrator of the novel, is in first grade when we first meet her. She lives in a violent and impoverished working class district of Naples where kindred spirits or role models are hard to find. Certainly not her mother – “My mother did her best to make me understand that I was superfluous in her life. I wasn’t agreeable to her nor was she to me. I found her body repulsive.” Then she meets Lila. Lila is a wild child with exalted sensibility and intelligence for her age. In Lila Elena finally identifies an ideal she can aspire to. The portrait of Elena and Lila’s bond is the novel’s masterstroke. As all around them the somewhat coarse uneducated boys of the neighbourhood seek to distort and shape the girls to suit their own masculine vanity – “dissolve the margins” of separation - the two girls forge an independence of spirit that is nurtured by the inspiration they find in each other. They create a compelling and exciting inner world together, a stage on which they both are able to dramatise themselves as the heroines of their own fate. The novel is the story of their friendship and Elena’s attempts to transcend her background of thrift and mean spirited bullying.

It’s an unusual and highly distinctive novel (visually reminiscent of de Sica’s early brilliant films). Essentially because of the intensity and lucidity of Ferrante’s prose. She manages to write about the most prosaic detail with a kind of hallucinatory urgency and as such her voice hits exactly the right notes in expressing the joys and torments of adolescence when every day seems to hold moments of both pivotal humiliation and triumph, moments few adults are capable of perceiving. Thus the narrative is a constant high tension wire where the mundane relentlessly spills over into epiphany or violence. There’s a passage when Elena is writing about Lila’s prose style which would serve as the perfect eulogy of Ferrante’s prose style – “She expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but – further – she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, the confusion of the oral.”
...more

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Sep 28, 2021 emma rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-ya, literary-fiction, owned, project-clear-ur-sh-t, 3-and-a-half-stars, recommend, historical, reviewed

The thing about this book is that the more that happened, the less I liked it.

At the beginning of this book, there was no plot. Just vibes. Just two kids existing in Italy and being good at school. Sometimes they go into the sewer, where they are convinced a Pennywise-esque interpretation of their scary neighbor has made his weird little home. Sometimes they throw rocks at children, or have rocks thrown at them. These are fun moments.

But they are just events with no throughline. The writing is p ...more

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Apr 05, 2020 Michael rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020

A fast-paced coming-of-age novel charting the ups and downs of an intense friendship between two working-class Italian girls. Set in the ‘50s on the outskirts of Naples, the sprawling story follows author-narrator Elena and her clever best friend Lila as the two strive for greatness, wealth, and knowledge in a neighborhood beset by patriarchal feuds and gendered violence. The prose is bare, the pacing swift, the plotting episodic, the characters many and quickly sketched; with writing that feels ...more

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Oct 06, 2014 Tatiana marked it as dnf · review of another edition

Recommends it for: read Atwood instead, if you are looking for books about women "friendships"

Recommended to Tatiana by: critical acclaim

Shelves: foreign-lands, 2015, why-the-hype

I just don't get the hype. I found the writing (or translation) incredibly choppy and the story overlong, repetitive and incoherent at times.

There must be better writers in Italy than Ferrante. ...more

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Nov 30, 2016 Candi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, book-i-own

"It was as if, because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other; even our physical aspect, it seemed to me, shared in that swing."

Elena and Lila, a friendship born of necessity – the need to find another human soul that understands us, our longings and sorrows - someone to emulate, someone that drives each of us to become our very best self. These two girls, born into poverty in 1950s Naples, forge a relationship that is both captivating and completely "It was as if, because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other; even our physical aspect, it seemed to me, shared in that swing."

Elena and Lila, a friendship born of necessity – the need to find another human soul that understands us, our longings and sorrows - someone to emulate, someone that drives each of us to become our very best self. These two girls, born into poverty in 1950s Naples, forge a relationship that is both captivating and completely authentic. There is something about a novel told from the point of view of an adult looking back at his or her childhood that thoroughly captures my attention and feels so convincing. Even if I cannot relate to the circumstances or the surroundings, the emotions are so very real and bring back such sharp memories of my own inexperience and innocent yearnings.

With keen insight and skillful writing, Elena Ferrante has crafted a vivid account of two young lives struggling to rise above the usual fate of those born into such harsh conditions. The impoverishment and violence of the neighborhood are part of the daily fabric of Elena and Lila’s lives, but they dream of a life elevated above those around them. The key to achieving this dream – education. "In that last year of elementary school, wealth became our obsession. We talked about it the way characters in novels talk about searching for treasure… Then, I don’t know why, things changed and we began to link school to wealth. We thought that if we studied hard we would be able to write books and that the books would make us rich. Wealth was still the glitter of gold coins stored in countless chests, but to get there all you had to do was go to school and write a book." Oh yes, there was a time when I believed diligent studying would achieve similar results! What little girl doesn’t dream of becoming rich or famous?! Both girls work hard, but it is quite evident that Lila is the dominant one in the relationship – academics come easy to her and Elena finds herself wanting to reach those same heights. She often feels inferior to Lila and it becomes her goal to keep up with her, but believing she can never surpass the brilliance of her friend.

Of course, the competition between two coming-of-age girls doesn’t just end at schoolwork. The fragility of such a relationship is further tested by the attraction they hold for the boys of the neighborhood. In this arena, Elena perhaps feels she has an advantage over Lila: "In general I was the pretty one, while she was skinny, like a salted anchovy, she gave off an odor of wildness, she had a long face, narrow at the temples, framed by two bands of smooth black hair." However, true to the nature of girlhood, feelings of inadequacy settle in and Elena feels second-string once again. "But Lila now had retaken the upper hand, satisfaction had magnified her beauty, while I, overwhelmed by schoolwork, exhausted by my frustrated love for Nino, was growing ugly again. My healthy color faded, the acne returned. And suddenly one morning the specter of glasses appeared."

I couldn’t help but wish that Elena would stand up for herself, value herself as an individual separate from her attachment to Lila. Lila, the leader and Elena, the follower – certainly a familiar dynamic in a friendship. I wonder who benefits most from these friendships. Perhaps Elena needed the competition to drive her own ambition and rise above her circumstances. But Lila too needed someone to ground her, give her some sense of stability in her own life. I think perhaps such relationships are fluid – giving and receiving on both ends at different times, always changing along with the trials and tribulations each experiences. Ferrante does an exceptional job of examining the complexities of friendships and this is what I found to be the most fascinating aspect of this novel. The ending leaves one with a question and the desire to grab the second book in the series. Without a doubt, I will do exactly that. I am eager to follow not just Elena and Lila’s friendship but also to learn more about the fate of the large cast of characters – especially Nino, Stefano, Rino, Pasquale, Antonio, and even the city of Naples itself.
...more

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Apr 25, 2018 Kevin Kelsey rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2018, favorites

Posted at Heradas

What you should know:
The book is fantastic, and I couldn’t help but absorb it in just a few days. I feel like it really got at the core of human insecurity, gender and income inequality, female friendships, and our hierarchy of needs. Somehow it’s also a page-turner and an engaging story. It blows my mind that all of those things are possible in one short novel. I guarantee that it’ll get under your skin and soak in.

Ferrante vs. Knausgaard:
Even though I’ve only read this first n Posted at Heradas

What you should know:
The book is fantastic, and I couldn’t help but absorb it in just a few days. I feel like it really got at the core of human insecurity, gender and income inequality, female friendships, and our hierarchy of needs. Somehow it’s also a page-turner and an engaging story. It blows my mind that all of those things are possible in one short novel. I guarantee that it’ll get under your skin and soak in.

Ferrante vs. Knausgaard:
Even though I’ve only read this first novel in the sequence, it’s hard for me to resist the urge to compare Ferrante’s Neapolitan series to Knausgaard’s My Struggle.

Both series are: multi-volume, non-English, first person page-turner novels spanning several decades of their character’s lives, first published in English in 2012, with subsequent volumes appearing annually. They both feature straightforward, simple prose, detailing the ins and outs of their characters’ lives, and are deeply, sometimes disturbingly honest in tone. They both tackle a lot of the same themes, but from inside different experiences. If you enjoyed one, I’d highly recommend the other. Especially if you're a guy who enjoyed Knausgaard, you owe it to yourself to read something similar, but from a female perspective. Ferrante’s writing really put me inside that experience in an empathic way.

They are also vastly different from one another: The Neapolitan Novels are fictitious, set in Italy, viscerally violent, told in a mostly linear, chronological order, feature short chapters, supposedly gained a lot in translation, are written pseudonymously, and have a tight focus on the friendship between two female characters over the years.

My Struggle is wildly non-linear, purportedly autobiographical, set mostly in Norway, meandering, has no chapters whatsoever, steeped in nostalgia, and is tightly focused on Knausgaard's view of his general failings as a man, before, after, and during his journey toward becoming a writer.

For more on the similarities between the two works, I’d suggest Joshua Rathman’s terrific essay for The New Yorker: Knausgaard or Ferrante? ...more

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Jan 10, 2019 Dolors rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2019

Much has been said about this book, the first of the Naples trilogy, and by many.
I opened this novel with the expectation to be enthralled in a world I could relate to, with characters that would bring back echoes of my own childhood and adolescence and also hoping to be surprised by Ferrante’s unique conception of friendship.
It turns out the book did nothing of the sort. That doesn’t mean I can’t understand why some readers feel attracted to it, as I detect a sort of addictiveness in Ferrante’s Much has been said about this book, the first of the Naples trilogy, and by many.
I opened this novel with the expectation to be enthralled in a world I could relate to, with characters that would bring back echoes of my own childhood and adolescence and also hoping to be surprised by Ferrante’s unique conception of friendship.
It turns out the book did nothing of the sort. That doesn’t mean I can’t understand why some readers feel attracted to it, as I detect a sort of addictiveness in Ferrante’s style that I can’t rightly place. My fault, probably.

Ferrante’s ability to paint a dexterous tableau vivant of Naples in the mid-fifties is undeniable; its gratuitous gender violence, the pressing presence of the Camorra that threatens the lives of young and old in a modest working neighborhood, the weight of a patriarchal system that harasses girls of all ages… it all leaps off the page, and yet, and yet…
My reservations arise from the lack of emotion with which all the above is framed by the two protagonists of the story: Lenu and Lila. They couldn’t be more different, Lila is daring, kind of a rebel, Lenu is dependant, a follower. And still, who is the “brilliant friend” in this story? The narrator or the narrated? Ferrante seems to suggest that Lila’s potential is subdued by her circumstances, but Lenu manages to flourish in them, as if she sucked her friend’s talent in spite of her apparent dominance over everybody around her.
Promising, right?
There is basis for a great story in this novel, one that could easily portray the true meaning of friendship, including its ugly side marred by envy and jealousy, but my response is undermined by the way in which Ferrante carried it through, which was, in my opinion, insipid in literary terms. Flat. Lifeless. I wasn’t pulled into the story, I couldn’t empathize with neither of the characters and I did find little narrative beauty in Ferrante’s unpolished sentences.

I’ll confess that the last page didn’t urge me to get the next installment; I just felt relieved to see the abrupt ending that gave me the perfect excuse to let these two girls go on their ways without me.
Closing the book felt like having eaten a bunch of junk food, easy to gobble up but knowing it will provide little nourishment to one’s body…or reading soul, in this case. So, no harm in doing that from time to time, but not on a daily basis. ...more

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Mar 07, 2015 Julie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: best-of-2015, italy-theme-setting, read-2015, contemporary-fiction

My Brilliant Friend, the first in Elena Ferrante’s quartet about best friends from a Naples ghetto, is a novel about power: who holds it, how it is won and lost, and what happens when power shifts occur. It is a story of violence: domestic and cultural, physical and emotional. All this, in a novel about two young girls exploring friendship and adolescence in post-war southern Italy.

Elena Greco and Lila Cerrullo are daughters of working class families, growing up in a crowded, poor, electrifying ...more

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Feb 06, 2021 Richard (on hiatus) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: current-lit-wd

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante is the first of four novels set in Naples charting the lives of Elena Greco and her best friend Lila Curello.
The book opens, present day, as Elena, a woman in her sixties, gets a desperate call from Lila’s son Rino. His mother has disappeared, can Elena help?
She can’t, but the worrying phone call stirs up memories, and Elena eventually decides to write down the details of her relationship with her oldest friend.
We return to the 1950’s when the girls are chil My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante is the first of four novels set in Naples charting the lives of Elena Greco and her best friend Lila Curello.
The book opens, present day, as Elena, a woman in her sixties, gets a desperate call from Lila’s son Rino. His mother has disappeared, can Elena help?
She can’t, but the worrying phone call stirs up memories, and Elena eventually decides to write down the details of her relationship with her oldest friend.
We return to the 1950’s when the girls are children.
Elena is sensible, clever and bookish - continuously buffeted by uncertainties of youth. One of the main constants in her life is her love for her childhood friend Lila ‘ ........that terrible, dazzling girl’
Lila, without realising it, is a leader - she’s fearless, singleminded and effortlessly bright. She’s also careless in her affections, unheeding of the opinion of others and dangerously spontaneous.
Elena’s life revolves around Lila. She basks in the warmth of the relationship when things go well and is awash in self pity when they don’t. Lila is mostly unaware.
Lila is complicated though ......... at a young age, she becomes aware of a feeling she gets which she calls ‘dissolving margins’ in which the outlines of things around her seem to her blur and disintegrate, allowing her to see horror and pain below the surface ie a bit like a panic attack or nausea - a hidden fragility.
We follow the girls through the years as they embark on ill advised adventures, usually at the behest of Lila. We experience school and their shared thirst for knowledge. We look on as they battle with families, make and break friendships, fight off and seek suitors, experience the awful, queasy feelings of first love and try to figure out what the uncertain future will bring.
The atmosphere of their neighbourhood is captured well ........ bustling streets, large families crammed into tenements, shouts and washing trailing from tiny balconies, dark tunnels and steep steps. An impoverished neighbourhood of tradespeople scraping by, barely able to support their families. Things are often tense and volatile and there’s a constant sense of simmering anger and frustration. Arguments are quick, fiery and passionate. The threat of violence is never far away with the occasional glint of a gun or flash of a knife.
I wasn’t sure at first how I would get on with this novel. I’m not normally a big fan of ‘coming of age’ stories and at first I found the rhythm of the writing took me a little while to get into (maybe a translation issue - probably just me though!) but I soon became invested in the lives of Elena and Lila and their ever shifting relationship.
My Brilliant Friend is a perceptive and involving read and I’m intrigued to see where the entwined lives of the friends take them next. ...more

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Sep 22, 2014 Agnieszka rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed, ferrante, read-more-women, 2015, own-a-copy

I had a friend, I still have, albeit, with time our paths diverged a bit, alas ! From early childhood till our twenties we were inseparable like two budgerigars. We were alike, yet different. We were alike because of youth but we differed about our expectations. While I daydreamed she had her feet firmly fixed on the ground. She was good at science while I always preferred humanities. She was pretty, easy-mannered girl, no wonder she was popular with the boys. But it was never any problem to me
I had a friend, I still have, albeit, with time our paths diverged a bit, alas ! From early childhood till our twenties we were inseparable like two budgerigars. We were alike, yet different. We were alike because of youth but we differed about our expectations. While I daydreamed she had her feet firmly fixed on the ground. She was good at science while I always preferred humanities. She was pretty, easy-mannered girl, no wonder she was popular with the boys. But it was never any problem to me because I had every boy I wanted. I had David Copperfield and Athos, Meaulnes and Mr Darcy, Hamlet and Snufkin. Sounds stupid, I know. Anyway, being shy and introvert by nature I was impressed by her go-getting energy, I admired her aptitude for learning. We attended to the same primary school, then secondary to finally get together into university. I remember our conversations, dreams, confessions. Though time ruthlessly verified some of our youthful desires and unworldly ideas I still consider these years being extraordinary time in my life.

Why do I write this ? Because of Elena Ferrante. Her name seems to be all the rage amongst my friends lately. Completely deservedly, I think. My brilliant friend is a first volume of series and centers around two young girls, Lila and Elena, and their not always easy friendship. One day Lila, now in her sixties, disappears without a trace. With all her things, books, clothes, photos. Nothing’s left as if Lila wanted to vanish off the face of the earth. This an unaccountable behaviour serves for pretext for Elena to tell us their story.

So, let's move then over forty years back to the peripheral parts of Naples, to the fifties of the last century. Girls grow up here surrounded by poverty and violence, falsely understood pride and macho behaviors of their fathers and brothers. They make plans for the future how to earn enough money to break out of embrace of misery, ignorance and oppression. Their relation is uncanny medley of admiration, envy and rivalry.

Girls are like fire and water. Elena is polite, dutiful and well-behaved meanwhile Lila is impulsive and rebellious. Although they are friends through thick and thin they do not cease to compete with each other. It is pull and push relationship, marked with the ups and downs, full of resentments and mutual fascination. My brilliant friend is a record of friendship and adolescence but also meticulous description of the world which is about to change.

Maybe this novel is not especially innovative but Ferrante has a keen eye. Maybe the name of the narrator is not quite accidental. Maybe Ferrante just writes about herself and performs a personal exorcisms. Anyway, her observations are acutely accurate and, needless to say, I’m eagerly waiting to know subsequent choices, joys and failures of Lila and Elena. ...more

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Jun 14, 2018 Em Lost In Books rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: armchair-ir, 4-star, translations, 2018, br-with-smitha, 2010-19

I had this book on my radar for so long but I always got distracted by other books (but I think this is the story of 90% of bookworms, so many books so little time. Sigh!) It took me three years to finally read this, and what an adventure this turn out to be.

"There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she I had this book on my radar for so long but I always got distracted by other books (but I think this is the story of 90% of bookworms, so many books so little time. Sigh!) It took me three years to finally read this, and what an adventure this turn out to be.

"There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it."

My Brilliant Friend tells us the story of Elena and Lila in Italy of 1950s. They grew up together, went to school together, fell in love together. While Lila was an exceptionally gifted child, Elena was a hardworking girl but they both got the things if they put in their minds that they had to have them. There was a healthy rivalry between these two girls too, and when Lila had to stop her schooling because of poor financial condition of her family. Lila on her own decides to read by borrowing books from the library and taught herself high school courses and Greek. In a way she was not trying to show Elena who was better but she was just trying to sate the hunger in herself to be educated. On the other hand Elena found it necessary that she impress Lila, and everything is alright in her world if Lila is talking to her and being happy with her. If she feels that Lila is not happy with her, she felt like a rejected and a sad puppy.

Story is told through Elena and yet clearly Lila won my heart here. I just can’t get enough of her. I wanted to be in her mind and strip her layer by layer and see what goes in that mind. Why she has this mystery around her. She is the portrait of patience, class, someone you want to be like and had the desire to be liked and loved by her.

While these two grew up to be brilliant teenagers, this story is not about all this. Ferrante I think did an amazing job when she weaved this story around these two girls and yet managed to show us the culture and the struggle that this south Italian neighborhood was going through.

I loved this book and will highly recommend to everyone. ...more

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Apr 17, 2015 Cathrine ☯️ rated it it was ok · review of another edition

A not so satisfying read for me. By many other accounts, a great book and writer. The first part of a trilogy beginning with childhood girlfriends who, come to find out, don’t get past the age of 16 in this first installment. And therein lies my problem with it. I wanted it to move into their adult years and become more interesting and relevant to me personally. I should state that I rarely enjoy reading about childhood from the child’s perspective for an entire book. For the duration, it read l ...more

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Dec 26, 2014 Adam Dalva rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

What makes something a page-turner? This book is more than the sum of its (considerable) parts: Yes, the writing is great, the setting is vivid, the period sometimes shocking, the protagonist relatable and fun, the best friend one of the spunkiest, most endearing characters I've encountered, the supporting cast is varied and dizzying and each stands alone. But still: why am I gasping in shock when someone wears a particular pair of shoes. Why am I staying up late at night to finish? What happens ...more

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Mar 13, 2018 Warwick rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, italy, naples

Early in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, the narrator arrives at the eponymous farmhouse and has the following exchange with the Earnshaws' servant, Joseph:

‘What are ye for?’ he shouted. ‘T' maister's down i' t' fowld. Go round by th' end o' t' laith, if ye went to spake to him.’

‘Is there nobody inside to open the door?’ I hallooed, responsively.

‘There's nobbut t' missis; and shoo'll not oppen 't an ye mak' yer flaysome dins till neeght.’

Charming. Now imagine, for a moment, that the scene had Early in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, the narrator arrives at the eponymous farmhouse and has the following exchange with the Earnshaws' servant, Joseph:

‘What are ye for?’ he shouted. ‘T' maister's down i' t' fowld. Go round by th' end o' t' laith, if ye went to spake to him.’

‘Is there nobody inside to open the door?’ I hallooed, responsively.

‘There's nobbut t' missis; and shoo'll not oppen 't an ye mak' yer flaysome dins till neeght.’

Charming. Now imagine, for a moment, that the scene had instead been written like this:

‘What do you want?’ he shouted in dialect. ‘The master's down in the fold. Go round past the end of the barn if you want to speak to him.’

‘Is there nobody inside to open the door,’ I hallooed, responsively, in English.

‘There's no one but the mistress; and she won't open even if you make that dreadful noise until nighttime.’

It's more immediately comprehensible, certainly; but it's productive to think about what might have been lost in such a version. This is somewhat the situation you are in with Elena Ferrante's novels, in which the use of ‘dialect’ is made to assume gigantic significance, while never actually being shown to us.

At first I thought the constant dialogue tags – ‘she said in Italian’, ‘he replied in dialect’ – were a device of the translator to show where Ferrante herself was switching between standard Italian and Neapolitan. But no; in fact, the original writing is all in purest Italian and those markers (in dialetto, in italiano) are just the same for Italian readers as they are for me. While I was reading, and enjoying, this book, I was also struggling to work out what about this was bothering me.

The thing is, casual readers would be forgiven for thinking that Ferrante's ‘dialect’ is some ungrammatical or degraded urban street version of Italian; in fact, of course, Neapolitan is a sister-language with a long, proud literary and administrative history. The Kingdom of Naples isn't some medieval nonentity – it lasted right up to the Risorgimento, and didn't really join ‘Italy’ until 1861. Neapolitan is no more a dialect than the Florentine dialect which has been enshrined (arbitrarily) as standard Italian. (At unification, by the way, the proportion of Italians who spoke ‘Italian’ has been estimated at no more than 2.5 percent.)

I put ‘dialogue’ in inverted commas before because the words ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ do not have any scientific meaning in linguistics, and the decision to call something a dialect is, in the end, a sociopolitical one. We see in this book that people speak ‘pure Italian’, ‘good Italian’, but ‘rough dialect’, ‘the thickest dialect’; Neapolitan is what they use for shouting, swearing, insulting, getting excited. Lenù's boyfriend frustrates her because ‘he never abandoned dialect, and in dialect it was hard to discuss the corruption of earthly justice’ and other high-flown intellectual topics; when he falls out with her (though this is actually at the start of the second book, not this one), it's specifically because ‘he heard scarcely any dialect in [Lenù's] voice, he noted the long sentence, the subjunctives, and he lost his temper’. Even the toastmaster at Lila's wedding is originally chosen on the grounds that he ‘had married a Florentine woman and had taken on the local accent’.

Of course, people really do look down on minority languages, they really are associated with poor education and low social status, and to that extent Ferrante is reflecting the reality of the situation. (In Naples as everywhere else – my wife was always told off at school in Edinburgh if she ever used ‘heid’ for ‘head’ or ‘ken’ for ‘know’.) And yet so much of the novel is about overturning preconceptions about Lenù's friends and neighbours, about restoring some respect to the lives of the working class in this neighbourhood; the novel aims to give a voice to a community that a lot of people do not hear from or understand. While this is often powerfully done, the book itself, on a sociolinguistic level, is profoundly conservative. Something about this friction sat uneasily with me and modulated the way I was reacting to the story.

News that RAI and HBO are producing a TV series of these books raises my hopes that a screen version will – perversely – foreground the language issue in a way that the literary version doesn't quite. Since it's being made in Italian, it's hard to imagine that the producers could duck the issue of using Neapolitan in the way that Ferrante can duck it in text – as a regional language, its use in oral contexts like film and music (’O sole mio, most famously) is, I suppose, more acceptable than in print. I get a sense of how Lila and Antonio and the Solaras sound – but it's distant, even allowing for the fact that I'm reading in translation. Maybe, on screen, I'll feel like I'm finally hearing their voices. ...more

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Apr 01, 2013 Esil rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Much has been written about My Brilliant Friend, so I'm not sure what I can add except for a few reactions to what I see as the three main characters:

< Elena -- my heart aches for you. We all know an Elena (and some of us are Elena). The brilliant second fiddle, who is too focused and intertwined with her friend Lila's life to appreciate her own talents, successes and hopes. I want to shake Elena, and to tell her to let go of Lila -- just a bit at least -- to stop hanging on Lila's every word an ...more

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Jul 17, 2018 Justin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Oh, Ms. Ferrante, hello there. No, I haven’t heard of you before. I’m so sorry. Oh, you’re an author? I like books. In fact, I even read books occasionally. I literally, like, open them and turn the pages and read the text inside them and everything. But, yeah, I haven’t heard of you.

Wait, hold on, Ms. Ferrante. Can I call you Elena? No? Sorry. Ms. Ferrante, I have never heard of you before, but this guy on a podcast recommended you and your books, something about a series of books. There was t Oh, Ms. Ferrante, hello there. No, I haven’t heard of you before. I’m so sorry. Oh, you’re an author? I like books. In fact, I even read books occasionally. I literally, like, open them and turn the pages and read the text inside them and everything. But, yeah, I haven’t heard of you.

Wait, hold on, Ms. Ferrante. Can I call you Elena? No? Sorry. Ms. Ferrante, I have never heard of you before, but this guy on a podcast recommended you and your books, something about a series of books. There was this link, and I clicked onit, and now here I am.

And, boy, you would not believe how popular you are on Goodreads! My goodness! People love you! Alright, fine, so I guess I start with My Brilliant Friend and just go from there? This is like a whole series about growing up or something? And people find this to be, you know, engaging? I mean don’t get me wrong. I read the plot and all, but I’m just not sure this is really my thing. I mean we should discuss the kinds of books I read. I read, you know, lots of genres, but this just feels like it was written for someone else. Someone else who is not me. Like a different someone. Not me.

Hey, so, Elena, yeah... you sure this isn’t a mystery?! Lila disappeared in the prologue. I do enjoy a good mystery. I just read one, in fact, about a woman. She was in a window. Crazy stuff ensued from there. It was crazy! What? This isn’t like that? But...

Hey, does anything ever happen in this book? Like, I get it. There are these two girls growing up together, kinda drifting apart into separate worlds, but is there a plot? Is jealousy a plot or just an emotion? Are they just going to compare themselves to each other and then the book ends with them deciding to accept their differences and just build a bridge and figuratively get over it?

No. That came out of nowhere. There is a plot! There are surprises! There is violence! Whoa! I didn’t see that or that or that coming.

Alright, time to breathe a little. More comparison. There’s a lot of shoes in this book, too. I guess that’s fine. Shoes are important. Shoes and jealousy. That’s what My Brilliant Friend is really about. Shoes, jealously, and Italy. Shoes, jealousy, Italy, and school. That’s basically it.

Hey! What the heck is that all about? Why did that happen? Oh man! Things were going pretty decently for the most part, I guess. Why?! Ahhh!!

So, what, now do I just read the next book? Anyway, how was I so captivated by a story where nothing much happens until it does happen? Why am I so invested in these two girls, and their town, and their friends, and their enemies? What have I done? Who am I?!

Shoes, jealousy, Italy, and school. I never really liked any of those things until I read your book, Ms. Ferrante. Thank you for this. This was a nice surprise. ...more

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Jun 05, 2014 Melanie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

"The women in my stories are all echoes of real women who, because of their suffering or their combativeness, have very much influenced my imagination: my mother, a childhood girlfriend, acquaintances whose stories I know. In general I combine their experiences with my own and Delia, Amalia, Olga, Leda, Nina, Elena, Lenù are born out of that mix. But the echo that you noticed maybe derives from an oscillation inside the characters that I’ve always worked on. My women are strong, educated, self-a "The women in my stories are all echoes of real women who, because of their suffering or their combativeness, have very much influenced my imagination: my mother, a childhood girlfriend, acquaintances whose stories I know. In general I combine their experiences with my own and Delia, Amalia, Olga, Leda, Nina, Elena, Lenù are born out of that mix. But the echo that you noticed maybe derives from an oscillation inside the characters that I’ve always worked on. My women are strong, educated, self-aware and aware of their rights, just, but at the same time subject to unexpected breakdowns, to subservience of every kind, to mean feelings. I’ve also experienced this oscillation. I know it well, and that also affects the way I write."
Elena Ferrante - The New York Times

"Ferrante’s Naples books are essentially about knowledge—its possibilities and its limits. Intellectual knowledge, sexual knowledge, political knowledge. What kind of knowledge does it take to get by in this world? How do we attain that knowledge? How does our knowledge change us and wound us and empower us, often at the same time? What things do we want to know and what would we prefer to leave unknown? What can we control? Who has power over our lives?"
Rachel Donadio - The New York Review of Books

"Life has actions in it. In reading a novel, it’s profound to experience the self-in-other in memory or contemplation, but it’s sometimes just as profound to experience the self-in-other during moments of decision. In Ferrante, we have both — they’re told in the first person, but they’re the story of more than a single person, of many equally weighted people. The plotting of their stories is so skillful, indeed so unplotted, in the sense that life is unplotted, in the sense that we don’t know the future, that as readers we suddenly exist both in other actions and in their actors’ consciousness of them. Not the latter alone."
Charles Finch - The Millions

There are so many layers at work in this astonishing novel that I don't even know where to begin... As soon as you start reading Elena Ferrante, you know you are in the hands of an extraordinary writer whose mind, heart and natural abilities have inextricably fused in the greatest of fires. The writing takes over your days and nights, seeps into your veins like crack. Straight into your bloodstream.

Very much like Karl Ove Knausgaard, she is able to play with the clearest, most fluid language to evoke simultaneously the multitude of details of everyday life and the ever shifting patterns of the mind. The words sizzle with grace, candor, terror and light.

The birth of a friendship between two little Neapolitan girls born in 1944 becomes the conduit for a ruthless and intoxicating exploration of what it means to become yourself. What is innate and what is acquired? What part of life is random luck and predestination? What part of character is emulation and what part is natural gift? How does the will to power play out if you are born poor in an uneducated and violent environment? How much does the past affect our present lives and can you escape it?

I read this breathtaking book over the course of three days, almost in a trance, and it seems that I have no choice but to echo what Charles Finch wrote at the end of his piece on his year of reading in 2014 for The Millions:

"What I do know is that before 2014, I thought Philip Roth was the greatest novelist alive. Now, for me, he’s second."

That says it all. ...more

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About Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante

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Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist. Ferrante's books, originally published in Italian, have been translated into many languages. Her four-book series of Neapolitan Novels are her most widely known works. ...more

Other books in the series

L'amica geniale (4 books)

Books by Elena Ferrante

The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels #2)

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (The Neapolitan Novels #3)

The Story of the Lost Child (The Neapolitan Novels #4)

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Quotes from My Brilliant Friend

“Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.” — 179 likes

“At that moment I knew what the 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 now was 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.” — 110 likes

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