Re-reading Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante can be found at all fine book sellers and at bookshop.org. The novel was originally released in 2011.
The story begins at the end. In My Brilliant Friend, the first of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, Elena the narrator, receives a phone call from her friend’s adult son where he tells her his mother, Raffaella is her “real name” but to the narrator—to us—she is Lila, is gone. Not that she has passed, but that she is missing.
Elena tells him to look around the house and tell her what he finds. Lila’s son is confused, but when he calls back later, Elena already knows what he will tell her.
Lila, her friend of five decades, is trying to disappear. She has taken every trace of herself out of the house, removed herself from family photos, exorcising herself from the past. No speck of her remains. Her son is scared, confused, but Elena knows exactly what her friend is trying to do.
And she is not willing to let Lila slip away so easily.
Lila’s overdoing it again Elena tells us, and she sits down to write her friend back into being, to put it all down so that Lila can’t escape her.
What follows is Elena’s story and Lila’s story, beginning with the dolls of their childhood and the march to face their fears at the door of the neighborhood boogeyman (and loan shark) Don Achille and following them through four volumes. The series is five decades of their lives together, apart, paralleled, intersecting, and diverging through time and place. It is a story of Naples, of girls, of women, of friendship, of place and poverty. It is the story of the inextricable ties that bind, about the creation and re-creation of self in the eyes and arms of those we love.
The language of the novels is clear and straightforward, but since I have read the work in translation it’s worth acknowledging the fraught tension that exists between a work and its translation. The novels, less a series of books and more a single novel released in four volumes, meanders through childhood, adolescence, marriage, affairs, divorce, motherhood, more affairs, death, and old age. The story spirals and reflects upon and itself and its own creation, a mirror pointing in on itself. Moments expand and contract, a single trip up the stairs to a door takes chapters; months elapse in the space between paragraphs.
This is the second time I’ve read the series; the first time was in the second summer of the Covid pandemic in a lock down that wasn’t so locked down, but amidst my own personal hiatus from social life. This time around I am listening to them on audiobook, particularly delightful as the person performing the audiobook pronounces the Italian names and words with a delicious precision my single-lingual mind could not bring to them. I have always enjoyed reading and re-reading works, especially when they pay such fruitful dividends for the attention. The prose and story are so gorgeous, it takes restraint to not devour the novels this time around like I did the first. The urge to forgo my life and work in favor of these audiobooks is strong.
On this re-read I am struck by Elena’s—the narrator and perhaps the writer through her—development as a writer, the particular attention the story pays to this development. Slowing down, I’m able to see the choices both Elena’s make on where their gaze rests, on the importance of those lingering moments, the ways that shadows, hands, slips of words, or the turn of mere minutes have these rippling affects throughout the work, throughout the characters life. Elena narrates a life where she is trying to find the words, to make meaning out of the random events; her friend Lila is trying to find a container that will keep her from spilling over herself and seeping out into nothingness. Elena becomes an author in the later novels; in the second novel we discover that Lila too is a writer, though privately, in her notebooks.
The series is long and detailed. It winds through their lives without shying away from the ugly, within them and around them. What lives and breathes at the heart of the novels is the friendship, but this is an overtly political novel. They come of age in a post-world war Italy, feeling the effects of all that came before them and what it has given rise to. They are young women from a poor neighborhood rife with violence and crime and they must learn to negotiate their place within it and decide who they will be with the options they are given and the ones they take anyways.
The question of opportunity lingers on the story. Of the two girls both are smart and capable, but only one is afforded the opportunity to pursue her education. Elena is allowed to continue beyond elementary school, one of the few from that neighborhood who does, moving along alone to high school and then university. It sets her apart, it marks her, but it fails to make her part of the other world too. She remains a girl from a poor neighborhood—that neighborhood—no matter her degrees, no matter the prestige she wins for herself as a writer.
And for Lila, despite her academic progress and the blazing light of her mind, she must make her own way in the world without access to the education Elena has. She marries young, it does not go well. Lila isn’t without successes though, but her opportunities and her abilities must be forced to take shape. Her trajectory and the characters themselves beg the question, what could have been?
HBO has made a series of the books, and I hear that people like it very much. I haven’t seen it. I think there is a tendency around these novels to brush the work off as “women’s fiction”, perhaps because of the covers, perhaps because it centers women. It is likely that this concept “women’s fiction” does us all a great disservice, that the phrase seeks to diminish the work and its contents. We’ll ignore the larger concept and it’s problems. This book reminds me more of Dostoyevsky than Confessions of a Shopaholic. Perhaps it’s the use of multiple names to refer to a single person that follow a pattern I don’t understand as a linguistic and cultural outsider, but undoubtedly it is because of the careful machinations of the political on the lives of Elena and Lila, those that they recognize and those that they don’t.
This book, these books, aren’t an easy acceptance of the way things are. They aren’t a simpering exploration of the enduring power of female friendship. They are deft and careful examinations into the development of a person, of a sense of self and others, and of a writer and writerly sensibility specifically. Each thing that touches Elena Greco leaves its mark on her and she is trying to see it, trying to see herself without clouding, without obfuscation that might make it more digestible. Her life, Lila’s life. Two sides of a coin and the edges between too.
“Is she with you?” Lila’s son asks Elena at the beginning. She tells him no, because Lila isn’t there with her, not in her house, not in that city, but Lila lives inside Elena’s skin, lives as the parts of herself she can’t turn away from. As alive within her as her mother and her father, as the forces that have shaped her, as the place she is from.
