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A review by storytold
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
4.0
4.35? Can I do that? My original review was just going to read "Being in love with your best friend is something that can be so personal" but then I wrote an essay so I guess I really liked this book.
Did I *enjoy* it? I enjoyed analyzing it. It's the first thing that's grabbed me after bouncing off book after book for a while. Lately I've been thinking about movement in writing, how interiority and action are both bad when they don't bear movement in mind. This is an extremely interior book that nevertheless focuses only on movement—interestingly not so much on Elena's movement, as is often the case with POV protagonists, but much more significantly on Lila's, and in a distant way the neighbourhood's, their whole generation. Lila served as the catalyst for that community's growth. A motion-sensitive camera turned on every time Lila evolved and we watched that process through Elena's eyes, though Elena is peculiarly more a sponge for the goings-on around her than herself a significant catalyst for change. She is hardworking, but lacks Lila's raw ambition, so it lands in the text quite differently.
Several times I reread a scene trying to imagine Lila's perspective instead. Enjoyable an exercise though this was, I realized what a different, worse book it would be if that was textual. The intrigue was purely in the reader's capacity to imagine her perspective and understand how different this world would look through her eyes—a domestic thriller layered over itself, watching Elena getting her education through the luck of her parents' willingness to provide it.
The book weaves a fairly complex social and political tapestry and relies on that unreliable single-POV narration to show how one person, albeit thoroughly embedded within her community, is navigating the hand she's been dealt. The last line in particular does land with a punch because it is as it has always been—Elena looking decipheringly at Lila—only in the context of all those social and political elements rising and clashing at the wedding. We realize that Lila, a very clever person navigating her survival and doing the best she can, is nevertheless aboard a sinking ship she had had to build out of necessity. Elena has not understood it until then because she is upwardly mobile on her own merit and luck, whereas Lila has had to sacrifice herself to create the same effect.
This book is effectively a thought experiment: put two girls in postwar "developing" Naples, give one an education and deny the same to the other, and what do they become? God, the more I write about this book the better I like it. I think the most compelling feature of the book was the historical depth of the setting (very historian thing of me to say)—I know next to nothing about Italian politics outside of wartime, nor did I know what "dialect" versus Italian meant in the context of this book. I asked my partner casually what that could be about and he conjured from memory a fairly comprehensive history of Italian nationalism c. 1870-1930. This was very helpful in contextualizing the events of the book and has piqued my interest in Italian history. I think this book wouldn't work as well for someone who wasn't invested in how modern nationalism and regionalism functioned in Europe generally, how radical politics and identity were tempered by the integration of a capitalist economy in Italy, and accordingly how class functions as the major motivator of everyone in this book.
Deftness of prose helped my intrigue massively. Execution was most certainly there. But it all felt quite removed and sterile despite the ferocity of the ambitions of pretty much every youth in the book. What invested me was its complexity, the social context that informed it. The presence of the capitalist Solaras, their violent interventions in the life and community that provided the backdrop of Elena and Lila's lives; how Marcello caught a whiff of Lila's ambition, like everyone else, and tried to uplift it through control and coercion; how openly hostile Lila was to this encroaching presence of ugly capitalism in her life, her neighbourhood. Lila, later negotiating with Stefano where to live, wanting to stay in the neighbourhood she grew up in is emblematic of her resistance to the sort of upward mobility that separates her from her family, from herself, from the girl she had been. She wants more for herself but she will not forget herself, even if she tries to work that poor, stringbean girl out of her appearance.
While reading I was compelled, but barely piqued emotionally. I bet subsequent books will endear me better, that reading the whole series will have the desired effect. For some reason I own books 1, 3 and 4 of this series; I now have 2 out from the library. I had big reading plans this month but maybe now those plans are the Neapolitan Novels.
Did I *enjoy* it? I enjoyed analyzing it. It's the first thing that's grabbed me after bouncing off book after book for a while. Lately I've been thinking about movement in writing, how interiority and action are both bad when they don't bear movement in mind. This is an extremely interior book that nevertheless focuses only on movement—interestingly not so much on Elena's movement, as is often the case with POV protagonists, but much more significantly on Lila's, and in a distant way the neighbourhood's, their whole generation. Lila served as the catalyst for that community's growth. A motion-sensitive camera turned on every time Lila evolved and we watched that process through Elena's eyes, though Elena is peculiarly more a sponge for the goings-on around her than herself a significant catalyst for change. She is hardworking, but lacks Lila's raw ambition, so it lands in the text quite differently.
Several times I reread a scene trying to imagine Lila's perspective instead. Enjoyable an exercise though this was, I realized what a different, worse book it would be if that was textual. The intrigue was purely in the reader's capacity to imagine her perspective and understand how different this world would look through her eyes—a domestic thriller layered over itself, watching Elena getting her education through the luck of her parents' willingness to provide it.
The book weaves a fairly complex social and political tapestry and relies on that unreliable single-POV narration to show how one person, albeit thoroughly embedded within her community, is navigating the hand she's been dealt. The last line in particular does land with a punch because it is as it has always been—Elena looking decipheringly at Lila—only in the context of all those social and political elements rising and clashing at the wedding. We realize that Lila, a very clever person navigating her survival and doing the best she can, is nevertheless aboard a sinking ship she had had to build out of necessity. Elena has not understood it until then because she is upwardly mobile on her own merit and luck, whereas Lila has had to sacrifice herself to create the same effect.
This book is effectively a thought experiment: put two girls in postwar "developing" Naples, give one an education and deny the same to the other, and what do they become? God, the more I write about this book the better I like it. I think the most compelling feature of the book was the historical depth of the setting (very historian thing of me to say)—I know next to nothing about Italian politics outside of wartime, nor did I know what "dialect" versus Italian meant in the context of this book. I asked my partner casually what that could be about and he conjured from memory a fairly comprehensive history of Italian nationalism c. 1870-1930. This was very helpful in contextualizing the events of the book and has piqued my interest in Italian history. I think this book wouldn't work as well for someone who wasn't invested in how modern nationalism and regionalism functioned in Europe generally, how radical politics and identity were tempered by the integration of a capitalist economy in Italy, and accordingly how class functions as the major motivator of everyone in this book.
Deftness of prose helped my intrigue massively. Execution was most certainly there. But it all felt quite removed and sterile despite the ferocity of the ambitions of pretty much every youth in the book. What invested me was its complexity, the social context that informed it. The presence of the capitalist Solaras, their violent interventions in the life and community that provided the backdrop of Elena and Lila's lives; how Marcello caught a whiff of Lila's ambition, like everyone else, and tried to uplift it through control and coercion; how openly hostile Lila was to this encroaching presence of ugly capitalism in her life, her neighbourhood. Lila, later negotiating with Stefano where to live, wanting to stay in the neighbourhood she grew up in is emblematic of her resistance to the sort of upward mobility that separates her from her family, from herself, from the girl she had been. She wants more for herself but she will not forget herself, even if she tries to work that poor, stringbean girl out of her appearance.
While reading I was compelled, but barely piqued emotionally. I bet subsequent books will endear me better, that reading the whole series will have the desired effect. For some reason I own books 1, 3 and 4 of this series; I now have 2 out from the library. I had big reading plans this month but maybe now those plans are the Neapolitan Novels.