Review: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
The One with the Unreturned Library Book.
For several years now, a plastic-covered copy of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend has lurked among an assortment of books piled up in my childhood bedroom. The paper slip inside indicates I borrowed the novel sometime in early 2021, and was due to return it to a Herefordshire library by the 15th of March. At this time I was midday through a bland, nominal, ‘year off’, trapped between my family home and the Hereford Vaccine Centre, where I performed every form of administrative work imaginable for ultra-stressed NHS staff, and often hid behind my monitor as stoic, PPE-clad nurses stabbed tiny needles into old-age-pensioners (a formative experience). I don’t recall being hassled about returning the book, which is odd, as rural council librarians usually pursue missing volumes with a ruthlessness that would put the most vigilant Bodleian staff member to shame. Meanwhile, My Brilliant Friend cropped up in conversations about female friendship, on lists of modern-day classics, and most recently as an acclaimed HBO TV adaptation pedalled on Facebook reels. I can also vaguely recall reading about the mystery of Ferrante’s identity, though I shelved this news alongside information about other 'anonymous' artists like Banksy, Daft Punk, and Pink Panthress before the Daily Mail 'unmasked' her and she did that excellent podcast episode with Louis Theroux. Only last week did I pick up My Brilliant Friend, and begin to read.
My Brilliant Friend is narrated from the perspective of Elena Greco, as she recalls her childhood and adolescence in 1950s Naples. Her girlhood is marked by poverty, violence, and the tumultuous friendship of Raffaella ‘Lila’ Cerullo, with whom Elena's fate seems irreversibly entwined. However, whilst Elena’s parents pay for her to take the admissions test for middle school, and her bookish talents propel her further up the education system, Lila is forced to start work at her Father's cobbler's shop, and their paths diverge.
So, did My Brilliant Friend live up to the hype?
The 20-page prologue was instantly arresting, but as I stumbled through the first half, I felt distinctly underwhelmed. Initially, I even wondered if there was an issue with the translation: the sentences were clunky and confusing, the pace lumbering. Ferrante’s prose largely dispenses with imagery and poetics, especially regarding setting, and over-describes the choreography of scenes, though her description does, display flashes of distinction, especially when our narrator attempts to characterise Lila’s magnetic qualities. As a child, Lila’s “quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite”; later, she silences a male peer who is “defeated by [her] capacity to link one thing to another in a chain that tightened around you on all sides.” Overall though, I questioned why someone hadn’t flicked through the pages with big red pen and given the whole thing a thorough edit. There was a section close to the middle —a scene set at a dance —which nearly made me chuck the book in the bin with frustration.
There is something about reading the No.1 Best Book of the 21st Century*, and finding it less than Best, similar to ordering an expensive special at a restaurant, only for it to arrive cold, on a tiny plate, with the vegetables undercooked. The gulf between expectation and experience amplifies any complaints, a process I probably accelerated with trawling through sundry 5-star Goodreads Reviews. Each one made me more indignant, to the point of reading particularly offensive snippets of the book aloud over dinner, with exaggerated boredom. Neutrally, my housemate observed that she didn't really see any issue with Ferrante’s writing, and I felt incensed like someone who has spent several hours complaining about conspiracy theorists, only to discover that her confidante believes the earth to be flat too.
On reflection, my criticisms softened. Ferrante's general neglect of overt literary-fiction device, dissent from the expected progression of the bildungsroman, and tendency towards repetition is frustrating, but does ground the narrative in an acute realism. The tone is not confessional but the feelings, desires and character defects revealed are deeply intimate, and no sordid detail of brutal, impoverished Naples is spared. In recent years commentators have - rightfully - criticised the tendency to assume that autobiography motors the fiction of female authors. Assuming My Brilliant Friend is drawn from purely from biographical experience is to risk undercutting Ferrante's imaginative capacity, but the confessional subject matter, intricate exposition of Neapolitan social and economic dynamics, and the fact narrator and nom de plume share the first name 'Elena', does encourage a reading of Elena Greco as the fictional avatar of Ferrante. Indeed, much has been made of Ferrante's true identity, and whether My Brilliant Friend is actually memoir clothed as fiction, culminating in the vitriolic, so-called 'unmasking' of Ferrante by a male Italian journalist — the ethical fishiness of whom is, I think, self-evident.
Fiction, autobiography, or a mixture of both - in My Brilliant Friend 1950s Naples and the brutal class and gender hierarchies it anchors emerge in gritty detail: organised crime mediated by the violent Camorrists dominates the local community, men are murdered in their beds and Fathers beat their daughters and send them flying through windows with the strength of their aggression. Violence is an integral component of this brutal masculinity, as is the patrolling of the female body. Reuniting with her bookish childhood crush, Nino, Elena realises with shock that "he showed not a trace of that disposition to violence that Pasquale, Rino, Antonio, Enzo showed when they went out with us and someone gave us one glance to many. As an intimidating guardian of our bodies he had little value.” Here, Elena's body is experienced as something which necessitates protection, and Ferrante is expert in showing how integral a violent control of the female form is to the hegemonic masculinity of post-war Italy.
Indeed, Ferrante is a dedicated chronicler of the phenomenology of the female body, and I felt the section exploring Elena's transition from slight, innocent child to teenage woman was a standout section. As soon as Elena experiences puberty her body becomes a source of shame and confusion: "As soon as I could I locked myself in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, naked. I no longer knew who I was… I felt at mercy of obscure forces acting outside my body." The omnipresent male gaze divorces Elena from an immediate, somatic experience of selfhood, and her feelings of inadequacy in relation to Lina's increasing accumulation of the marks of heteronormative womanhood - multiple suitors, a finance - are expressed through dissatisfaction with her pimpled face, her excess flesh. She turns to familiar technologies of femininity - makeup, dresses, jewellery - to discipline her body, as it "expand[s] like pizza dough." This rendering of puberty felt startlingly contemporary.
However, Elena's narrative eye is turned so tightly on Lila that her own character development remains undetected until the final third of the book, when we suddenly realise the novel is just as much about Elena's fledging journey of upwards mobility, as her relationship with Lila. This subtle shift in perspective solidifies at the novel's end, when Lila addresses her as "my brilliant friend", and admonishes Elena, "to be the best of all, boys and girls." From here the novel motors towards a masterful conclusion, where Elena realises that the educational path she has "confronted brilliantly" has produced a gulf between her crystallising identity and the people she is bound to by background, and blood. This epiphany is cleverly manifested through language. It is language that solidified Elena and Lila's childhood bond, as they conversed standard Italian "of comics and books" to the exclusion of other children, and language which enabled Elena's ascension through the education system, as she steadily grasped Latin and Greek. By the novel's end, as Elena struggles to find linguistic middle-ground with her Mother, and with Lila, "Language had become a mark of alienation". I'd be willing to bet that the next book takes this growing alienation as its starting point and, despite myself, I might just read it.
A few notes:
*According to the New York Times
My Brilliant Friend, alongside multiple platitudes, has also attracted many critical reviews on Goodreads, my favourites of which include:
i love family drama when it's not my own
There was not one character that was engaging enough to care about. Everyone was shallow, jealous and self absorbed. Basically, it was "I love you, I hate you, fight fight fight, I love you, I hate you, fight fight fight".It was like West Side Story meets Jersey Shore
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