My Brilliant Friend
Two girls in postwar Naples, and a friendship in which each becomes herself by watching the other.
Ferrante's novel tracks Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo from a poor Naples neighbourhood in the 1950s, following them through school, family violence, and the first pull of ambition. The two girls form each other. Elena works and competes and defers; Lila is quicker, harder, more frightening to the adults around her. What one wants, the other already has or refuses.
For a clinician, the interest lies in how a self takes shape against another self. Admiration and envy run as a single current here, and identity forms as much through opposition as through likeness. Elena becomes a person partly by measuring herself against Lila, and partly by borrowing what Lila will not use.
Elena narrates from old age, after Lila has vanished, so the account is shaped by her own stake in it. The reader watches a self being assembled in the act of remembering.
About the author
Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante is the pseudonym of an Italian author who has published fiction since the early 1990s and has chosen to remain anonymous. Her real identity is not publicly known, and she has declined to attach a public face to the work. She is best known for the Neapolitan Novels, a four-book series that begins with My Brilliant Friend, and for the earlier novel The Lost Daughter. Her fiction is written in Italian and widely translated.
Details
- 2011
- Italian
- Europa Editions
- Europa Editions
- 336
- 9781609450786