Elena grows up side by side with her friend/foil/personal albatross Lila, who is naturally brilliant at everything and more beautiful than Elena, but who is held down by circumstances to work in her father's shoe store while Elena has a chance to escape her life through education. The narrator Elena tells us everything about her upbringing in a neighborhood where harsh poverty is the norm and family violence is unremarkable, even, for instance, when a father sends a daughter flying out a second story window. I read the book in English (because my Italian is not that good yet) and the style was both deeply intimate and jarringly matter-of-fact. The cast of characters is large, and for me, an American reader, I was missing some cultural context that made it a little bewildering at first. This is contemporary realistic fiction about two women who grow up together in the 1950s and 1960s in a poor neighborhood in Naples. My Brilliant Friend is not the sort of book I would normally pick up as I prefer fantasy fiction. Still, it only adds to the intrigue, as you can't help but wonder who writes these marvelous books. Her real identity is unknown except to her publisher because she wishes to have a normal life. There have been many articles about this author's mysterious anonymity. 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. This is a story of childhood that simply doesn’t know it’s underprivileged. This is by no means an emotionally manipulative misery memoir. 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. That constant anger, violence, the ‘let’s get them before they get us’ feel permeates the novel. Anyway, to me this book was more about class than gender. But then, I generally feel female experience, once stripped of all telling signs could be pretty universal, because, you know, women are people too. 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 in short it’s about the intense friendship and rivalry between two girls growing up in the impoverished outskirts of Naples. I don’t suppose I have to explain what this book is about, because you have other reviews for that. 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. What we are left with, though, is so vivid and authentic that no carefully polished novel could compete with it. 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. Neither do they have time for stylistic flourishes. 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. Additionally, Knausgaard has happily joined the marketing circus, which is why I find Ferrante’s presumed exhibitionism a lot more palatable. The autobiographical component is official in case of Knausgaard and alleged in Ferrante’s. 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.įerrante’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. 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. So despite the terrible cover, and a rather idiotic blurb I knew it would be a fine book. 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. In fact, everyone in the office received a copy – that’s how much our boss wanted us to read it. I received this book as a Christmas present from my boss over a year ago.
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