I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.I had seen My Brilliant Friend recommended many times over the past few years at the bookstore and at the library and on Goodreads, and something about the cover art or the title or something made me think, “Oh no, that's not for me.” And I was dead wrong. I picked this up, and scant hours later, was closing the back cover – absolutely in shock from the closing scene – and am only consoled by the fact that this is the first of four volumes in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. And just to add a note on Ferrante herself: She is an author who remains perfectly anonymous, having written to her publisher upon the acceptance of her first manuscript in 1991, “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.” She does no promotion, has released no biographical information, refuses to attend award ceremonies. It is suspected that as the narrator of My Brilliant Friend is a successful author who shares Ferrante's first name, this series might be considered autobiographical. Who knows? All that matters is that this book and I finally found each other and it impressed me beginning to end.
In the prologue, Elena is in her sixties and learns that her childhood best friend, Lila, has disappeared without a trace. Realising that she herself doesn't have so much as a letter from Lila in her possession – and fearing that Lila has the ability to completely erase all traces of her own existence – Elena decides to write out the story of this remarkable friendship. This first volume covers the years until the girls turn sixteen, with a couple of outlier scenes in which the women are older and looking back together on specific childhood events to give extra context.
The girls are raised in a working-class suburb of Naples, Italy in the 1950s. The neighbourhood is just poor enough that neither of them is taken on the short bus ride to the sea until they're teenagers; a car is a rare sight on local streets; most children never advance to Middle School because their parents can't afford the fees and need their eleven-year-olds to start work. Violence is accepted as part of life – whether from a gang of boys throwing rocks at you or your father tossing you out the window and breaking your arm – and Lila, with her scrapes and scabs and squinty eyes, looks like the type of person who takes abuse from no one; Elena finds her dangerous and irresistible. Lila also taught herself to read and write before she started school, so although her scruffy appearance made her no favourite of the Maestras, Elena is also in awe of her friend's mind. When eventually Elena is the only one of the two of them permitted to continue on in school, Lila nevertheless checks out books from the library on Latin and Greek grammar to tutor herself and stay ahead of Elena's knowledge.
Elena hits puberty first and she feels huge and awkward and she has acne and a big nose. Lila remains tiny and distant, hanging out with other friends. We follow Elena to school, but like her, miss having Lila on the scene: as Elena interprets her experiences through how Lila would feel about them, so too does the reader. As Lila develops into the great beauty of the neighbourhood, it seems fitting that the boys who once threw stones at her are now mooning around after her. Everything about this friendship and the coming-of-age experience is masterfully told.
I don't think I've read another Italian author (other than Umberto Eco, who wasn't trying to capture the Italian experience), and the 1950s Naples that Ferrante describes here is exactly what I'd expect: the cobblestone roads with the rich boys and their Fiat dodging around vegetable carts; the screaming and the smashing pottery that brings everyone to their windows; the sexy young girls and the scrappy young men. There is much made of the girls going from children who blithely accept that events happened before they were born (it doesn't matter if you're talking about the last Ice Age or a recent family feud, that's all prehistory to a child) to becoming young women learning about the War and Fascism; learning who in the neighbourhood was a profiteer and who's mobbed up. Of these facts:
(Lila), in her usual way, was awed and altered by them, so that for the entire summer she tormented me with a single concept that I found quite unbearable. I'll try to summarize it, using the language of today, like this: there are no gestures, words, or sighs that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that human beings have committed and commit.And when they – the beautiful young men and women of the neighbourhood – go strolling in a fashionable part of Naples proper and see what truly chic people look like, they are forced to accept that they are, indeed, little more than hicks; most people don't accept the squalor and violence that has been their share in life. It all comes into focus for Elena at a wedding:
At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts. The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and now was leaning against my father’s shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, at the sexual allusions of the metal dealer. They were all laughing, even Lila, with the expression of one who has a role and will play it to the utmost.Absolutely everything about this book worked for me; it has a subtle magic and I am delighted to have discovered the series now that the next three volumes are out there waiting for me.
