My Brilliant Friend

What I love about this book–strange as it may sound–is how perfectly the darker emotions are captured; shame, envy, disgust, and boredom are so vibrantly described as to become almost beautiful.

Growing up in a corner of Naples run by the mafia, protagonist Raffaella Cerullo is brilliant and fearless. This book is the first in a four-book series that I read the summer of its release, and it made me want to pack up and go to Naples.

I am convinced nobody writes about female friendships in an aching, warm, and complex way better than Elena Ferrante. I have returned to pages of this book again and again.

The relatability, the precision with which you can see yourself so clearly on certain pages. It has helped me find language in navigating my own friendships.

My Brilliant Friend is the first novel in a series of four entitled the Neapolitan Quartet. Set in a poor neighbourhood of Naples, it is a marvelous evocation of the childhood and teenage years of two Italian girls, Elena and Lila, their friends and enemies, and their families.

Having myself had a stab at describing young female friendships, I couldn’t put it down. I shall certainly look out for the second in the series, The Story of a New Name.

This novel is the first in Ferrante’s autobiographically based Neapolitan tetralogy of growing up and making a life in Italy—friendships, teenage years in school and her poor neighborhood, adolescent experiments with sex, difficult but loving friendships, the rough and tumble of her native city, Naples, and its inhabitants.

I had hesitated to begin because of all the different families and characters who come and go, but a dramatis personae at the front of the novel helps, and as I got into the first chapters of the novel, I found it didn’t matter about the clusters of characters.

The energy of… show more.

I held out on Ferrante for a while, put off by the complicated neighborhood tree at the beginning of the book. When I finally dug in, I was so riveted by Elena and Lila that I stopped caring about all those other characters.

This book really nails the loyalty that can build out of rivalry in a friendship. Elena and Lila meet as schoolgirls in a violent, working-class neighborhood in post-war Naples. They are both smart, but Lila, the more fiery and precocious of the two, is forced to drop out of school to work. Elena, with a kind of… show more.

This is a series of four novels with the first one titled My Brilliant Friend.

The novel is set in the outskirts of Naples in the 1950s following the early lives of two friends. One is dark and outgoing but seems to contain an inner strength as well as inner demons while the other is lighter, more introspective, and tentative. Life quickly rushes at them as they deal with the families of local mafia sons and their girlfriends both in school and the neighborhood.

The writing is so intimate and perceptive it brings you right to the doorsteps of both… show more.

A magnificent depiction of the coming of age of a writer, through youth to old age, in Naples, Italy, with a powerful depiction of a friend who is a magnetic enigma. It describes Italy through the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s—and addresses, engages, creativity, historical crises, family schisms, politics, sexuality, female rage, literary politics, and breakdown and loss, the consolations of artistic endeavor. Passionate, complex, rich, epic in its scale, attentive to small details, acute in its charting of minds and spirits. Ferrante has invented the memorable characters of Lila and Elena in her pages.

My Brilliant Friend is a rich and absorbing novel about the intense friendship between two young girls in the slums of Naples in the 1950s. Both girls, Elena and Lila, are poor and clever, and while they are often competitive, they learn to rely on each other. Ferrante creates a detailed and fascinating world, pulling the reader into the colour and drama of a poor neigbourhood in post-war Neapolitan Italy. At the same she creates a powerful and unforgettable picture of two girls trying to create a future for themselves. I recommend this to any reader who likes a strong… show more.

My Brilliant Friend is my favorite novel of the last decade. Elena and Lila are childhood friends in working-class Naples, Italy in the 1950s. When Lila turns down an offer to take a writing class it is Elena who takes it and realizes her vocation. On this theme alone the author captures how Elena’s life changes forever once her first book is published. The author captures how her working-class family, neighbors, and friends, including Lila, look at her differently. She is catapulted into a world she knows nothing about and struggles with her newfound fame and new identity. Who is… show more.

Like me, millions of mainly women readers were captivated by this saga of an intense and heartbreaking relationship between two girls that evolves over four volumes. The story of Lila and Lenù’s friendship begins in 1950s Naples when they are young schoolgirls, living in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood. Even though on the surface my boring middle-class life did not resemble theirs even remotely, the emotions that tied the two together as they grew into adolescence feel universal. In fact, reading Ferrante’s novel made me understand what I was trying to figure out in my own book––and led me… show more.