As a person who likes reading and likes ranked lists of things, I was quite intrigued by the New York Times list of the top 100 books of the 21st century. I’d read seven of the top ten, which included several of my favorite novels (and a couple that I thought were pretty seriously overrated). But I hadn’t read the number one pick, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which I decided I should remedy as soon as I could.
My Brilliant Friend is the story of a friendship between two girls, Elena (the narrator) and Lila (the brilliant friend), in postwar Italy. It’s an accurate title, although “My Cruel Friend” or “My Friend Who Struggles Under the Oppressive Yolk of the Patriarchy,” would have been just as accurate (despite the latter’s lack of brevity). The cleverness of Ferrante’s title emerges late in the novel, when Lila refers to Elena as “my brilliant friend,” reversing what Elena has been telling us for over two hundred pages.
What makes a person brilliant? Is it the student who quickly grasps everything the teacher says? Is it the dreamer who imagines an entirely new way of doing something? Or perhaps the charismatic leader whose every word is made more compelling by their very presence? In Ferrante’s telling, Lila is brilliant in all of these ways, casting a long shadow over Elena, who is studious and thoughtful and kind, but spends much of the novel grappling with her own sense of inadequacy:
Even the fact that, in my first year, I was a student with a small reputation for being clever soon seemed to me unimportant. In the end what did it prove? It proved how fruitful it had been to study with Lila and talk to her, to have her as a goad and support as I ventured into the world outside the neighborhood, among the things and persons and landscapes and ideas of books. Of course, I said to myself, the essay on Dido is mine, the capacity to formulate beautiful sentences comes from me; of course, what I wrote about Dido belongs to me; but didn’t I work it out with her?
Growing up, and by extension, the Bildungsroman, is about figuring out who we are and what we can dream of becoming. For Elena that question is deeply tied up in what she owes to her friendship with Lila, who unlike Elena is not allowed to continue her education and is instead caught in a web of unacceptable1 suitors. As we age these outside influences become less threatening: I don’t feel that my ego is under attack if someone else’s insights shape or shift my own thinking. But the world of My Brilliant Friend is the world of adolescence, and Elena’s need to prove and differentiate herself is one of the aspects of the novel that makes it feel so perfectly real.
Cruelty is the other constant of the teenage years, and Lila is brilliantly cruel. When Elena asks her to read an essay written for her theology class, Lila responds with the an extraordinary diatribe:
We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you’ll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Do you want to see the string of pearls that Stefano gave me?
Look at what Lila does in this short speech: she cuts Elena’s essay off at the knees while simultaneously describing a broken world that justifies her own cruelty. And when she’s done she turns the attention back on her upcoming wedding to the wealthy Stefano, prodding at Elena’s fears of being poor, boyfriendless, and left behind in childhood. Lila’s cruelty is complicated by the fact that she surely envies Elena’s freedom and that she and Elena need each other, that each is the only one that truly understands the other.
To paraphrase Yogi Berra, ninety percent of growing up is figuring out who we are, and the other half is figuring out where we’re from. The girls know from a young age that most adults regard their neighbor Don Achille with hatred and fear, and so they turn him into the boogeyman of their childhood games. Only later do they learn that he was an historical boogeyman as well, a fascist during the war. The French historian Ernest Renan said, “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation2,” and while the adults in Elena’s neighborhood might prefer to forget the horrors they endured, it doesn’t mean that the past is no more:
Her father pretended that there had been nothing before. Her mother did the same, my mother, my father, even Rino. And yet Stefano’s grocery store before had been the carpenter shop of Alfredo Peluso, Pasquale’s father. And yet Don Achille’s money had been made before. And the Solara’s money as well. She had tested this out on her father and mother. They didn’t know anything, they wouldn’t talk about anything. Not Fascism, not the king. No injustice, no oppression, no exploitation. They hated Don Achille and were afraid of the Solaras. But they overlooked it and went to spend their money both at Don Achille’s son’s and at the Solaras’, and sent us too. And they voted for Fascists, for the monarchists, as the Solaras wanted them to. And they thought that what had happened before was past and, in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too.
I hope that this passage and the ones above pay tribute to the wonder clarity of Ferrante’s prose. No other recent novelist reminds me so much of Tolstoy, from the way in which Ferrante sets not just a character, but a whole set of characters, a community, in motion, to the unflinching desire to explore the human condition. Nothing is simple in this novel because life isn’t simple, but at the same time the tension that builds to an unexpected cliffhanger3 is indicative of the novelist’s art. It’s no surprise that My Brilliant Friend was appealing to such a wide range of readers that it finished first in the New York Times survey. It’s not my favorite of the 21st century, but it’s certainly high on the list.
Unacceptable to Lila, at least.
From Renan’s 1882 lecture, “What is a Nation?”
Fortunately there are three further novels in Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Quartet", which I’m sure I’ll read at some point.