Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend


I finished reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend late last night and had to restrain myself from immediately starting the second book in her Neapolitan series. There is a vivid immediacy to Ferrante’s writing that made me feel I was IN Naples with the characters. I would look up occasionally, disoriented, from reading, surprised to find that I was still in my Canadian mid-winter living room and not in the hot, dingy streets of Italy.
The book centers around Elena and Lila, two small girls living in the same poor neighbourhood of Naples, who become friends after Lila throws Elena’s beloved doll into the dark basement of her apartment building. When Elena retaliates by throwing Lila’s doll, too, between the iron bars of the basement window, their mutual shock at the fate that has befallen their most precious belongings forms the beginning of a silent pact between them. Elena’s words as they stare at each other in realization – “Whatever you do, I do” – characterize the bond they will have for years to come. Together, they attempt an (unsuccessful) rescue mission into the basement to recover the dolls, and this marks the start of an unspoken competition, in which they push each other every day to confront a fear more awful than the last. The determined, fiery nature of this childhood friendship persists as they grow into teenagers, influencing them first to read more books, get better marks at school, learn more, then to stand up to the boys and men of their neighbourhood, and finally to manipulate their way out of the futures expected of them. In short: the friendship between them protects them both from the very real dangers of the world in which they exist, and becomes the most important factor in both of their lives throughout their formative years.
The depiction of the girls growing up, their adventures and interactions with their neighbours, provides the reader with an intimate portrait of Naples during the 1950s. The families we come to know are those of the fruit and vegetable seller, the carpenter, the grocer, the shoemaker. These are the real people who make up a community, and through them we come to understand the rules and realities that govern them. The neighbourhood is rough and violent, but the people who live there share an identity that manifests itself in a fierce protection of one another – by parent of child, by brother of sister, by friend against outsider. This becomes particularly clear on the occasions when the girls venture outside of the neighbourhood, accompanied by the group of boys they know well from home, who react fiercely – and en masse - to anyone who looks at the girls too directly, who appears too forward, or whose appearance offends the nature of the neighbourhood clans.
It is apparent from the beginning of the novel that Lila is quite brilliant. Through Elena’s narration we see a whippet-like girl whose stubborn will refuses to bend, who is able to best her classmates, both male and female, in competitive tests, whose desire to learn causes her to borrow library books in the names of everyone in her family, who can see beyond the circumstances of her neighbourhood to understand there is more to life, and who is able to pull almost out of thin air the circumstances she navigates and manipulates to ensure she and her family are safe and ultimately drawn into a better sphere of living.
But we see all of this through the eyes of Elena, a narrator whose reliability we have some cause to question. Lila, towards the end of the book, calls Elena her brilliant friend, and we understand that of course she IS brilliant, perhaps the more so of the two, that the unbalanced picture we have of Lila the Great comes to us through the insecure, adolescent lens of a teenaged girl. We also understand that, though Elena does not yet see this, her own form of brilliance is likely to lead to a future far brighter than the one Lila has secured for herself by the end of the book. And that Lila herself, her best friend, has given her, through years of pushing her, the tools to reach for that future.
I became thoroughly attached to these characters whilst reading and I can’t wait to continue the saga. I am, however, imposing a break on myself, I have other books on my TBR list, and I don’t want to swallow these up too quickly. Though I am certain I will come back and re-read these books one day, I want to treasure each volume in the series, like toffee to be sucked instead of bitten, in order to ensure the pleasure endures a little longer.
What I loved:
- Ferrante writes so brilliantly, so vividly – and kudos too, to the work of the translator, Ann Goldstein, because it reads wonderfully well in English – and there are all kinds of meta passages in the book during which Elena describes Lila’s writing, and then her own work to imitate that writing, to improve her writing, that I felt could easily have been passages on Ferrante’s own writing. I loved that this is a book about writing and books as well as about Italian traditions and culture:
Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarrator in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but – further – she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word." 


And later: 


“Professor Gerace and Professor Galiani, who were part of the committee, praised my Italian paper to the skies. Gerace in particular said that my exposition was further improved. He wanted to read a passage to the rest of the committee. And only as I listened did I realize what I had tried to do in those months whenever I had to write: to free myself from my artificial tones, from sentences that were too rigid; to try for a fluid and engaging style like Lila’s in the Ischia letter. When I heard my words in the teacher’s voice, with Professor Galiani listening and silently nodding agreement, I realized that I had succeeded. Naturally it wasn’t Lila’s way of writing, it was mine. And it seemed to my teachers something truly out of the ordinary.”


- The tortuous road through female adolescence is described so perfectly that it took me right back there. The first plump growth of breasts, the acne blooming across the face, the first fleeting feelings of attractiveness and then the crippling insecurity of weight fluctuations and pimples, the pain of watching boys find another girl attractive and not you, the heart-palpitating excitement of a first crush.


- Ferrante brilliantly conveys the sense of the neighbourhood, of how things are done, how they have been done for eons, and then the creaking, gradual changes that are taking place largely at the hands of Lila, and which are so unfamiliar that even Elena, though she recognizes the change, and sees it happening, finds it hard to grasp.


“They were behaving in a way that wasn’t familiar even in the poems that I studied in school, in the novels I read. I was puzzled. They weren’t reacting to the insults, even to that truly intolerable insult that the Solaras were making. They displayed kindness and politeness toward everyone, as if they were John and Jacqueline Kennedy visiting a neighbourhood of indigents. When they were out walking together, and he put an arm around her shoulders, it seemed that none of the old rules were valid for them: they laughed, they joked, they embraced, they kissed each other on the lips… Did she want to drag us out of ourselves, tear off the old skin and put on a new one, suitable for what she was inventing?” 


- The character of Lila is just astonishing. I want to read more about her. I want to know what happens to her. The beginning of the book is a teaser for what must happen later in the series: Lila, adult Lila, has gone missing. And Elena writes that she knows Lila well enough to know that what she wanted most of all was to erase all trace of herself off the earth. The rest of this book is a flashback to their early friendship. And I am left wanting to know what happens to get her back to where we started, what happens between the girls later in life. In other words, this series is at once detailed in its descriptions of the minutiae of quotidian life in 1950s Naples, and sweeping in its generational and compulsive story-telling. Quite magnificent.

No comments:

Post a Comment