MY BRILLIANT FRIEND - ELENA FERRANTE

I’d heard about and wanted to read this book for years, basically since it and its sequels were translated into English. Recently, the NYT published a list of the best books of this millennium and this topped it, beating out my personal choice, 2666, a placement that rocketed it to the top of my personal to-read list. First and foremost, this book is no 2666. It’s amazing and brilliant and magical, one of the best I’ve read in a year or so, but it’s not on the 2666 level. Few books are as tapped-in and perfect as Bolano’s masterpiece, so that is no knock. Anyway, with all that aside, I loved this thing. It turned out to be quite appropriate to read this thing in the middle of Brat summer, an album that is also about female friendships and relationships and the ambivalence and rivalries, disappointments and love therein. Instead of investigating and interrogating the life of a mid-level pop-star/club girl, MBF follows a pair of girls in mid-century Napels who grow up in poverty and seek to escape their circumstances. The book follows the girls from birth until 16, when one of them marries. The girls are both quite smart and precocious, they both excel in school and are something of little geniuses. One of the more heartbreaking and poignant parts of the book occurs when the title is spoken and who is referring to whom as their “brilliant friend” is revealed. Because of the poverty and misogyny of their circumstances, only one of the girls, our narrator, is allowed to pursue schooling beyond the elementary level, the other main character is forced to drop out and has to navigate life without an education. There are two levels where I think this book really shines. First, it does a great job painting the world that we were in, but through the lens of the two girls. The misogyny of the time and place of the book means that these girls are cut out of the “real world” or deeper world. We hear about the political situation, the communists and fascists who populate post-war Italy, the organized crime and corruption that infect every aspect of their lives, but only through the eyes of these girls who never sit the reader or a reader surrogate down to “explain” what is going on and how these things work. We see them both struggle to live an ethical and moral life under these conditions and how impossible that proves to be. Secondly, the nature of their friendship is so incredibly drawn. The rivalry, jealously, affection, care, ambivalence, of a real friendship is not only there, it’s all there, all at once. It’s not “we’re friends but now we’re fighting and now we’ve made up,” instead its, “I”m not sure what you meant by that or how I feel about you right now,” all the time. The book has a pretty great and devastating ending, a real twist in the last sentences of the book, which ends with a wedding at age 16. I know this is the first in a series of 4 that follow these people throughout their lives, I intend to work my way through the whole thing.