My Brilliant Friend (My Brilliant Friend, #1) in Reading Book Club

Mar 28, 2017 Victoria rated it really liked it

Innate stubbornness perhaps delayed my reading of this smash literary hit, Book One of Ferrante’s four “Neapolitan novels,” and I read it now only because my book club selected it. I couldn’t get past the cover, where The New York Times Book Review is quoted saying “One of the great novelists of our time” and The Sunday Times says, “Elena Ferrante has established herself as the foremost modern writer in Italy—and in the world.” So much hype must surely propel expectations to unreachable heights. Innate stubbornness perhaps delayed my reading of this smash literary hit, Book One of Ferrante’s four “Neapolitan novels,” and I read it now only because my book club selected it. I couldn’t get past the cover, where The New York Times Book Review is quoted saying “One of the great novelists of our time” and The Sunday Times says, “Elena Ferrante has established herself as the foremost modern writer in Italy—and in the world.” So much hype must surely propel expectations to unreachable heights.
A lot to live up to.
I’ve read it now, and it is lovely. Not four books’ worth of lovely, perhaps, but I am glad I read this first one. (My book group members who have read on have mixed views about the experience.) It is the story of two young girls, Lila and Elena, up to and mostly through their adolescence. The writing, in translation from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, is vivid and perceptive. An example:
“Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.”
The book’s most memorable feature for me is the strong sense of time and place—a claustrophobic neighborhood outside Naples shortly after World War II. The intermingled families that live there demanded a list of characters, and the one in the front of my copy is well-thumbed. How this community weathered, survived, and felt about the war never featured prominently, perhaps because of the child’s sensibility expressed in the quote above. Yet, it’s hard to believe the war experience wasn’t an almost-physical presence in the characters’ lives.
There are other holes in my understanding as well. Because Elena is the book’s narrator, the reader has less access to Lila’s quirky—and likely more interesting—consciousness, and her character never came into sharp focus for me.
Ferrante has been coy about her true identity, and speculation about who actually writes her books is rife. Given that “Elena Ferrante” is a made-up name, why did she assign her narrator, a would-be writer, the same name? Are we to believe this is quasi-memoir? That decision seemed unnecessarily obfuscating and mildly annoying.
Bottom line: Well worth reading at least this first book. After that . . . ?
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Mar 11, 2016 Kristyn rated it liked it

Shelves: bookclub

Meh. A little long winded. Entertaining but repetitive. I probably won't read the other two in the series. I will read the spoilers in the reviews. ...more

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