Book

My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante · 2011

My Brilliant Friend

About

Background summary — AI-generated; not source-grounded.

My Brilliant Friend (L’amica geniale, 2011; translated into English by Ann Goldstein in 2012) is the first of Elena Ferrante‘s four Neapolitan Novels. Its frame is set in 2010: Elena Greco, now elderly and living in the north, hears that her lifelong friend Lila Cerullo has vanished, taking every trace of herself with her — and breaks a promise never to write about her by beginning this account. The body of the book returns to a poor quarter of eastern Naples in the 1950s and follows the two girls from the day they push each other’s dolls into the cellar of the local loan shark to Lila’s wedding at sixteen. Elena is the one who is kept at school; Lila, quicker and fiercer, is taken out of it to work in her father’s shoe-repair shop, and looks for other exits — a shoe of her own design, then a marriage to the neighbourhood’s richest young man. The novel ends at the wedding reception, on a single image that undoes everything Lila thought she had arranged. The remaining three volumes — The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child — carry the friendship into old age. The quartet sold in the millions, was adapted by HBO and RAI, and in 2024 was placed first in the New York Times’s poll of writers and critics on the best books of the twenty-first century.

In the wiki

  • Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on My Brilliant Friend, Female Friendship, and the Unreliable Narrator — a first reading by both hosts, testing the book against that New York Times verdict. Their case for it is structural: the whole novel is Elena’s account of Lila, so Lila reaches the reader only as Elena’s construction, and the brilliance Elena keeps asserting is never once demonstrated. The phrase ‘my brilliant friend’ is used exactly once in the book, by Lila about Elena, which reverses the story the narrator thinks she has been telling. They also read the neighbourhood as a third character with the fascist past still pressing on it, and dialect against formal Italian as the class weapon both girls use on each other. Eight out of ten from Sandbrook, nine from Syrett; neither will call it the best book of the century.

See also