Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on My Brilliant Friend, Female Friendship, and the Unreliable Narrator

My Brilliant Friend arrives with a reputation to answer for: a survey of critics and novelists run by the New York Times named it the best book written in any language this century. Both hosts read it for the first time for this episode, and neither will go that far — Sandbrook gives it eight, Syrett nine. What interests them more is the machinery. The book is narrated entirely by one of its two girls about the other, and by the last quarter both hosts have stopped trusting her. The title, they conclude, is the tell.

Key ideas

1. The narrator is the puzzle, and the title gives it away. Everything reaches the reader through Elena Greco; her friend Lila exists only as Elena’s construction. Elena tells us Lila is brilliant, crackling, indomitable — and almost never shows us. Lila’s writing is called raw native genius, but no line of it is quoted, so the reader cannot judge. By the end Sandbrook has concluded that Elena has built herself a mythological friend, close to an imaginary one. Then, on her wedding morning, naked and childlike in the bath, Lila says it the other way round: ‘You are my brilliant friend. You have to be the best of us all, boys and girls.’ The narrator has misunderstood her own story, and the tragedy belongs to the other girl.

2. An anatomy of friendship — deliberately not Little Women. Little Women sits inside the novel: the girls own it, talk about it, measure themselves against it. Elena is the good girl who follows the model to school and out of the neighbourhood; Lila is the bad girl who rejects it. But where Little Women offers warmth and sisterhood, Syrett’s reading is that this friendship keeps every layer and removes the forgiveness — love, empathy, rivalry, jealousy and hatred running at once, in two girls who know each other’s weak points precisely and prod them on purpose. Elena’s own admission of the dependence is that in losing pieces of Lila’s life, her own ‘lost intensity and importance’.

3. Naples is the third character, and the neighbourhood is not the city. The girls are lost and bewildered on the rare trips into central Naples; their world is a poor eastern quarter that Sandbrook notes is barely described visually and is nonetheless completely vivid, because it is built out of relationships rather than scenery. Syrett’s image for it is gravitational — a womb with an umbilical cord that follows you for life, oppressive and comforting at once. Its history presses down as the girls grow up: a former capital demoted by Italian unification, bombed more than a hundred times by the Allies, starving and typhus-ridden by the time they arrived, then revived on a black market that made the Solara family and put the Camorra on the rise.

4. A wrong choice at sixteen is a life. What makes the book bleak is not violence but foreclosure: these are people too poor to have the liberty of changing their minds later. Lila is taken out of school to repair shoes and looks for another way out — first the revolutionary shoe she designs, then a marriage she believes she has engineered. The last image kills both. Marcello Solara, the mafioso she married Stefano partly to escape, walks into the wedding wearing the Cerullo shoes she designed: her husband’s money is as dirty as his, her art has been handed to the worst man in the neighbourhood, and nothing has changed.

5. The author is unknown, and both hosts decide it does not matter. Elena Ferrante has kept her identity private for thirty years, arguing that a book should be read without the figure of its author clouding it, and has given email interviews in which she fictionalises her own background. Sandbrook’s case for the practice is aesthetic — coming to the novel knowing nothing of its maker, you are less aware of the construction, so the world arrives fully formed with nobody behind it. Syrett’s is ethical, and turns into the episode’s firmest opinion: writers should be able to write what they have not lived, so the hunt for the woman behind the book is beside the point.

Context

Who Elena Ferrante might be

The hosts run the candidates without settling on one, and are candid that they do not much care. A Neapolitan historian, Marcella Marmo, has been proposed on the strength of the period detail — unlikely, Sandbrook thinks, since the history is not the point of the book. The Italian novelist and journalist Domenico Starnone has been named on the basis of a stylometric study that compared the novels against 150 books by 40 contemporary Italian writers and found his prose the closest match, which Sandbrook calls spurious. A variant has Starnone writing with his wife.

The most-cited answer came from the journalist Claudio Gatti, who traced publisher payments, financial records and property transfers and concluded that Ferrante is Anita Raja, a translator of German literature into Italian — Kafka, and Christa Wolf — born in Naples but raised in Rome, and married to Starnone. Ferrante’s readers attacked Gatti for lifting the lid on someone who had asked not to be identified; his defence was that she had laid a false trail by claiming a Neapolitan childhood, and that correcting it was fair game. Syrett notes the Italian literary world is small enough that this was an open secret there long before it was news elsewhere.

Sandbrook draws out what is actually at stake in the Rome detail: if Ferrante was not raised in Naples, some readers would feel the book’s authenticity compromised — which is a reason to stay hidden, since anonymity spares her having to admit that the whole thing is a construct. Syrett’s answer is that Naples and the girlhood are both done too well to be worried about, and that in a publishing culture which signs authors partly on the size of their Instagram followings, refusing to sell yourself is worth respecting on its own.

The Naples underneath the neighbourhood

Naples joined a unified Italy in 1861 having been capital of the independent Kingdom of the Two Sicilies under the House of Bourbon, and lost its prestige and wealth with its independence — one root of the gap between the Italian north and south, and of the emigration to the United States, Argentina and Brazil that began late in the nineteenth century. Under Mussolini from 1922 it was a notably corrupt corner of fascist Italy. In the Second World War it was bombed more than a hundred times, the Germans destroyed the utilities on their way out, and the Allies arrived to find a shell: starvation, children in rags, mass prostitution, typhus, and a black market that became a byword in Allied reporting for how crime thrives in ruins. The rich had left; the poor had been trapped there.

That black market is what the Solaras are built on, and Sandbrook’s point about the book is that the fascist past never lifts. It is done through the girls’ own dawning comprehension — the Solara sons begin as stupid boys in a flashy car and become frightening only as the narrator grows old enough to see them. The neighbourhood’s politics were dominated through the 1950s by Achille Lauro, il comandante, a committed fascist who became a conventional right-wing politician and drifted back toward neo-fascism in the 1970s. The reckoning comes through Pasquale, the young communist, who tells the girls what everyone knows and nobody says: Don Achille had been a spy for the Nazi fascists, Stefano’s grocery money was made on the black market, and the whole quarter is tainted by what its adults did.

Dialect, and the uses of two languages

The class system in the book is carried by language. The working class of the neighbourhood speak Neapolitan, which a northern Italian may struggle to follow at all; formal Italian is the language of school, prestige and power. Elena, who is educated, can move between them, and both hosts notice her using the switch as a weapon — into Italian to impress an intellectual boy she has a crush on, and into Italian mid-conversation with Lila to place herself above her. Lila does it too. The real power, as Syrett puts it, belongs to whoever can do both.

Sandbrook extends this to the doubling that structures the novel: two girls, each with two names — Elena and Lenù, Lila and Lina — and a narrative voice that slides between the twelve-year-old who saw the thing and the old woman recalling it. The identities are not fixed, and the names mark which side is speaking.

Dissolving margins

Lila’s episodes of dissociation — what she calls dissolving margins, in which the outlines of persons and things break down — are read here as the book’s clearest evidence that the brilliant friend is the fragile one. Syrett’s argument is that Elena never needs the escape because Elena is already at a distance, observing; only someone in the middle of the storm has to shut herself off from it. What reads as chilliness is porousness. The same inversion runs through the small facts Elena reports without weighing them: it is Lila, not Elena, who turns back when the girls set out for the sea, frightened of leaving home; and Lila who turns out to be the least sexually experienced of the group.

The world doing this to her is one in which women are controlled and commodified as a matter of course. The decision about whether Lila continues at school is taken by her father and brother arguing in front of her, ending with the father hitting the brother, and she never speaks. The violence is domestic, latent and cyclical — fathers hitting wives, daughters and children, generation after generation.

The verdicts

Sandbrook gives it eight. He whipped through it, found himself unsure halfway through what the fuss was about, and then rethought the whole book from the end backwards, which he takes as the mark of a good one. He is not certain he will read the rest of the quartet, and does not think it the best book of the century — a beautifully observed portrait of female friendship doing clever things with narration. He also thinks the book is done an injustice by being marketed as one for women, and says he would probably never have read it otherwise.

Syrett gives it nine, and would have eaten the next three books straight away. Her case is that it renders an alien world in a way that is nonetheless intuitive and relatable — the mundane, all-consuming anxieties of becoming a teenage girl, caught without drama or cliché — and that watching two characters grow across four books is what plants a series in a reader. The prose she calls clear, sharp and quick, but not groundbreaking. Neither host will put it at the top of the century.

Related

• Dominic Sandbrook — co-host
• Tabitha Syrett — co-host
• My Brilliant Friend — the book under discussion
• Elena Ferrante — the author, or the name standing in for one