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

Dominic Sandbrook

So, Tabby, you hadn't read this before, had you, before we did this? You've just finished it, as have I. What was your first reaction to it? What did you make of it all?

Tabitha Syrett

First off, it was such a treat to read something for the first time. It's quite rare that we've done that on this show. And I just thoroughly enjoyed it. It is infinitely readable. It's also, I think, particularly enjoyable if you're a female reader — though I think you can enjoy it very, very much as a male reader too. There's all sorts to pick apart. Naples comes alive in it in an extraordinary way, and so does the community they live in. As a girl it's incredibly relatable, because in many ways it's a coming-of-age story. And it brilliantly captures the complexities of female friendships.

Tabitha Syrett

There's massive hype around this book. Both of our producers love it. So many people I know love it. So I was interested to see if it lived up to the hype. I think we'll discuss that at the end of the episode. But what about you? It was the first time reading it for you too.

Dominic Sandbrook

First time for me, like you. I had read a lot about the hype. First of all the mystery about Elena Ferrante, which we'll come to, because she's writing under a nom de plume — she's effectively hiding behind a borrowed identity. Who is she? Some people are fascinated by that. But for me, more interesting is whether the book would live up to its reputation. The New York Times did a massive survey of critics a few years ago and named it the best book in any language of the entire twenty-first century.

Tabitha Syrett

And it wasn't just critics. It was fellow authors. If you can have experts in reading, it would be them.

Dominic Sandbrook

Exactly.

Tabitha Syrett

And us.

Dominic Sandbrook

And us. Well — we were not invited. It's important to be clear about that.

Dominic Sandbrook

I really enjoyed it. I whipped through it in a couple of days. When I was about halfway through I thought, hmm, I'm enjoying it, but I'm wondering what all the fuss is about. When I got to the end, there were bits of it that stayed with me, and I started to rethink what I'd read — which is always a sign of a good book, I think, when you're almost tempted to go back and start reading again from the beginning because you'll notice things. Particularly about the relationship between the two girls. By the end of the book I think you see it in a different light. A lot of your expectations have been overturned. I loved that about it. And by and large I really, really enjoyed it.

Dominic Sandbrook

It's interesting, though, because if I hadn't done this podcast I probably would never have read it. It is projected by the publisher, and indeed by the literary industry generally, as a book by a woman, about women, for women. And I think that does it an injustice. Not that that isn't a good thing in itself.

Tabitha Syrett

I think it does too.

Dominic Sandbrook

As a male reader who might be suspicious of reading it, there is so much to enjoy in this book. Not least, as you say, the world of Naples in the 1950s.

Tabitha Syrett

Absolutely. And it is thrilling. But you say a book for women by a woman — in many ways Elena Ferrante is the most mysterious author we've ever done on The Book Club, because as you say, no one knows who she is. Elena Ferrante is just a pseudonym, and she's kept her identity private for thirty years, claiming that this anonymity is a crucial aspect of her process as a writer: that a book should be read and understood without the figure of the author clouding it in a reader's mind.

Tabitha Syrett

She has given loads of email interviews over the years, and in those she's often fictionalised her background as a false identity, which is very interesting. She said at one point that she was the daughter of a Neapolitan seamstress, that Naples had defined her childhood and her adolescence and her early adulthood, that she had sisters.

Dominic Sandbrook

Which is very clever. If you're being cynical you could say it's an ingenious marketing ploy, because obviously you're buying into the sense that this is a person who really knows about the world she's writing about.

Tabitha Syrett

Are you suggesting that she's not those things? That this is a fiction from her?

Dominic Sandbrook

It's an interesting concept in itself, this. We're obviously a book show. We have spent a lot of time digging into the authors behind the book, sometimes in order to shed light upon the book we're discussing. When we did The Picture of Dorian Gray we discussed Oscar Wilde's dual identity and how it comes out in the book. We discussed Emily Brontë.

Tabitha Syrett

Or Orwell, or whoever.

Dominic Sandbrook

Orwell, or whatever it is. So it's an interesting phenomenon for us to be doing a book in which the author is unknown. You could argue it's an ethical dilemma — should we be digging into it at all? I think what we should do is run through the most famous candidates. I'm not going to reach my own conclusions, because I don't find that I care that much about who she is. But it's an intriguing mystery nevertheless.

Tabitha Syrett

It's a game, isn't it? Because the books are such hits, people are fascinated by who Elena Ferrante might be. If you go online and google her, you can read all sorts of articles about who she might be.

Dominic Sandbrook

There are some people who think, well, she's so deeply immersed in the world of Naples in the 1950s that perhaps she's a historian. So there's a writer called Marcella Marmo, and people think, maybe she's a historian from Naples, maybe it's Marcella Marmo. Seems very unlikely, because it's not really a historical novel, is it? The history's not the point. One of the interesting candidates is a man.

Tabitha Syrett

So interesting. The book is so laden with female sensibility. So the idea that it could be a man — on the one hand you could say, my God, he's a genius, if he were a man, for managing to capture this female world and the delicacies of female relationships so well. Or you could say, again, great marketing, because it's much easier to sell if it's a woman.

Tabitha Syrett

But men are perfectly capable of writing about women.

Dominic Sandbrook

Of course. Anyway, there's a guy some people have pointed the finger at — an Italian writer and journalist called Domenico Starnone.

Tabitha Syrett

The way they came to the conclusion it was him is so interesting, because it's people taking something to an extreme degree.

Dominic Sandbrook

They analysed the grammar and punctuation and vocabulary of the book. They did a sort of computer survey of it. They compared it with 150 books by 40 other contemporary Italian writers, and they said the style Ferrante is closest to is that of this bloke Starnone, and therefore it's him. Which I think is very spurious.

Tabitha Syrett

I agree. But then there's another intriguing possibility, which is that Starnone wrote it in collaboration with his wife, given that both of them were born in Naples and his upbringing resembles that of the two main characters in the novel.

Tabitha Syrett

And this leads us to the most popular conclusion about who Ferrante is. When I was digging into this I read an interview with the man who reached it, and it was a fascinating read. There's a journalist called Claudio Gatti who did a massive investigation to try to uncover Ferrante's identity, and he took this very far. He used financial records. He traced payments from the publisher who publishes these books. He looked at real estate purchases and transfers.

Tabitha Syrett

Ferrante's fans really came after him, because they said, you have no right — she has said that she wants to be anonymous, you can't lift the lid on who someone is when they don't want to be revealed. And he defended himself on the basis that she had sprinkled a false trail about who she was, by saying that she came from Naples, that she grew up in Naples, that she was grounded in this world, and that therefore it was his right to tell people the truth.

Tabitha Syrett

So who are we talking about here?

Dominic Sandbrook

He looked at all the financial records and came to the conclusion that Elena Ferrante was a translator called Anita Raja — and that she was not raised in Naples. She was raised in Rome.

Tabitha Syrett

Born in Naples, but raised in Rome.

Dominic Sandbrook

Yes. And her speciality is translating German literature into Italian, which will please our German producer. She did Kafka, and she specialised in Christa Wolf. There was a piece in the New York Times saying that people in Italy have known for a long time that Anita Raja is Ferrante. Literary circles in Italy are quite small and quite tight, so basically everybody knew. It was an open secret. It's just not really well known outside Italy. But there's a twist, isn't there — who is Anita Raja married to?

Tabitha Syrett

She's married to Domenico Starnone, the man that people said had been writing these novels.

Tabitha Syrett

And to be honest, this debate runs on and on. People haven't reached definitive conclusions. Our newsletter, Book Club Notes, is going to do a deep dive into it. But the question itself doesn't really bother or interest me very much. Trying to uncover someone's identity is always intriguing, but it doesn't affect my reading of this book in any way. When I read it this time I thought not at all about Elena Ferrante and who she was. And I don't care about not finding out. I was reading things online saying that it would really ruin the books if they discovered who Ferrante was, and I just think that most of the time we read books knowing who the author is, and it doesn't change the experience. She is not the first author to have a nom de plume.

Dominic Sandbrook

No, of course. We talked about Emily Brontë — Ellis Bell. George Eliot, exactly.

Tabitha Syrett

Obviously, if you were studying a historical author it can help to shed light on the issues, the themes, the concerns woven into the narrative. But a story can be a story without that, in my opinion. And writers, I think, should always be able to write about things that they haven't experienced. It's a work of imagination, it's a work of creative endeavour. For me, to feel understood by a book, or to feel that I can relate to it, is very different from seeking to understand it from an analytical perspective. So I don't really care either way. And I do actually respect her decision to want to stay anonymous, in this world of promotion where people are constantly trying to weave a version of themselves in order to sell things.

Dominic Sandbrook

It's interesting, because we're at a point in the history of literary culture where authors are put under enormous pressure by publishers to sell themselves, particularly on social media. They're more likely to sign you up as an author if you already have a very popular Instagram account. So that makes her an outlier.

Dominic Sandbrook

I think there are two aspects to this. One is that if you come to a book like this knowing nothing of the author, you are actually more likely to immerse yourself in the reality of the characters. You are more likely to suspend your disbelief, because you're less aware of the process of construction. It's as though the book has come to you fully formed, perfectly, and nobody actually wrote it. There is no Elena Ferrante, there is just the book. So you throw yourself into the world of these two women in a way that you might not if you were conscious of the puppet master.

Dominic Sandbrook

The other thing is that Naples in the fifties is such an important part of the story. If Elena Ferrante was not raised in Naples, then for some readers that would compromise the supposed authenticity of the book. So you can understand why she would want to keep her identity secret — she doesn't want to admit to everybody, this is literary fiction, it's a construct, and I made all this up. People are so invested emotionally in the story of Lenù and Lila. If you're aware that there's someone pulling the strings, for some readers that would spoil it.

Tabitha Syrett

I suppose so. But part of the genius of the book is Naples, and the way she captures that world and that gritty surrounding. And it is also about two girls, and growing up as a girl, and female friendships, and she manages to get that — and I'm sure she experienced that, if she is a woman. So I do get it. But I genuinely do think that people should almost always be able to write about that which they have not experienced. I don't think you can write Beloved if you're not Toni Morrison. But almost always.

Dominic Sandbrook

Should we talk a little bit about the book itself and give people a sense of it? Some people listen to these episodes before reading the books, so there's always a slightly delicate dance with spoilers.

Dominic Sandbrook

Just to give an outline of the story: the book is narrated by Elena Greco — we'll call her Elena; she's also Lenù, so names change across the course of the book as the characters age. Elena is telling us about her childhood and her teenage years in Naples, in a working-class suburb in the east of the city, very gritty. Interestingly there aren't many visual descriptions of this world, but our sense of it is very vivid, because it's defined by the relationships of the characters. You get a real sense of what it would be like to grow up there.

Dominic Sandbrook

The story starts in 2010. Elena is elderly. She gets a phone call from her old friend Lila's son, and he says, my mother has disappeared. Elena isn't surprised. She says, I always knew Lila wanted to disappear, and that she would one day. This spurs her to break a promise — she'd always said she'd never write about their friendship, and now she says, well, I will write about our friendship. And so she writes this account of their lives up to the age of sixteen.

Dominic Sandbrook

Then we move back to the 1950s, to this neighbourhood in Naples. Elena describes herself and her friend Lila. They go to school. They go through puberty and adolescence. They fall for boys. They fall out with each other. They struggle with the physical and emotional changes of becoming a teenager. But also, the choices they make in their teens — they move very soon after they leave childhood, really when they're still children — those life choices are going to define them. It's actually quite a bleak book in that sense. A wrong choice that you make when you're fifteen or sixteen sends your life down a course from which you'll never be able to turn back.

Tabitha Syrett

Because it's a much more brutal world. People are much poorer. They don't have the liberty of changing their minds later.

Dominic Sandbrook

No, exactly. They are subject to the violence of men. They're subject to all kinds of pressures and expectations. And they are chafing, trying to find identities for themselves, and it's very difficult to do so. And all of this is related to us through Elena's subjectivity. Everything we know about their friendship, the other characters, the neighbourhood, is what Elena is telling us. And there was definitely a point for me, about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through, when I thought: oh gosh, maybe Elena is wrong about lots of things. And maybe about her friend Lila in particular. Do you not agree?

Tabitha Syrett

Definitely. For instance, at the very end of the book we think that Lila has achieved a great triumph over the neighbourhood. She's managed to elevate herself above it. She's managed to escape poverty and the violence she's grown up with. She's made herself the mistress of her own fate. And we think that because that seems to be what Elena thinks — we are constantly in her mind. And then we have cause to question it, because Elena suddenly has cause to question, and that means we start to question everything she's ever thought. So is Lila's fate a tragedy or a triumph? It's whatever Elena thinks it is.

Tabitha Syrett

But you speak about the neighbourhood, and this whole plot is very much rooted in the world and politics of post-war Naples. Italian culture and history infuses every aspect of it. This environment colours the girls' upbringing and their attitudes to class, gender, art, love. But it's also brutal, because it's totally indifferent to their struggles growing up as teenage girls. And I think the genius is that Naples — the neighbourhood, as it's called — is turned into a character in itself. Its facets, its features, its denizens are minutely explored throughout the novel. And this neighbourhood consumes people for the rest of their lives. It has a gravitational pull, like a womb, something you can't quite escape. The umbilical cord follows you through life. On Lila especially. They're both chafing to get out of it, to rise above their circumstances. But it's also comforting.

Dominic Sandbrook

And this is a world very much based on a historical reality — a very violent, or certainly a very difficult, real life. So let's dig into the historical Naples that Ferrante is describing.

Dominic Sandbrook

We discussed in The Leopard two weeks ago about Italian unification. Naples joins the unified Italy in 1861, having been the capital of the independent Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, formerly ruled by the House of Bourbon. So it's no longer a major capital city, and it sees a decline in its influence, its prestige, its wealth. It becomes a symbol of the broader economic gap between the north and the south of Italy. And then towards the end of the nineteenth century, in part because of this, large numbers of people begin to emigrate all over the world — especially to the US, to Argentina, to Brazil. And then its history takes a particularly dark turn in the twentieth century.

Dominic Sandbrook

Naples suffered really badly. Mussolini comes in in 1922, so Naples is part of fascist Italy, the reign of the Blackshirts, great corruption in Naples. And actually the shadow of fascism hangs over the book. This is one of the really nice things about it. When we think about 1950s and 1960s Italy in Britain, we think of people on Vespas outside ice cream parlours.

Tabitha Syrett

Exporting vast quantities of spaghetti and marinara sauce to America.

Dominic Sandbrook

Right. It's very cool. It's the home of design. It's Federico Fellini films. But in the book it's as though the shadow of fascism has never really gone away. Everybody has a past.

Tabitha Syrett

It's so cleverly done, though, because as a child, or even as a teenager, you're so self-obsessed, so concerned with your own little world. You don't think about the big picture. And that's how it filters through in this. The shadow of fascism grows closer and closer as more and more understanding comes into the girls' minds.

Dominic Sandbrook

Exactly as they start to realise the truth about some of the people they've taken for granted all their lives.

Dominic Sandbrook

Naples suffered particularly badly in the Second World War. It was bombed more than a hundred times. Lots of people killed, vast swathes of the city destroyed by the Allies. So the Allies arrive in the last couple of years of the war and they find Naples a shell: terrible poverty, hunger, near starvation, kids in rags, mass prostitution to make ends meet. There's a typhus epidemic. Because although the rich people had got out, the poorer people of Naples, of whom there were very many, had been trapped in the city. And just before the Germans left, they destroyed all the utilities. Naples was a war zone. And then when the Allies arrive there's a black market that flourishes, there's all kinds of corruption. It's a sink of criminality. It becomes, in Allied reporting, a byword for the horrors of war, the terror of the civilian population, and the way in which crime and vice can thrive in the ruins.

Tabitha Syrett

And this is also a feature of the book, manifested by this family called the Solaras. The patriarch is Silvio, and his sons are Marcello and Michele. They are the most prominent crime family in the neighbourhood, and they benefit enormously from this underhand black market. This is what they build their wealth on. They come to embody the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, which is on the rise at this time because of the black market, because the traditional structures have been dismantled.

Tabitha Syrett

And at first we see them as the girls would see them. At first they don't seem that threatening. They seem like stupid boys who drive up in their fancy car and chat up the girls. And they grow more and more frightening as the book progresses. Marcello at one point almost tries to bribe or force Lila into marriage — he buys her family televisions, and he gets quite aggressive with her physically. So that element of history is very much present in the story.

Dominic Sandbrook

Naples is a wreck in the late 1940s, and then it starts to revive in the 1950s, and you see that traced through the book. But if you're from a poor family the expectation is that you'll stay at home to help your parents, that you'll become economically useful as quickly as possible. And this is what happens to Lila, because she drops out of education at the very first opportunity, because her parents want her to help in the shop. They're shoemakers — they repair shoes. And of course, across Naples, if you read reports from the 1940s and fifties, you have all these families living in battered buildings, a whole family in a single room.

Dominic Sandbrook

At the same time, as the Italian economy starts to get back on its feet, all kinds of new opportunities open up. The city is run by a man who's mentioned a couple of times in the book — il comandante, the commander, Achille Lauro. He was a former fascist, a very keen fascist. He then became a more conventional right-wing politician, but actually went back towards neo-fascism in the 1970s, and he completely dominated the politics of Naples in the 1950s.

Dominic Sandbrook

There's loads of stuff in the book about class and status. And it's perfectly captured — fittingly for a great work of fiction — in language. Lila speaks in dialect. She's speaking Neapolitan. And there are lots of references through the book: oh, I switched to Italian; oh, I went back to Neapolitan.

Dominic Sandbrook

This is really important, because outsiders think of Italy as a culturally united country in which everybody speaks Italian. Of course that's not the reality, because it's only united into one country in the nineteenth century, which is what we talked about in The Leopard. And somewhere like Naples, the working class speak their own dialect, which is often unintelligible to an Italian outsider from the north. The characters' Neapolitan dialect is them. It is their authentic self. It is the language of the neighbourhood. But at times some of them code-switch — Elena in particular, because she's educated — to speaking a more formal Italian. And that is a marker of difference, and of status, and of prestige.

Tabitha Syrett

And of education.

Dominic Sandbrook

It's power, I suppose. You are more powerful if you can do both.

Tabitha Syrett

And Elena uses this almost as a weapon against Lila at times. When she's speaking to a boy she has a crush on, a very intellectual boy, she'll use it to show off. But with Lila she'll use it almost to put herself above her. They'll be in the middle of a conversation speaking dialect, and then she'll consciously switch into Italian, and it makes her feel she has one up over Lila. And Lila does it too.

Tabitha Syrett

But in fact the interesting thing is that the whole book, in a sense, is Elena's attempt to take back control over Lila. Because as the narrator she automatically has the power. She can possess her, because she is creating her. She is describing her. She is shaping our perceptions of both of them. And this makes her an extremely unreliable narrator. But it also infuses the book with an electric current, because you're constantly unsure of what is truth and what is a conjured reality. We can't know to what extent Lila is as she is in real life, or an exaggeration. Because there is something of a heroine, or an anti-heroine, a fable, about her.

Dominic Sandbrook

I agree completely. Even the title, My Brilliant Friend — and the way they describe things. There's a slight fairy-tale quality to their first meeting and their friendship, and the thing with the dolls.

Tabitha Syrett

You almost expect Lila to do the things that she does, because in Elena's eyes she is indomitable. She's untouchable. She's perfect. She's beautiful. She is cat-like. She's withdrawn. She is clever and aggressive. Elena says at one point: she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words; she injected it with energy. And you wonder — is Elena doing that with Lila? Is she injecting her with a power that she did not in fact possess? Is Lila in fact as cruel as she comes across, or is she merely seen through the eyes of her competitor? Is Elena telling the truth, or is she manufacturing a character? Are Lila's strengths merely Elena's insecurities and a projection of her own fears?

Tabitha Syrett

Both characters come across as incredibly psychologically complex. But I think Elena more so, because as the narrator she's witness, admirer and rival. And we have to see her and understand her almost in spite of herself.

Dominic Sandbrook

I agree completely. We've talked on this show about a lot of books in which there's a kind of doubling. In The Great Gatsby you have Nick and Gatsby. In Wuthering Heights all the characters are basically doubles of each other. In this book you have these two girls who are doubles. Both of them have two names — I noticed when you were talking, you were switching between different names without even knowing it. We have our narrator, who is Elena or Lenù, and we have the person she is describing, her friend, who is Lila or Lina. And the narrative slightly moves between them depending on who's talking. It's as though their identities are not really fixed, and different sides of their personality are brought out by the different names.

Dominic Sandbrook

But what's complicated about it is that because we don't have a third-person narrator — because it's not somebody else telling us the story, it's just Elena — Lila exists for us only as a construct of Elena's imagination. It's only through Elena that we see her. And so Elena will tell us: Lila was brilliant, she made you feel alive, she crackled with energy. Often we don't really see that. We're just told it, and we have to take it on trust.

Tabitha Syrett

It's really interesting, because they're held up as foils. Even physically — one is golden-haired and curvy, the other is androgynous and dark. Elena, our narrator, is quite insecure. She's wistful. She's romantic. She can be mean, but not as overtly as Lila, whereas Lila is hard and cold, and you think calculating, or so it seems. So they're held up as pillars of opposition. And then we discover that all along they're moulding themselves into each other. It's the very opposite of opposition. They're liquid, they're fluid. They're melding into one another the whole time.

Dominic Sandbrook

First of all, they're mimicking each other. But also, even though they don't admit it, they're rivals. They define themselves against each other.

Dominic Sandbrook

Just on Elena — she's an excellent narrator, I think, because she's a really good example of a narrator who to some degree can't work out quite what's going on. She's discovering things that make us look at her story in a different light.

Tabitha Syrett

You're reminded at points that this is her memory as well. This is her telling the story from years in the future.

Dominic Sandbrook

Her narrative voice sometimes slips between the voice of somebody who's twelve years old — telling us what a twelve-year-old sees — and the voice of an older woman reflecting on it much later, able to see things she perhaps didn't at twelve. She's very reflective. She's very self-aware. She is full of self-doubt. But at the same time she can't be full of self-doubt by comparison with other people in the neighbourhood, because she's very successful. She goes to school. She does brilliantly. She makes a point of telling us all the marks she got at school. When she does slightly disappointingly — she never does badly — when she only gets a seven out of ten, or when she gets all tens, she makes a point of telling us. Going to school makes her feel different. In some ways it makes her feel an outsider, makes her feel lesser than the people in the neighbourhood. But of course, the further she goes in school, the higher above them she is rising and the greater her opportunities will be.

Tabitha Syrett

And she actually flourishes when she's not near the neighbourhood, because she feels the pressures and expectations of that world, of her family, of her neighbours. She goes on a holiday at one point and she feels happy, she gets beautiful, she looks golden and glowing. But she constantly has a slight strain of self-pity about her, as though Lila has the upper hand and she is always Lila's apostle, or lesser. She underplays her own achievements — and yet she always tells us about them. And then it turns out that she may have a better prospect of leaving the neighbourhood than Lila. She may actually be the brave one.

Tabitha Syrett

But again, so much is unknown. We get the impression that she's almost obsessed with Lila. She speaks about her all the time. She needs her to feel whole. She needs the rivalry, in a way. She needs what she perceives as Lila's brilliance. But we can't know much of the time whether Lila feels the same way. Is Lila reacting to everything Elena does? Is she jealous of her? Does she watch her?

Dominic Sandbrook

So — the brilliant friend, Lila. Or is she? Why don't we take a break, and then we'll come back and talk about whether Lila really is the brilliant friend after all.

Dominic Sandbrook

Welcome back to The Book Club. So we promised to get to the heart of the novel — Lila, the character we are led to believe is the brilliant friend, and her relationship with Elena.

Dominic Sandbrook

Lila is a great character, isn't she? She's very striking, she's androgynous, we are led to believe she has a cruel streak, she is almost omnipotent. She's brilliant at everything, according to Elena. She is the master of every situation. She's always a step ahead of everybody else. You'd be slightly nervous if you found yourself sitting next to her at a dinner. She can be quite chilly. Almost malicious is too strong, but she's calculating, and she's quite dark as a character.

Tabitha Syrett

She can be very aggressive. At one point she pulls a knife on someone, and she throws stones at the other boys. At times she's almost the villain of the novel. Elena writes: Lila was malicious. This, in some secret place in myself, I still thought. She had shown me not only that she knew how to wound with words, but that she would kill without hesitation. And yet those capacities now seemed to me of little importance. I said to myself: she will release something more vicious. And I resorted to the word evil — an exaggerated word that came to me from childhood tales.

Tabitha Syrett

And we've said right from the start that there is something mythologised about Lila. She is a portrait of a person constructed by someone who has studied her and been obsessed with her all her life. And she's a fascinating contradiction. That contradiction becomes clearer and clearer as we move through the novel, because in the beginning she just seems to be a real tomboy. She has real grit. She may be quite mean. She's brilliant. She's competitive. But actually, in many ways she's very childish. She is more consumed by the neighbourhood than we know, and much more so than Elena.

Tabitha Syrett

At one point, when they're little girls, they decide they'll leave the neighbourhood and go to the sea. And it is Lila, not Elena, who turns them back, because she's frightened. She's frightened of leaving the comfort of her home. And later on, when she's in a serious relationship and the other girls aren't, we find out that she is the least sexually experienced of all of them. Which again makes her somehow inhuman — she's not physical, she's not embodied, she's not rooted in the mire of human trivialities. She's something greater, because she is in Elena's eyes.

Tabitha Syrett

And she's very clever, but unlike Elena she isn't allowed to go to secondary school, so she educates herself privately, because she's very curious. These are the first hints that Elena's recollections of her aren't entirely correct, because Elena is so jealous of her throughout. Even though Lila is working for her family, making shoes, and Elena is flourishing at school, she's still jealous of her. She says at one point that even though she's educated and thriving, and very good at Italian, she reads something Lila writes and thinks: this is genius. It puts everything I've ever done to shame. It has a raw, native brilliance that I can never have.

Dominic Sandbrook

Interestingly, though — Elena is the one who's gone to school, who is clearly the more highly educated. She keeps insisting to us: my friend Lila, who doesn't go to school, is absolutely brilliant, she has this native brilliance, she's read all of these classical authors privately, she knows more than I ever will. She tells us this, but we're never shown it. She says Lila's writing has a raw, native genius — but we're never given an example of the writing, so we can't judge it for ourselves.

Dominic Sandbrook

And actually, by the last quarter of the book I started to think: Elena has created a fairy-tale, mythological friend for herself. Almost an imaginary friend. And maybe Lila is a much more anxious, frightened, insecure person than we've been led to believe. I think that really comes out towards the end of the book.

Tabitha Syrett

That's definitely true. It's like they're both climbing a ladder at the same time, and at one point one will be a rung ahead and at another point the other one will be. You speak of the fact that Lila might actually be the more vulnerable one. When they hit puberty, Elena develops very quickly, and she feels good about this. Her body develops. Of course she's very confused, but it makes her feel she's above Lila, because Lila remains a little girl physically. And you don't really see Lila's side, but you think — I wonder if she felt left out and behind, because she's not going to school and she's physically behind everyone else. And then Lila flourishes, and she's fancied by everyone, she's beautiful, and Elena automatically feels lesser again.

Tabitha Syrett

So it's like a rope the whole time. They're winding around each other. And this push and pull is the tension of the novel — it keeps the plot moving. Down period, up period, down period, up period. Because it's them growing up, and you're never constant when you grow up. There are periods when you really suffer and there are periods when you feel you couldn't be doing better. So in that, it's very much a coming-of-age story.

Dominic Sandbrook

Speaking of coming-of-age stories — they do have fictional characters at the back of their minds, don't they? Quite early on they mention another book about girls growing up that we've done on the show: Little Women. There's quite a lot of discussion about Little Women. They love it. They have a copy of it, which they read and are very interested in. And Elena is in some ways like a character from Little Women. She has gone to school, she has educated herself, she's raised herself up, she seems to be a good girl. She's followed the model. Lila is the bad girl, who hasn't followed the Little Women model, and who later on rejects literary models — she throws the things away. That good girl, bad girl dynamic is such a tired cliché, but it's obviously part of their self-image, and it runs through the book.

Tabitha Syrett

The most intriguing part of the whole novel is the actual friendship. It's basically an anatomy of a friendship, and it's really unforgiving at times, because it's very complex. There are layers of love, jealousy, empathy, rivalry, all bound up in one, and they actually hurt each other. This is very un-Little Women. If Little Women is about friendship and a warm and loving female community and sisterhood, friendship is also very much the heart of this novel, but it is a much less forgiving iteration.

Tabitha Syrett

And this is the genius of the novel, because it is so complex and so ambiguous. The layers she manages to pack in, and to dig into, of friendship, of female friendship. It can be rivalry, it can be love, it can be empathy, it can be hate, it can be jealousy. The ability to be friends and enemies all at once. In Elena's case it's someone she's almost in love with, and that's almost why Lila comes across as this perfect untouchable model of a person.

Tabitha Syrett

They are so cruel to each other at times, because they know each other so well. They know one another's vulnerabilities and weak points, and they prod them. They want to hurt each other. They want to weaken one another. And yet they continue to deeply care for each other. Elena says at one point, when she's on holiday and Lila is suffering back in the neighbourhood: I was afraid of what was happening to her, good or bad, in my absence. It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me — the fear that in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance. You can see the codependency there, the sense that her identity is woven into whatever Lila is doing.

Dominic Sandbrook

We were talking beforehand with our producer, who loves this book, and she was saying her theory is that Elena is in love with Lila. She's definitely in love with the idea of her, with the idea of her being brilliant. And there is a slight element of a crush at times.

Tabitha Syrett

But also I think Elena is quite idealistic. There's a boy called Nino Sarratore, and she's obsessed with the idea of him too.

Dominic Sandbrook

Yes — because he's a communist and he's clever and he's older.

Tabitha Syrett

And she constantly speaks about reading the Aeneid, and she speaks about Dido the whole time. The idea of that mythologised love.

Dominic Sandbrook

Your point about friendship is the key to this book for a lot of readers. What this book is, is a portrait of a relationship between two characters who are, on the surface, the best of friends, and who think of themselves that way.

Tabitha Syrett

Sisters.

Dominic Sandbrook

But their friendship consists of layer upon layer of resentment, rivalry, jealousy, sometimes hatred. They define themselves against each other. You have a phrase in your notes which I think is dead right — that it's a dance and a duel. Which it absolutely is.

Dominic Sandbrook

But then there's the third character in the book, which is Naples itself. Their friendship exists within this ecosystem. And I say the city, but it's not really the city, it's the neighbourhood — because when they go to the city centre, when they go to the Naples you go to as a tourist, they are bewildered and lost. They don't go there very often. They don't even go to the sea very often.

Tabitha Syrett

Elena explores it with her father at one point, and it's a bit like stepping out of a sepia-toned movie into broad daylight, and she's astonished by it and excited by it. That's when you really get a sense of how small their world is. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone has heard the rumours about everyone.

Dominic Sandbrook

Do you not think that's what lies behind the thing that occurs to Lila, this experience of dissociation — what she calls dissolving margins? I wonder whether that's her psychological reaction to the overbearing nature of the neighbourhood.

Tabitha Syrett

It definitely is. It's a dissociative state, which allows her to distance herself from the horrible things happening around her. It's a form of detachment, and that's when you really see just how vulnerable Lila is. Elena never has to do this. Elena is closely observing all the time. And you can only closely observe something horrible if you already feel slightly untouched by it. Whereas Lila is in the heart of the storm of the difficulties of this world. She's fragile, she's vulnerable. She has a fragile mental state. So she has to almost shut off her emotions, shut off who she is, and step away from it. And it makes her seem chilly, but in fact it's because she's so soft and porous.

Tabitha Syrett

She had the impression that something absolutely material, which had been present around her and around everyone and around everything forever, but imperceptible, was breaking down the outlines of persons and things and revealing itself.

Dominic Sandbrook

So it's almost like an out-of-body experience, where she's not there in the room. And part of that, I think, is because she's the daughter of a shoemaker — or a shoe repairer, and it is an important distinction.

Tabitha Syrett

This book is about shoes.

Dominic Sandbrook

Whether you're repairing shoes or making new shoes does matter a lot.

Tabitha Syrett

A big financial and cultural differentiation, because to be a shoemaker is more prestigious than to be a mere shoe repairer. She's in the heart of the neighbourhood, and she's under the control of her father and her brother. And this is true generally of all the female characters in the book. They are at the mercy of male violence.

Dominic Sandbrook

It's a male-dominated world through and through. We realise that a lot of them will hit their wives, they will hit their daughters, they hit their children. There is an unacknowledged latent brutality to this world.

Tabitha Syrett

And it's cyclical. It repeats generation through generation.

Dominic Sandbrook

Exactly. There's a scene when Lila's father Fernando, the shoe man, and her brother Rino have a massive argument about her, in front of her — whether she'll go to school or not. And she never speaks in that argument. It ends with the father hitting the brother in the face. And it's decided without her having any possible input at all.

Tabitha Syrett

Exactly. And you can see from that how the girls of the neighbourhood are controlled and commodified. It's two men arguing about Lila's fate, and it is a fate she ends up living out. And it calls to mind the dolls, which are flung into the cellar of this man Don Achille, the bogeyman of the neighbourhood. It's later revealed that he has ties to the mafia and to the black market. The dolls are kept prisoner in this powerful man's cellar, and it's full of debris, and it's symbolic of Naples' past and the traditional patriarchy that no one can quite escape, that all these women are imprisoned in. And the ghosts of the past are all around the neighbourhood — layers upon layers of history.

Dominic Sandbrook

In Naples above all. If you go to Naples, it's one of the best places in the world to see literally layers of history. There are places in the centre where you go into a building and they'll say, oh, this is a mediaeval bit. And then you go down a staircase underground and there's a cellar and they'll say, this was Roman. And then you go further down, in a kind of archaeological dig, and they say, and this was Greek. This was Neapolis.

Tabitha Syrett

But it could also be constrictive and claustrophobic, to have all those layers around you. And if you were seeking to break free, which both of these girls are to some degree, it's much harder to do so, because you have to wade through sedimentary rock practically.

Dominic Sandbrook

Can you wade through a rock? I'm not sure you can. But I'll take your point.

Dominic Sandbrook

This point about the history and the past pressing down on them — when they're in middle school, in the late 1950s, they first become aware of it. I think this is so nicely observed. It's the point at which, as a child entering your teens, you first become aware that there was a past before you, that you are not the be-all and end-all, and that everybody else around you are all prisoners of the past and of their history.

Dominic Sandbrook

There's one boy, Pasquale, who is a communist, and he sees this more clearly than the rest of them. He says Don Achille had been a spy for the Nazi fascists. He says the money Stefano is using to expand the grocery store his father had made on the black market. So the neighbourhood is full of these unadmitted, unacknowledged secrets — everybody is tainted by history, they've all done terrible things. And the girls' dream is to escape it, but they can't.

Tabitha Syrett

And it hits home because very little exposition is used in this book, so when it's spelled out it's very affecting. And Lila is more affected by this than Elena — the corruption she's been growing up in. It serves as a loss of innocence for her. It torments her and it sinks into her soul. She was gripped by a frenzy of absolute disclosure. She pointed to people, things, streets and said: that man fought in the war and killed. That one turned in a lot of people. That one starved his own mother. So again, the ghosts of the past are literally living around them. She identifies all these dirty secrets and is appalled by it, and hurt by it, and disgusted by it. It's part of the reason she refuses to marry Marcello Solara — because he's part of this world. He's leading it. He's the figurehead of crime in the community.

Dominic Sandbrook

So that's the prison for them. And the story of the book, in some ways, is how they're both looking for escape. For Elena it's academic. She feels she's very boring because she's at school compared with some of her friends. But Lila, who doesn't get to continue at school, had as a girl dreamed of being a writer. She borrowed loads of books from the library. And this is actually sad — she'd written a story about a blue fairy.

Dominic Sandbrook

The blue fairy would have been a very popular figure in 1950s Italy, because the blue fairy is a character in Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio. And interestingly, Lila's father is a shoemaker — and in some later adaptations of the Pinocchio story, Geppetto, Pinocchio's creator, who's really a wood carver, is sometimes described as a shoemaker as well. The blue fairy realises the hero's dreams, allows Pinocchio to become human, to achieve his ideals, to escape from his wooden status and become flesh and blood. You've got to assume that title has been chosen deliberately, because it's symbolic of Lila's desire to escape and to become fully realised and true to herself. But she doesn't. And that blue fairy story reappears later in the Neapolitan quartet, and it's a very sad fate. I won't spoil it.

Dominic Sandbrook

There's a sense in which her reading and her writing have done nothing to advance her.

Tabitha Syrett

Books have failed her.

Dominic Sandbrook

And she ends up having to work in her father's shoe repair shop. And then, rather like Geppetto working on Pinocchio, she comes up with something. A revolutionary shoe.

Tabitha Syrett

Say that with the respect it deserves, because the shoe is an important thing. A revolutionary shoe. It's both comfortable and adaptable as well as waterproof.

Dominic Sandbrook

Hasn't it got a very large white toe? Isn't the thing about this shoe that it's slightly larger? It's simultaneously too tight when people try it on, but also people say the toe is very broad. So in my mind, whenever I think of this shoe, I think of a bit of a clown shoe.

Tabitha Syrett

Me too. But the shoe does come to symbolise ambition. It's a way for Lila to transcend this cyclical reality of violence and repression and expectation. It's her artistic endeavour. But again, in this she is quashed by her father, and she must find another way out. And what does she do? Like so many girls before her, she opts for marriage.

Tabitha Syrett

But in this case she thinks she's engineering it herself. And this is to Stefano, the son of the former owner of the grocery shop, who has made lots of money. And he seems pure. She actually asks him at one point: you're different, right, to these other guys? And he says, yeah, yeah, yeah. He invests in her father's shoe business, and he seems to adore her. He frames her original drawings of the shoes. They get very glamorous. They wear fancy clothes. They pretend to be John and Jacqueline Kennedy. They're well off.

Tabitha Syrett

And Elena says: was this her latest invention? Did she want to leave the neighbourhood while staying in the neighbourhood? Elena can be wealthy, she can be high status, but she won't have to leave the place she feels safest. 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? So Elena is envious of this.

Dominic Sandbrook

He's Don Achille's son, isn't he — Don Achille, who was murdered.

Tabitha Syrett

Exactly.

Dominic Sandbrook

There's a very telling line, I think. Elena says: look what Lila has achieved at the age of sixteen. She's going to have babies soon. She's getting married. She looks great. And this is a very nicely written section, because of course, as a reader, you read this and you say — no, you fool, you're the winner. You want to be in school and not married and not have babies at sixteen. Poor old Lila is making a terrible choice, and she is going to end up trapped. And actually, only a few pages later, Elena writes about Lila being trapped in a cage — the cage being Stefano's family.

Tabitha Syrett

Nevertheless, it seems like a bit of a triumph for Lila. Elena writes that Lila is somehow triumphant. And we get to the wedding day, and it's like the end of a fairy tale — that moment where they're married, the prince and the princess drive off in the carriage. Lila is beautiful. She's going to be wealthy. Everyone is jealous of her, admires her. She seems to be escaping the poverty she's grown up with.

Tabitha Syrett

But then it starts to unravel in a really horrifying fashion as the wedding unfolds. And Elena becomes aware of how she's been wrong all this time, that she had been mistaken: Lila had remained there, chained in a glaring way to that world from which she imagined she had taken the best in Stefano. And she starts seeing the wedding guests and imagining them as Roman plebs fighting over food and wine and laughing at half-jokes and quarrelling on the dirty floor. And Elena feels she's not part of it. She's almost floating above it, looking on. I was imagining a Hogarth painting when I was reading this bit.

Dominic Sandbrook

I know exactly what you mean.

Tabitha Syrett

And there's a sense of continuity that they can't escape. The Roman plebs still exist today.

Dominic Sandbrook

And then you get the final shocking, horrible image of the book.

Tabitha Syrett

It's so funny that you think this is so shocking and horrible.

Dominic Sandbrook

I find it very depressing, actually. When I got to this I was like, oh my God. To people who haven't read the book, they'll say — what? Is that really that horrible? But go on, describe it.

Tabitha Syrett

I hate to say this, Dominic, but he's literally wearing the wrong pair of shoes.

Dominic Sandbrook

He is wearing the wrong shoes. Just describe the terrible image the book ends with, and tell me how shocking it is.

Tabitha Syrett

Marcello Solara turns up. He is the mafioso who had courted Lila and tried to pressure her into marrying him — and it's partly to escape him that she marries Stefano. And then he turns up to the wedding, and he is wearing the very special, innovative, waterproof and yet comfortable shoes that Lila had designed, and that she and her family had manufactured with money from her now husband, Stefano.

Tabitha Syrett

So: the unpredictable revealed itself only at one point. I saw Lila lose her colour, become as pale as when she was a child, whiter than her wedding dress, and her eyes had that sudden contraction that turned them into cracks. She had in front of her a bottle of wine, and I was afraid that her gaze would go through it with a violence that would shatter it, with the wine spraying everywhere. But she wasn't looking at the bottle. She was looking farther away. She was looking at the shoes of Marcello Solara. They were Cerullo shoes for men.

Tabitha Syrett

So we find out that Pasquale was right all along. That Stefano's money comes from as dirty a place as Marcello's, that he is just as corrupt, just as bought into this world of historical violence and underhand dealings and fascism, and that she is now tainted by that corruption too. That nothing has changed. The Solaras are still in control, and Lila is married to the man at the heart of it.

Dominic Sandbrook

And her wonderful creation, the creation into which she poured her talent and her idealism, is now on the feet of the worst man in the neighbourhood, who is clearly in cahoots with her husband in some way. Her art has been appropriated and claimed, and she has been dragged back, and she has been trapped by Naples and by the neighbourhood. She has been tainted.

Tabitha Syrett

You don't find that depressing?

Dominic Sandbrook

I do find it depressing. Of course I find it depressing.

Tabitha Syrett

I just thought it was amusing when you said it's the most horrifying, shocking image you've — to be fair, in fiction.

Dominic Sandbrook

Just before we come to the conclusion — the title, My Brilliant Friend. Because I'm a very sluggish and slow and foolish reader, I had thought through much of the book that My Brilliant Friend is clearly Lila. Elena is telling us about her brilliant friend. But actually, the words My Brilliant Friend are only used in the book the other way round.

Dominic Sandbrook

Towards the end, in the wedding scene, the set piece that ends the book, brilliantly done — on her wedding morning Lila is going to take a bath. She's naked and she's vulnerable. It's the only time Elena sees her friend naked, and she's struck by how childlike she looks.

Tabitha Syrett

And vulnerable.

Dominic Sandbrook

And vulnerable. And Elena is about to wash her, and Lila says to her: you are my brilliant friend. You have to be the best of us all, boys and girls. And I thought — gosh, this is so clever. All along we have thought that Lila was the brilliant friend. But really, the brilliant friend is Elena, and she has misunderstood her own story. The tragedy of this story is actually not what's happening to her, it's what's happening to Lila. Lila perhaps was never as brilliant deep down, but Elena projected that onto her, and poor old Lila has been dragged down and has made terrible choices and has been claimed by Naples.

Tabitha Syrett

You also discover that Lila has been just as jealous of Elena as the other way around all along. She reads something Elena has written at one point and says: you write very well, I can't read any more because it hurts me. That jealousy, that envy, it hurts her. It doesn't spur her on to greater things the way this rivalry does for Elena. It makes her back off. It makes her retreat.

Dominic Sandbrook

That possibly Elena, the character we always thought of as gentler and softer and more reflective, is actually the harder of the two after all. The more resilient.

Tabitha Syrett

This is what struck me.

Dominic Sandbrook

So it was obviously a colossal hit. We said already that the New York Times called it the best book of the twenty-first century. Should we give our verdicts? I'll go first.

Dominic Sandbrook

I think it's a really, really good book. I think it's very cleverly written. I actually enjoyed talking about it — this is a terrible thing to admit to you, Tabby, because you'll probably lord it over me for ages — I enjoyed talking about it as much as I enjoyed reading it.

Tabitha Syrett

Really? Well, that's because I'm a great conversationalist.

Dominic Sandbrook

The great level of banter. The great level of shoe-based banter.

Dominic Sandbrook

However — will I continue with the rest of the series? I'm not sure. I don't think it's the best book of the twenty-first century. I think it's a very beautifully observed portrait of female friendship. I think it does lots of clever things with narration. And it's the kind of book where you read it and halfway through you start googling flights to Naples, because you're immersed in that world. I've been to Naples and I really enjoyed it. I like the frisson of danger on a holiday.

Tabitha Syrett

If ever the mafia was going to recruit one of us, it would be you. So how many innovatively comfortable shoes would you give it out of ten?

Dominic Sandbrook

I'm going to give it eight. Which I know our producer will be cross about, because she loves it. But I'm going to give it eight. What about you?

Tabitha Syrett

I agree — I don't think I would put it at the top of the best hundred novels of the twenty-first century by any means. I don't think it's groundbreaking. But I thought it was really good. And if I didn't have to get on and read the next book for the show, I would have just eaten up the next three books in the series.

Tabitha Syrett

Because it describes what is undoubtedly an alien world for most people, but in its very intuitive and very raw portrait of two girls growing up, it's extraordinarily relatable. It captures, without any drama or cliché, the mundane and at the time all-consuming worries of becoming a teenager when you're a girl — of seeing yourself and the world around you change. It captures brilliantly the ambivalence of friendships, and how poisonous they can sometimes be and yet how loving. I think the prose is good, it's clear, it's sharp, it's quick. It's not groundbreaking.

Tabitha Syrett

And part of the reason it means so much to so many people is that over the course of the four books you watch these two characters grow up, and that always plants a series in a reader's heart more than anything. So I did really enjoy it. I thought it was brilliant. I didn't think it was the best book of the twenty-first century. So I'm going to give it a nine.

Dominic Sandbrook

Nine. That's nice and high.