The Neapolitan Series: My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante
I’ve been quiet for a while about the books I’ve been reading, and that’s because I was busy with the series My Brilliant Friend, also known as the Neapolitan series, by Elena Ferrante. It’s safe to say I was blown away. The series follows the friendship of two girls growing up in a poor, violent neighborhood in Naples in the 60s and the intricate flow of their lives both together and apart.
From the very beginning a strong sense of competition and comparison draws them together, one that does its damage over the years, damage that ultimately forces them to examine the very basis of their friendship and decide over and over again whether or not to continue. At times even I was questioning whether the relationship before me was actually a friendship, or just a toxic comparing of supposed thoughts and achievements. In this the narrator and protagonist can be considered an unreliable narrator, because the suppositions she makes are sometimes ludicrous but sometimes spot on, always drawing the reader into her tangled web of thoughts and feelings.
Ferrante’s flowing descriptions of Italy, and especially of the neighborhood in Naples where the protagonist and her friend grow up, transported me right there. I intimately felt everything Lenù did and saw everything she saw. Ferrante’s long, commaed sentences give us an idea of what the original Italian is like; perhaps long and unbroken like the strip of coast that can be seen from Naples and is often mentioned.
I am fully aware that this short review is in no way deserving of the books themselves; that is why I urge you to read them. They are truly marvelous and one of the only things that I want to reread (the only others being Twilight of course, and also Circe, by Madeline Miller), and are among my favorite books.