My Brilliant Friend

(Questions)

1. Why is Don Achille such an important character? His presence looms over the whole novel; what does he represent?

2. Throughout the novel, Lila earns her reputation as "the misfit," while Elena comes to be known as "the good girl." How do the two live vicariously through one another, and what is it about their differing personalities that makes their relationship credible? Which girl, if any, do you most easily identify with?

3. Domestic life in the outskirts of in the 1950s is depicted as conservative, challenging, and at times, even severely violent. Ferrante uses the girls’ early "child play" to emulate the callous undertones of the town. Why is this analogy so successful? What is so important about Tina and Nu?

4. Why is Elena so invested in her education? Is it a means to an end, or an end unto itself? If a means to an end, what end? And if a means, is she being realistic or is she fooling herself?

5. What is revealed of the girls’ characters on the day they decide to skip school? Do these discoveries surprise you? How does this affect their relationship (or our sense of their relationship)?

6. Ferrante returns to the theme of "mother-daughter relationship" in My Brilliant Friend. What are the abiding characteristics of this relationship? Who do you feel suffers the most—mother or daughter? Why?

7. It can be assumed that Elena’s voice is behind the title of the novel, referring to Lila as "her brilliant friend." However, toward the end of the girls’ story, it is Lila who praises Elena, and encourages her to be "the best of all, boys and girls" (pg.

312). Is this dialogue between the two girls symbolic of Lila’s surrender? Are you surprised by Lila’s words?

8. Lila’s rustic personality and crude comments sometimes come off as hurtful and malicious. Furthermore, although both families struggle with poverty, it is the Cerullos who appear to be the underprivileged of the two. Why, nonetheless, does Elena remain a highly devout friend? What does this say about Elena?

9. What do the shoes that Lila designs and makes represent symbolically? What undertones do the shoes help to evidence in the latter half of the novel?

10. How would the book be different if told from the point of view of Lila or another character? Is Elena's point of view the most appropriate? Why or why not? Explain.

11. Page 282: "Do you love Stefano?" She said seriously, "Very much." "More than your parents, more than Rino?" "More than everyone, but not more than you." Lila’s personality seems to have grown warmer by the end of the novel. What can we attribute this change to?

https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/fiction/10350-my-brilliant-friend-ferrante?start=3

My Brilliant Friend

(About the Author)

Elena Ferrante is the pen-name of an Italian novelist whose true identity is not publicly known. Though heralded as the most important Italian novelist of her generation, she has kept her identity secret since the publication of her first novel in 1992.

Works Ferrante is the author of a half dozen novels, the most well-known of which is Days of Abandonment. Her four "Neapolitan Novels" revolve around two perceptive and intelligent girls from Naples who try to create lives for themselves within a violent and stultifying culture. The series consists of four novels: My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015), which was nominated for the Strega Prize, an Italian literary award.

Two of Ferrante's novels have been turned into films by Italian filmmakers. Troubling Love became the 1995 feature film Nasty Love, and The Days of Abandonment became a 2005 film of the same title.

Her nonfiction book Fragments (2003) discusses her experiences as a writer.

Identity In a January 21, 2013, article in , James Woods wrote that Ferrante has said, "books, once they are written, have no need for their authors." Perhaps that is one reason for her pen-name.

Speculation about Ferrante's identity is rife. In the same New Yorker article, Woods also wrote:

In the past twenty years or so, though, she has provided written answers to journalists’ questions, and a number of her letters have been collected and published. From them, we learn that she grew up in Naples, and has lived for periods outside Italy. She has a classics degree; she has referred to being a mother. One could also infer from her fiction and from her interviews that she is not now married. (“Over the years, I’ve moved often, in general unwillingly, out of necessity. . . . I’m no longer dependent on the movements of others, only on my own” is her encryption.) In addition to writing, “I study, I translate, I teach. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/11/2015.)

https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/fiction/10350-my-brilliant-friend-ferrante?start=1

My Brilliant Friend

(Reviews)

Ferrante writes with a ferocious, intimate urgency that is a celebration of anger. Ferrante is terribly good with anger, a very specific sort of wrath harbored by women, who are so often not allowed to give voice to it. We are angry, a lot of the time, at the position we’re in—whether it’s as wife, daughter, mother, friend—and I can think of no other woman writing who is so swift and gorgeous in this rage, so bracingly fearless in mining fury. (From a 2012 review of My Brilliant Friend)

Susanna Sonnenberg - San Francisco Chronicle

[Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels] don’t merely offer a teeming vision of working- class Naples, with its cobblers and professors, communists and mobbed-up businessmen, womanizing poets and downtrodden wives; they present one of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship.

John Powers - Fresh Air, NPR

An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends Lila and Elena, Bright and passionate girls from a raucous neighborhood in world-class Naples. Ferrante writes with such aggression and unnerving psychological insight about the messy complexity of female friendship that the real world can drop away when you’re reading her.

Entertainment Weekly

This is both fascinating—two girls, their families, a neighborhood, and a nation emerging from war and into an economic boom—and occasionally tedious, as day-to-day life can be. But Lila, mercurial, unsparing...is a memorable character. (From a 2012 review of My Brilliant Friend.)

Publishers Weekly

https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/fiction/10350-my-brilliant-friend-ferrante?start=2

My Brilliant Friend

(Enhancement)

My Brilliant Friend was part of the 2014 International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award Longlist.

In one of the loveliest sequences in Elena Ferrante’s novel “My Brilliant Friend,” two girls read “Little Women.” But Elena and Lila don’t merely read the book together. They recite it, they memorize it. They fantasize about emulating Jo March, who escaped poverty by writing. They wreck it with their love: “We read it for months, so many times that the book became tattered and sweat-stained, it lost its spine, came unthreaded, sections fell apart.”

This sequence is a delight in the TV adaptation, too, which is currently airing on HBO. On a bench in their grungy, violent Naples neighborhood, Elena and Lila lounge, bodies entwined, wearing shabby dresses, reading in unison, in Italian. (The show has English subtitles.) Excitedly, Lila recites a passage in which Jo herself reads out loud, from her first published short story, to her sisters, without telling them who wrote it. At the passage’s climax, when Jo reveals herself as the author, the two girls read Jo’s words together, their faces shining, as Lila pounds her chest: “Vostra sorella! ” (“Your sister!”) It’s a thrilling moment, which threw me back to the wild vulnerability of childhood reading. The scene is dramatic, or maybe just specific and sensual, in a way that the version on the page can’t be, and really doesn’t try to be. There’s no dialogue in the book, no chest-pounding, no description of the girls’ clothes, and no quotes from “Little Women.” Ferrante’s book confides more than it describes—that’s both its technique and its insinuating power.

Elena Ferrante in an Interview:

Do you recall when you first had the idea for “My Brilliant Friend”?

I can’t give you a precise answer. It may have had its origin in the death of a friend of mine, or in a crowded wedding celebration, or perhaps in the need to return to themes and images of an earlier book, “The Lost Daughter.” One never knows where a story comes from; it’s the product of a variety of suggestions that, together with others that you are not aware of and never will be, excite your mind.

https://dublinliteraryaward.ie/news/2014-printable-longlist/ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-sweet-linearity-of-my-brilliant-friend https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-elena-ferrante-interview-20180517-htmlstory.html