This story set in Italy has captivated readers around the world, writes Michele Magwood for the Sunday Times
It started quietly last year, with people pressing a book into friends’ hands. It wasn’t available in South Africa yet; some had bought it overseas or online, but My Brilliant Friend began to do the rounds, like a secret handshake, and the cultish, elusive word-of-mouth kicked in.
Dinner parties and book clubs were split into those who had read it and those who hadn’t; the ones who had fell into intense discussions with each other. Those who hadn’t, begged to borrow it, and as the next books in the series followed, the conversation around them grew louder.
Now, thankfully, all four of the novels in the series are in our stores. Thankfully, because once you start reading them you can’t stop. There again, you don’t read these novels so much as immerse yourselves in them. In their panoramic, intricately detailed style they’ve been compared to Dickens and Proust, and rarely have literary novels sparked such worldwide attention.
It’s rare, too, that books in translation sell anywhere near the millions these have, yet this story of two friends growing up in the slums of Naples has a potent appeal.
In the first pages of My Brilliant Friend Elena Ferrante presents us with an index of characters. She arranges them into families: the shoemaker’s family, the mad widow’s family, the carpenter’s family, and so on. Over four books and some six decades we will follow these characters and the tributaries of their lives, lives tinged with love for some, but with treachery, madness and obsession too.
Traditionally there is an arc to fiction: the beginning, the climax, the denouement. There is no single arc to this story, though. Rather, it is like life itself, a pullulating flow streaming onwards. The language is unadorned and neutral, with few lyrical flights or gorgeous tracts of description, yet there is an urgency to the writing, an engine of fury driving it.
Ferrante told The Paris Review, “I tend toward an expansive sentence that has a cold surface and, visible underneath it, a magma of unbearable heat.”
Part of the quartet’s allure is the anonymity of the author. From the outset of her career the pseudonymous Ferrante has refused to be identified or to promote her books. “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.” This hasn’t stopped Italian commentators trying to guess her identity – one even proclaimed her to be a man – but so far she has steadfastly remained anonymous, granting few written interviews.
My Brilliant Friend opens in the present day. The narrator Elena Greco is in her 60s, a successful author living in Turin. She receives a call from the son of her childhood friend, Lila, telling her that his mother has vanished. She has wiped every trace of her life from their apartment, even cutting herself out of photographs. When, weeks later, she hasn’t reappeared, Elena is livid.
“Lila is overdoing it as usual, I thought … she wanted not only to disappear herself, now, at the age of 66, but also to eliminate the entire life that she had left behind. We’ll see who wins this time, I said to myself.” And with that she turns on her computer and begins to write the story of their friendship, beginning in the 1950s.
Lila Cerullo is the daughter of the local shoemaker, a skinny, scabby sprite of a child, preternaturally clever. “Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite … every one of her movements said that to harm her would be pointless because, whatever happened, she would find a way of doing worse to you.”
Elena is softer, given to pleasing, and is devoted to Lila. She’s intelligent, too, but dogged and disciplined. She persuades her parents to let her continue her studies – her eventual ticket out of the squalor – but Lila’s father forces her to leave school to work for him. Her ticket is the usual one for girls like her: marriage at 16 to a brute.
And so the two friends plunge into their lives. Their dolls will become babies, the boys who threw stones at them will be their lovers. They will orbit each other, sometimes colliding, sometimes swinging far apart, supporting each other, betraying each other, forever entangled by their childhood experiences. They grow into beautiful, forcible women, powerful in different ways.
Elena moves away, pursuing the life of the intelligentsia, but is pulled inexorably back to the neighbourhood that Lila can never leave but which she comes to rule. It is a deeply intimate examination of women’s friendship set against a backdrop of poverty, violence and heaving Italian politics. The lava that Ferrante refers to is their rage against their circumstances: the misogyny and shuttered horizons, the ambivalence of motherhood, the iron grip of class and their frustrated ambitions.
How Lila and Elena navigate the limitations of their lives, how they triumph and stumble, contest and acquiesce, makes for an unforgettable epic. There has never been anything like it.
Follow Michele Magwood on Twitter @michelemagwood
Ferrante fever
- High-profile fans include Oprah, Alice Sebold, Richard Flanagan, Zadie Smith, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeffrey Archer.
- The books have been translated into 42 languages.
- Italian TV company Wildside has started production on a 32-episode series of the books.
- A new Ferrante book is scheduled for December, a scary children’s book titled “The Beach At Night”. The story is told from the perspective of an abandoned doll.
- The series has boosted tourism to Naples, once a city to be avoided. The New York Times even ran an article directing visitors to sites from the novels, including bookstores and pastry shops.
- The latest – and some say the most plausible – guess as to Ferrante’s identity is that she is Marcello Marmo, a professor of contemporary history at Naples University. She has denied it.
Book details
- My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
EAN: 9781609450786
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- The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante
EAN: 9781609451349
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- Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
EAN: 9781609452339
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- The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
EAN: 9781609452865
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