Elena Ferrante's 'My Brilliant Friend'

WARNING: SPOILERS

My Brilliant Friend is about the frenetic mimesis of female friendships, the humiliation of writers, the impotence of tracked study, and the overwhelming power of beauty, money, sheer physicality, and agency over words.

There is much to appreciate in Elena Ferrante’s first novel in her Neapolitan series. There is perhaps no greater portrait of mimesis in literature. Agency as the sole defense against mimesis. The uneven intensity of memory and experience is delivered in a charming patter of youthful Italian and ‘dialect’ audible even to a reader in English. The outsized, monstrous effect of ideas and words from near-history (monarchy, communism, fascism) and the people that lie on the periphery of the familiar (like the strange neighbour you had as a child). The irresistible power of a woman’s beauty. But most ironic of all is how one of the greatest literary authors of the 21^st century totally denigrates the written word and the writer in her great literary work.

Ferrante chuckles at herself often enough: through her child protagonist’s eyes a woman a little over 30 is old and a writer must be rich:

Evidently his father, although he had written a book of poems, was not yet wealthy.

No, writing will not bring you riches. Writing does not even make you better. In fact, Ferrante says, writing can be a trap, its lure a lie.

The book’s sole author is Donato Sarratore, a sexual predator who mangles a widow’s mind and molests our underage protagonist Elena. He writes poems and a book, which seems wildly romantic and idealistic and successful to Elena until that fantasy careens into the older man’s sexual approach, and is left pathetic as he desperately begs for her affections, promising poems, threatening suicide. The grand writer is reduced to a disgusting worm.

Our two girl friend protagonists, Elena and Lila, are initially enthralled by books and stories. They represent an intellectual, economic, and status ladder out of their backward little town, out of the vortex of village gossip in which they’re stuck. Elena, our narrator with no sense of self or agency, defines herself exclusively through the prism of such aspirations:

I was secretly convinced that I would truly exist only at the moment when my signature, Elena Greco, appeared in print.

The narrative structure hammers her lack of agency endlessly: Elena describes their world, Lila commands it from its centre.

As ...