I really enjoyed reading “My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante for this weeks novel. It feels a bit like a nice little break and a good way to end of this class’s reading list with a novel like this one. The writing style was so nice and easy to follow. I found that Elena didn’t bother with as much of the unnecessary and “unique” writing techniques that many of the other authors we have read from did. I think that this added simplicity makes the storyline very clear and lets this become a more enjoyable read where the plot line and characters all seem to have a place and make sense without excessive amounts of reader interpretation which much other novels have done. Even though this novel gives you the information slowly of what happened to Lila, the author does this in a straightforward way where the reader is still understanding what is going on.<\/p>\n
I found the relationship\/friendship dynamic between Elena and Lila to be quite interesting. First of all they have a large gap and difference in lifestyles. Lila comes from a world of less money and less opportunity however Elena has much more opportunity and support financially. This obviously creates a divide between the two however they are friends despite this difference. I do however think that this difference is what causes their relationship to feel a bit abnormal at times. I often thought that the relationship felt slightly transactional and almost as if they were using each other a bit and things between them were always up or down. However even though the nature of their relationship seemed to (me at least) have transactional and a bit unpredictable or unstable, they still had a deep care and appreciation of one another which makes me believe that their friendship is based off of real connection too.<\/p>\n
The competition between the Elena and Lila, is partly what I think makes their relationship so meaningful and deep yet also so toxic and confusing. Clearly they both envy the other meaning that they are inspirations to each other, however they let this go too far and turn into competition which is when the friendship becomes toxic.<\/p>\n
My question for the class: How do you think that Elena and Lila’s relationship dynamic,ic would’ve changed if they were to have the same socioeconomic status which would eliminate a lot of the differences and jealousies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I really enjoyed reading “My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante for this weeks novel. It feels a bit like a nice little break and a good way to end of this class’s reading list with a novel like this one. The writing style was so nice and easy to follow. I found that Elena didn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,40,42],"tags":[43,45,44],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elena-ferrante","category-ferrante","category-my-brilliant-friend","tag-friendship","tag-missing","tag-toxic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/daelynwagner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/daelynwagner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/daelynwagner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/daelynwagner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/90004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/daelynwagner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/daelynwagner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/daelynwagner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions\/37"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/daelynwagner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/daelynwagner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/daelynwagner\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}