My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante is a novel about the friendship between the narrator Elena and Lila. This novel follows many themes that we have noticed in previous readings such as childhood and memory. Although it seems like Elena is in competition with her best friend Lila, I believe Elena does care and looks up to Lila and even fears losing her. Lila is extremely brave like at the beginning of the novel when she and Elena went to Don Achille’s apartment and confronted him about taking their dolls and when she had a knife at Marcello’s throat to protect Elena. I really enjoyed reading this novel because you can observe the character development among the characters. For instance, how Elena and Lila had dreamt of becoming wealthy and as they got older, that dream, especially for Lila had faded. Elena went on to succeed in high school while Lila didn’t receive the same opportunity and stayed with her family in the shoemaking\/ fixing business. We can also see Rino’s character develop. At the beginning of the novel, he seems like a nice boy who just looks out for his younger sister Lila. But later on in the novel, he becomes abusive to his younger sister when he becomes greedy about the idea of their shoe factory.<\/p>\n
Some parts of Ferrante’s novel reminded me of The Shrouded Women by\u00a0Mar\u00eda Luisa Bombal. I found the male gaze to be a part of the novel many times. It makes sense since the main characters are going through puberty. But for Elena, the way men view her seems to be significant while Lina doesn’t seem to care. For instance, when Elena begins to fall in love with\u00a0Pasquale Peluso\u00a0but he only seems interested in Lila who does not feel the same back. And now to think of it, there is a lot of jealousy and most of this jealousy comes from Elena. Elena is jealous when the boys find Lila more attractive and when she beings dating Stefano because she has more money now. It seems like Elena compares her life to Lila’s a lot. Elena compared her relationship with Antonio to Lilas and Stefanos and even wondered what they do and don’t do.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Overall, I really enjoyed reading My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. It was interesting and dramatic while being still relatable. My question is, Elena often doubts her and her ability in school, near the end she says in reaction to Lila and Stefano’s marriage that “studying is useless” she doubts that she can make it. Have you ever had doubts about being in Post-secondary?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante is a novel about the friendship between the narrator Elena and Lila. This novel follows many themes that we have noticed in previous readings such as childhood and memory. Although it seems like Elena is in competition with her best friend Lila, I believe Elena does care and looks …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[15,28,27,4],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-blogs","tag-childhood","tag-ferrante","tag-memory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jaisleenthindblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jaisleenthindblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jaisleenthindblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jaisleenthindblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jaisleenthindblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jaisleenthindblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jaisleenthindblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions\/32"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jaisleenthindblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jaisleenthindblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jaisleenthindblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}