Unlike the past weeks where I had doubts about which books to choose, I knew for a fact that I wanted to read Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. In the beginning of the year, I had just finished the HBO original, Scenes from a Marriage, and the HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend was recommended under the “more like this” tab. I watched the trailer and was definitely intrigued, but with the hour long episodes and the show being filmed in Italian, I decided to hold off on watching it until after. Also, I’ll admit that I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to book to film and tv adaptation (mainly because so many of them never do the books justice!) so I wanted to wait until I could read the book first before watching the show. So, when it came to choosing books for this class, I was very surprised to see this book in this class’ text list and knew that I had to read it!
Revolving around the friendship between Elena/Lenù and Lila, the novel is split into two parts: one about their childhood and one about adolescence. Initially, I found myself being a bit confused with the names since they are so similar. However, my version of the novel came with a few pages that provided a list of the characters and a brief description of who they were. With the amount of characters being introduced, that list definitely helped a lot with keeping track of who everyone was.
The friendship between Elena and Lila is a great example of how complicated and intense female friendships are. From the beginning of the novel, Elena makes the remark that she’s “the only one who knows what [Lila] means” and it becomes clear that Elena and Lila share a secret language that only the two of them can understand (10). Nevertheless, it is also apparent that their friendship is not all sunshine and rainbows as she soon makes the comment that she couldn’t find a single item that belonged to Lila. As Elena to ponder the question of whether that was because Lila didn’t give her anything or if she didn’t want to keep anything from her, the readers get a sneak peak of the tumultuous friendship between the two.
All in all, I really enjoyed reading the novel and felt like the friendship being described was very relatable. After finals, I’m definitely going to go and watch the HBO show and am excited to see how well the adaptation will be!
Here are some questions for everyone else!
Elena makes the note that although Lila was “darling” to her, Lila was often viewed as “only terrible” (31). So, do you think the dynamic of the friendship would be different if it was told through the narration of Lila?
Hi Rebecca! I enjoyed reading your blog it was very well written! To answer your question, although Lila seemed to not care about Elena, she really did. For instance, when she held a knife to Marcello’s throat because they broke Elena’s silver bracelet. She, put her life in danger to protect Elena so I feel like if the novel was written in Lila’s narration she would speak highly of Elena. Maybe she would also be a little jealous because the girls always seem to have a little bit of a competitive atmosphere. – Jaisleen Thind
Nice post! I think that’s a great idea to watch the TV show now that we’ve read it, I might just do the same. For your question, yes I feel like Lila maybe had more of a soft spot for Elena internally, whereas it seemed like Elena borderline despised, while loved, Lila in some aspects. Everyone perceives the same story differently, so it would be an interesting perspective to read the story from.
I definitely agree about the reluctance towards the adaptation. Although in my case I had read the book and then after watched some trailers and clips from the series. While the book has many heavy themes, I found that the trailers made the story seem super dour and brooding when in reality I think there’s more nuance to this story then the hyper-dramatization the series might be going on (haven’t seen it so I can’t say for sure). I’m also glad you mentioned the intensity of the female friendship because that felt salient to me to. I found that Ferrante’s prose and the first-person perspective really allowed me to be captivated by their friendship and to bridge the gap between the reader and the writing such that I felt fully engaged in the story and characters.