I mean, being from Ischia, I was already pretty biased towards loving My Brilliant Friend, but I really enjoyed this one. Though one of the longer books we’ve read in this course, I felt completely pulled into the story; it felt more like a book that I would normally choose to read for fun than many of the other books from this semester (not that I don’t also love those).

I appreciated the complexity of the relationships in this novel. Grappling with the identity changes that come with knowing the same people your entire life can be very challenging, and realizing you’ve outgrown people is hard to navigate, and I thought Ferrante conveyed it really well.

Both Elena and Lila have their flaws and make mistakes, but overall, I felt like they both tried to do the right thing and are supportive of each other in their friendship, though the competition was a bit too toxic at times. The relationship felt like the weirdest combination of insanely fragile and entirely unbreakable, and I’m still not entirely sure which it was.  It was friendship portrayed in a way that I haven’t seen in a novel before, and I think it’s important to see. Relationships, even those outside of romantic ones, are not perfect. If you have a friend who’s been with you for your whole life and you want to continue that way, you have to want to be a part of each other’s lives and be willing to go through the challenges that come with change.

I do kind of wish I’d read it in Italian, and maybe one day I will, but I’m very curious what was lost in translation, particularly for this book. The spelling of “chalk” scene (p. 43) made me more focused/aware of the translation of this book early on, since the word in Italian doesn’t have a silent ‘l’.  I noticed that some of the phrases felt like a sort of clunky/literal translation from Italian (for example, on p. 165, “What the fuck if there’s a little dampness?”).

I resonated with Elena on so many levels. I so get the feeling like your whole identity is tied to your academic success: she felt like her intelligence was all that she had, and losing that and struggling in school doesn’t just mean that you’re not doing well in school, but it feels like if you don’t do well in school, you have nothing else going on for you and nothing to offer. For most of the book, I thought the ‘brilliant friend’ was Lila because Elena’s voice/the narration style made it so clear that she didn’t think of herself that way. I liked watching Elena grow, and I felt that towards the end of the book, she was beginning to find her voice and her place outside of Lina.

I’m curious if you think that Elena and Lila’s relationship was more fragile or more unbreakable?