Soon to be an HBO series, book one in the New York Times bestselling Neapolitan quartet about two friends growing up in post-war Italy is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted family epic by Italy’s most beloved and acclaimed writer, Elena Ferrante, “one of the great novelists of our time.” (Roxana Robinson, The New York Times) Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the … vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its protagonists, the fiery and unforgettable Lila, and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflictual friendship. Book one in the series follows Lila and Elena from their first fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence.
Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists.
“An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends,” writes Entertainment Weekly. “Spectacular,” says Maureen Corrigan on NPR’s Fresh Air. “A large, captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman,” writes James Wood in The New Yorker
Ferrante is one of the world’s great storytellers. With My Brilliant Friend she has given her readers an abundant, generous, and masterfully plotted page-turner that is also a stylish work of literary fiction destined to delight readers for many generations to come.
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I am completely invested in the lives of these girls. I feel as if I’m living in their shoes even though I’m a spectator to their reality. This story is gripping in every conceivable way.
Finally read this one. It’s been recommended as this beautiful portrayal of female friendship — and it is — but that maybe makes it sound less internal than it is? The book is grounded in the narrator Elena’s inner life, and that’s what makes the friendship compelling too; it’s always framed by Elena’s insecurities, admiration, and jealousy for her friend Lila, and the reader’s view of the world expands with Elena’s as she grows older and sees class conflict and harassment and comes to understand her own competitiveness with Lila. Anyway! It’s really good.
It took me awhile to read this one — it just felt a little too close to home at the time, I guess? But reading it this summer, I was really moved and captivated by Ferrante’s writing and by her characters. The pace of the book is slow, but the characters and the world they inhabit are so alive and so precisely rendered that I finished this book in a matter of days. Ferrante pulls you into her young narrator’s head, and I felt like I couldn’t help but like Lenù — not because she’s likeable per say, but because I felt like I knew her, or was her at points in my life. Her obsession with Lila is both completely relatable and completely incomprehensible, at turns. Anyway, this book definitely lived up to the hype for me, and I’d highly recommend it.
A masterpiece of time and memory that examines a friendship from vantage points of class and gender rarely found in American literature.
This book took a little time to get into, but it was well worth the effort. I think the writing style was very engaging and the story was intriguing with multi-faceted characters whose voices were so realistic. This book is part of a series of four and I can’t wait to start the second book of the series.
Elena Ferrante is one of these authors who make me read the way I read when I was a child. With total absorption. With love and passion and wonder. The women she writes about are flesh and bones. She is not hidings their flaws. Love her writing!!!
Ferrante writes like she’s on fire. Wonderful characters growing up in war-torn Naples. I read all four of the Neapolitan novels over the summer of 17
This tale of two friends in Naples, Italy contains some of the most intimate insights into women’s friendships with paragraph after paragraph of emotionally devastating and honest prose. One of my favorite books of contemporary fiction.
The beauty of this book is that it manages to fascinate the reader without any real plot. There are small stories that continue over ten years of friendship between two girls in the background of a slum in Naples after World War II.
So why is he so fascinating?
It is a novel that focuses on the experience itself, the nature of human beings, with much emotion and humanity.
Such an affair speaks to people, and any person can identify with him, no matter if he grows up in a neighborhood or country of one kind or another.
There is also a question that hangs all the time, who is a genius here? The one who studies and excels at school or who knows how to channel her life in such a way that she will be well, regardless of her studies.
I liked it.
On the surface, this is a coming-of-age novel set in the late 1950s in a poor, violent suburb of Naples. Yet it has depths of love, beauty, politics, social observation, spite, generosity and anger all rendered in sparkling prose.
The reader is immersed in this Southern Italian environment, narrated by Elena Greco, whose entire story of her growth and development into her late teens is refracted through the lens of comparison. Lila Cerullo is a wild, stubborn, intelligent, spiteful and completely hypnotic eight-year-old. Elena is drawn to this bright flame, despite her fears. The two support and compete, discuss and fantasise, gossip and observe their world as best friends. Small gestures of cruelty are followed by selfless acts of love, constantly testing one another and keeping score.
Ferrante’s cast of characters is broad and its hierarchy rigid. Brutal threats between neighbours, families, lovers are rarely idle and an undercurrent of honour, vengeance and blood runs just below the surface.
Passions and dramas abound on the small stage of their little community, set against a greater backdrop of the recent war, political extremism and the importance of having the right connections.
Ferrante is an extraordinary writer, able to observe the smallest details in grains of sand, then rush you through a scene such as the fireworks on New Year’s Eve so you feel exhilarated and unnerved. It’s a world you don’t want to leave. Thankfully, you don’t have to.
Set in the 50’s in Italy, it is a story of friendship and desire to advance one’s self. The many and varied routes we can take to move forward. The struggle to survive and the role of friends in your life.
This series is my favorite!!
This is the story of best friends and both their rivalry and love for each other, set against the backdrop of growing up in their poor neighborhood in Naples. It’s a translation, and the “voice” of the story certainly crosses over to English.
Very inciteful
The author creates family lives in the post war community of Naples using the vehicle of an uneasy / uneven friendship between the two principle characters. The neighborhood comes alive with all of the different personalities encountered.
My Brilliant Friend is the first of a trilogy from this author. It is absolutely the best book I have ever read. The characters are well developed and you feel that your are living amongst them in the neighborhood in Naples. Unpredictable, sad, happy, twists and turns, you cannot wait to read the next page. You get so involved in their lives that you hate to do anything else but read the book.
It is also a series that was on HBO and was very well done. It tears at your heart.
Unpleasant characters and silly plot. One of the worst books I’ve read.
I didn’t want the four book series to end. I was hooked from book one and couldn’t put these books down! Loved the series!
I really felt as though I were in that village — the characters and the situations seemed so real. It’s. really long tho.
also I’m afraid to read the next in the series as I’m suspect that unhappiness is in the offing.
Beginning book in great series