My Brilliant Friend: childhood, adolescence (Neapolitan Quartet) Paperback – 5 Mar. 2020

This is a terrific novel, set in poverty- ridden Naples, of two friends who grow up in the same district and their interconnecting families. They share a love of education yet inevitably work for family businesses. The ominous presence of the mafia is ever present and the girls lack the free will to make their own choices, despite their obvious talents and ambition. They have to make difficult decisions within an environment of brutal and daily occuring violence. Moving, touching and beautifully written, this novel stayed with me for some time after I'd read it.

What can one say? ... after so many gushing words have been lavished on the (pseudonymous) author and her four-part series set in Naples: 'an unconditional masterpiece', 'a riveting examination of power', 'brutally, diligently honest', 'the truest evocation of ... friendship between women I've ever read', 'Ferrante will blow you away'.My Brilliant Friend is the first book in the series, taking the narrator, Elena Greco, and her fearless friend, Lina Cerullo, from childhood in the 1950s to the nubile age of 16 in the 1960s.Elena, the town-hall porter's daughter, is a clever, quiet girl in thrall to her mother. At school, she is in awe of Lina, the shoemaker's daughter who outshines everyone in the old-fashioned class tests with an icy and effortless ease. Even more impressive is Lina's quick mastery of every situation, passionate and daring, holding a knife to the throat of a son of the feared local mafioso when he disrespects Elena.Like Jane Austen, Elena Ferrante writes with precision and fluidity about small-scale, dramatic neighbourhood relationships, in which the development of the narrator's own self-awareness is the part-hidden core of the tale. Like Austen, the main characters, for all their intelligence, are emotionally impetuous. Like Austen, Ferrante tells us little of the environment in which the story takes place - though it is a time of huge social and economic change. As with Austen, the backdrop to Ferrante's world is one in which women (and most men) are powerless - but the heroines are cleverer than the men.Apparently small gestures - refusing to dance with a boy, or entering her father's shoe-making premises to help her brother - can be decisive moments.However, unlike the novels of Jane Austen, with Elena Ferrante everything is revealed. We are privy to the fears and desires of the narrator as we are plunged into the turmoil of a teenage friendship, in which a competitive and envious edge vies with a slightly unbalanced, almost cold admiration. The girls, Elena and Lina, are passionately close allies against a hostile world, rather than affectionate friends - and in this, I venture, Ferrante paints a true portrait of many a girl-girl friendship. The boys, for the most part, are leagues behind in the relationship game - and, as someone once said, we never really catch up.One can have quibbles with My Brilliant Friend. For example, the superhero nature of Lina is overdone, as when she teaches herself Greek from a dictionary; or when, with virtually no prior experience, she designs a sophisticated wonder-shoe. More tellingly, for this reader at least, the relentless focus on the daily emotional twists and turns of the teenage group, unleavened by humour or by any sense of greater purpose except biological, can become cloying.However, there is a lingering undercurrent of unease, hinted at early on when we learn from the older Elena - who is recounting the story as a kind of memoir - that decades later Lina has disappeared. And by the end of this book, Elena the narrator realises that she wants to move beyond her stifling neighbourhood and everyone she knows, including Lina. But will she be able to?This straightforward and unsophisticated story is a joy to read. It is a real page-turner, because it is so well-written (and well-translated), so emotionally focused and because its intensity makes the ordinary extraordinary. However, the drama is limited to the relationship between the two main characters, and I am not interested enough to want to read the rest of the series - but this may just be me.

An interesting though average readI read that this was a brilliant masterpiece and cinematic in its detail so I felt certain that I was in for a treat by reading my purchase and made myself comfortable and ready to be transported to somewhere special. Iconic, impeccable, remarkable, outstanding, incontrovertibly brilliant - gosh, stop me form bubbling over with excitement here, please. I read it and my response is ‘well, it was Okay though nothing special’Perhaps I had better start finding a few more long-winded and effervescent comments to make if I’m going to continue to review books that I pay good money for.The story is quite sweet - about two girls growing up in the suburbs of Naples and this, the first book in the series ( I gather there are four in total) covers their life from the very early years to sixteen or seventeen when one of them marries rather young. Its a coming of age type of biography and joins the girls as they learn about relationships, education, class, family loyalties and ties. As they learn and experiment with sex and sexuality, commitment and how to survive in the real world, their experiences get them ready for the challenges of adult life. Its been translated extremely well but the story is certainly not unique to growing up in Naples and could easily be set in any of the suburbs of any major town in the world.It is well written and it meanders along without a great deal happening and that in itself is quite comforting - its demonstrates just how similar our early life truly is for we all share the same fear, excitement and trepidation. Its realistic but to the point that all I really need to do is open my front door and find that reality is there in front of me. Its an easy read but I do wonder when I read some of the reviews written by certain publications at the beginning of this book praise that the writers really need to get out more and experience a bit of real life.There is no doubt that Elena Ferrante is a good writer and possibly (dare I risk saying this) more appealing to a female audience. But I have searched my internal thesaurus and still can’t come up with anything better than “yeah, it was okay”.