(Prologue)This morning Rino telephoned. I thought he wanted money again and I was ready to say no. But that was not the reason for the phone call: his mother was gone.
Friday56 quote:
I calmed down. Lila looked around, identified the opening from which we had dropped Tina and Nu. We went along the rough bumpy wall, we looked into the shadows. There dolls weren't there. Lila repeated in dialect, they're not there, they're not there, they're not there, and searched along the floor with her hands, something I didn't have the courage to do.
Summary: Two girls growing up in Naples, Italy in the 1950s form a friendship that borders on a rivalry. The story begins in childhood where the girls are in the same class at school, competing for the highest marks. It runs through their adolescence where Lila is forced to drop out of school to work in her father's shoe shop, but Elena (aka Lenù) goes on with her education first to the middle school and eventually to the high school. Even though Lenù is the one in school, it is often Lila who helps her friend on school assignments and understanding the material. As they age, Lila, who was always skinny and dirty, becomes a great beauty, while Lenù, always the better looking of the two when they were young, finds herself gaining both weight and pimples. Lila ends up getting married at the end of the book and the reader is left to understand that she won the big prize by marrying first.
Review: This July, The New York Times Book Review published a list of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, chosen by 503 literary luminaries. The No. 1 book was My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein. I had a copy of the book kicking around the house but had never read it. It was high time to dust off my copy and read it for myself. As the summary makes it sound, it isn't a complicated -- it is a coming-of-age story of two friends, Lila and Lenù, as they navigate through adolescence while living in a deeply impoverished area of Naples. I liked the book fine but wondered at its placement in the number one spot on the list. Searching around the Internet for some insight I bumped into a review of the book by Vinay Prasad. He says,
Ferrante does all the things I love in a novelist. She writes of mundane matters -- simple truths of the heart. Her characters aren't involved in assassination plots or terrorism. They don't want to change the world. They wish merely to live and be happy, perhaps to rise slightly in social status and wealth.
Ferrante is a recluse no one knows who she is. In fact, she may be a he or a them. No one knows. When her first manuscript was accepted for publication, she told her publisher she would not do any publicity for the book, saying, "The novel is the end of the art and the author is irrelevant."
My Brilliant Friend ends on a cliffhanger, of sorts, or at least abruptly, so readers will want to read on to find out what happens next. Luckily there is a sequel, in fact there are three sequels in the Neapolitan series, published between 2012 and 2014. The fourth of the Neapolitan novels, The Story of the Lost Child, also made the 'Best Books of the Century' list. Clearly I need to read on after reviews like this:
"Nothing quite like this has ever been published before," proclaimed The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two women with unmatched honesty and brilliance.
Have you read the book? Series? What are your thoughts?
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