My Brilliant Friend

My Brilliant Friend is Elena Ferrante's 2011 novel (2012 in Ann Goldstein's English translation), the first volume of the four-book Neapolitan Novels and one of the most-discussed contemporary European literary novels in English. The structural premise is the lifelong friendship between two girls, Elena Greco (the narrator, called Lenu) and Raffaella Cerullo (called Lila), who grow up together in a poor neighborhood of 1950s Naples. The first volume runs from approximately age six through the end of adolescence; the four-book sequence as a whole runs across approximately sixty years of the two friends' separate adult lives, with the structural premise that Lila has disappeared in present-day Naples and Lenu is writing the four-volume sequence as her response.

Ferrante's structural method is the close-third-person narration from inside the lifelong Lenu interiority, with Lila constructed entirely through Lenu's observation and resentment-and-admiration of her across six decades. The Naples poverty material in the first volume is rendered with the kind of patient sociological texture (the family politics of the cobbler's shop, the seasonal-employment cycles of the neighborhood, the violence that runs through every household, the specific moral economy of the 1950s Italian Catholic working class) that lifts the novel above its commercial-literary-fiction shelf. The school-and-Lila chapters in the middle third are some of the strongest contemporary literary prose about a specific kind of young female friendship that the broader literary tradition has not historically treated seriously.

Recommended as required contemporary European literary fiction reading, as the right Ferrante entry point and the first book of the Neapolitan tetralogy, and as one of the canonical contemporary novels about female friendship. The 2018 HBO Max Italian limited series adaptation runs across four seasons covering the entire tetralogy and is one of the strongest contemporary literary-fiction adaptations. Read The Story of a New Name (2013) next. The Hillary Huber audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.