My Brilliant Friend

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Flavorwire

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10 Funny, Tortured, and Melancholy Literary Quotes About Female Friendship

If “Ferrante Fever” has taught us anything, it’s that the hunger for good literature about female friendship isn’t a hunger for treacly, happy-ever-after stories about gals who stick together through thick and thin. No, readers want stories that show the jealousy, regret, companionship, discovery, love, humor, and hate that make our lifelong friendships such rich fodder for books from the best YA to the most troubling literary fiction.

Here are some of our favorite passages about female friendship from literature, from the silly to the sublime to the sad — with lots of Ferrante included, of course.

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Don’t Read Too Fast

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Elena Ferrante, or Naples, Part Two

by dontreadtoofast on October 8, 2015

A panel discussion was held at Lutyens and Rubenstein on the eve of the release of the final novel in Ferrante’s Naples tetralogy. The panel was made up of Cathy Rentzenbrink, Jonathan Gibbs, Susanna Gross and Tessa Hadley – all writers and critics, but more importantly, ardent Ferrante fans. Although none of them were especially keen on speaking in front of an audience, when it comes to this author none of them could bear the alternative prospect of sitting in the audience and watching another panel get it wrong. Such is the fervour for Ferrante.

For those who have not yet been introduced, the books chart the course of a friendship over several decades. The two women – Elena and Lila – are co-dependent rivals and know each other better than anyone. The novels open with Elena writing their story down as Lila has disappeared. Her aim to recapture what may soon be forgotten becomes, we realize, memoir as as an aggressive, defiant act. Elena is punishing Lila by colonizing their story. She seems to own it by providing the only side, however, in telling the full version of events, there are moments when she clearly hands the reader’s sympathy over to Lila by recounting her own actions. There is little objectivity, but at the same time, there is little bias.

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Columbia Tribune

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LITERARY LINKS

Sunday, October 11, 2015 at 12:00 am

Each month, the Columbia Public Library offers selections from its collection related to a current best-seller or hot topic. Library Associate Ida Fogle compiled this month’s selections.

 

“My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante (Europa Editions, 2012, translated by Ann Goldstein) is the first book in a series centering on the lifelong friendship between two women, Elena and Lila, who meet as children in the 1950s and grow up together in a gritty, impoverished neighborhood in Naples, Italy. “My Brilliant Friend” follows Elena and Lila through childhood to the beginning of their adult years. The writing is abundant in the details of daily life, while also showing the bigger picture of families, a community and a country recovering from the hardships of war. Elena is the narrator, but Lila is the star. Lila is brilliant in school and full of spark out on the violent streets, fighting back against bullies and living large. Yet for all of Lila’s potential, her options are limited by family and economic circumstance.

Flavorwire

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50 Great Books About Deliciously Bad Women

BY

What is it about bad girls that is so alluring? Maybe it’s the seized power they signify, or the agency their badness implies, or just the comebacks and leather jackets, but I always love the “bad” women in literature best. Here are some books that are blessed with such mavens, whose antics range from mere misbehavior to pure evil, who are antagonists and antiheroines and just plain heroines who just also happen to be jerks a lot of the time. Some of these characters are deeply lovable despite their flaws, and some readers just love to hate. But no matter what, they will delight you in all of their badness. Read on for some deliciously bad ladies of literature, and if I’ve missed your favorite, sing her praises (er, or shriek her name in terror) in the comments.

The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante

The narrator of this extraordinary novel’s husband has just left her, and as the book unfolds, so does Olga. She ignores her sick children. She throws screaming fits in public. She makes dismal attempts at sexual encounters with her neighbors. She thinks the worst things and develops a keen taste for what she calls “obscene language.” She is bad — but her badness is a reaction to grief, to abandonment, to despair, and her abject rage will make you love her.

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Al Jazeera America

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The disappearing woman

What accounts for the proliferation of stories about women abandoning their lives?

July 19, 2015 2:00AM ET

by Elizabeth Greenwood @lizgreenwood4u

In the opening pages of Elena Ferrante’s first book of her Neapolitan novels, 66-year-old Lina Cerullo has gone missing. Her adult son discovers she has cut herself out of family photos. “She wanted to vanish” Elena, her best childhood friend, remembers. “She wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found, to leave not so much as a hair in the world.”

“My Brilliant Friend” is one of a spate of books published in the past couple of years whose female protagonist disappears. But these characters don’t get snatched by a madman lurking in the bushes; nor are these women the typical blonde innocents who make headlines and launch nationwide searches. Rather, these are affluent adult (and usually white) women who conscientiously choose to opt out of their lives.

In Catherine Lacey’s 2014 novel “Nobody Is Ever Missing,” the 28-year-old protagonist flees the country seeking not just a divorce from her husband but “a divorce from everything, to divorce my own history.” In Vendela Vida’s latest novel “The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty,” a woman whose passport is robbed in Casablanca tries on different identities, shedding her old self for novel unblemished versions. “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” by Maria Semple satirizes the smothering, overly politically correct parenting and the trappings of tech money, so oppressive that the agoraphobic Bernadette ventures out into obscurity. Paula Bomer’s “Nine Months” centers on a mother pregnant with her third child who ditches her husband and two boys for the open highway and its limitless possibilities.

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The Guardian

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Best holiday reads 2015

From a portrait of modern-day Britain at work to New York in the 1940s, taking in the secret world of Fifa and tales of female friendships, authors, critics and other bookworms tell us which books they will be reading on the beachIllustration by Sarah Tanat-Jones.

Helen Dunmore

Poet, novelist and children’s author

I have just bought Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend , because friends have praised her superb handling of women’s lives and friendships. There are two further novels in the trilogy and so that should take care of the summer’s fiction reading. My nonfiction treat would be Growing Citrus: The Essential Gardener’s Guide by Martin Page (Timber Books £19.99). I have two lemon trees and acalamondin, which produce good-sized, fragrant but oddly shaped fruit, so perhaps there’s more that they need. My classic choice is to search out the Ladybird book What to Look for in Summer, written by EL Grant Watson and illustrated by CF Tunnicliffe. The series is ravishingly illustrated, botanically accurate and evocative of childhood.

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The Daily Mail

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HISTORICAL

By ELIZABETH BUCHAN FOR THE DAILY MAIL

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND

by Elena Ferrante

(Europa £11.99)

A few pages into volume one of what are known as the Neapolitan Novels, I was completely hooked.

Canny, highly intelligent and hungry for experience, two young girls, Lila and narrator Elena (known as Lenu), grow up together in a tightknit community on the outskirts of Naples, until circumstances force them down different paths — one of them into marriage at the age of 17.

This is the Fifties and, ruled by tradition, vendettas and fiercely guarded territories, a combustible city is coping with post-war exhaustion and poverty.

Yet, change is coming and the friendship of these girls — fractured but enduring — provides the emotional heart of this superb coming-of-age novel.

Forensically observed, truthful, rich and rewarding, this is an unforgettable reading experience. Brava also to Ann Goldstein, the translator.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-3139431/HISTORICAL.html#ixzz3eXZfMMgQ
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

The Times Literary Suplement

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“Ferrante Fever” and other symptoms

By THEA LENARDUZZI

If you don’t count the one-woman sensation that is Elena Ferrante – whose agile prose has found her not a few (well-deserved) admirers in our recent Summer Books feature – Italian literature has been having a rather tough time of it in recent years (recent decades, some would say). When I left Italy for England in 2004, Ugo Riccarelli’s Il dolore perfetto had just won the Strega prize, Paola Mastrocola had won the Campiello with Una barca nel bosco, and Franco Cordero had taken the Bagutta for Le strane regole del sig. B. A cursory search suggests that I was the only one of us to make it to England. Statistics haven’t improved much in the past ten years. Of last year’s winners – Francesco Piccolo, Giorgio Fontana, Maurizio Cucchi and Valerio Magrelli (joint winners of the Bagutta) – only Magrelli, and to a lesser extent, Cucchi, are likely to ring any bells among English readers (Magrelli’s poetry in particular, translated by Jamie McKendrick, has been praised highly in the TLS).

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The Millions

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Outside the Neighborhood: Reading Italy Through Elena Ferrante

By posted at 6:00 am on February 19, 2015

 

1.
Near the beginning of My Brilliant Friend, the first of Elena Ferrante’s series of novels about a complicated friendship between two women from the slums of Naples, the girls, then in elementary school, play hooky and sneak out of “the neighborhood,” their claustrophobic network of courtyards and stairwells filled with violence and poverty. Lenú and Lila aim for the sea. Though Naples is a port city, neither of them has seen the “vague bluish memory” of water. After hours of walking, Lila becomes suddenly afraid and turns them back, while Lenú, usually the timid one, discovers that distance “extinguished in me every tie and every worry.”

The Neopolitan Novels, as they are known, expand this dynamic tension between the pull of Naples, the city, and the expansion of the girls’ consciousness as Italy enters the modern era. This is a story of self-realization alongside the self-realization of a nation. Acutely sensitive to the workings of class and power, Ferrante subtly works in black market war profiteers, fascist collaborators, mafiosi, the workers’ movements and radical terrorism of the 1960s and ’70s, and the arrival of wealth and consumer goods to Italy’s new middle class. Ferrante attaches the story of Lenú and Lila to the history of postwar Italy in a way that never feels contrived.

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Bookriot

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With Friends Like These, Who Needs (the word) Frenemies?

Six months late (as usual), I’ve finally worked through my TBR list far enough to get to Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first in her much-discussed Neapolitan trilogy, and boy, do I get the hype. My immediate reaction was that this a book that will launch a thousand essays: on class, gender, violence, and sexual identity. The book offersso much for analysis and reflection. What captivated memost, though, at least in this initial read, was the rich, complicated, and deeply-felt relationship between the book’s two adolescent protagonists, Elena and Lila. But about a quarter of the way into this fascinating read, I felt a sudden I sudden sinking in my stomach. Oh god, I thought, this is the kind of friendship people are going to label ‘frenemies.’
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New Humanist

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Taking off the mask: Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels

In these compelling books, the Italian writer – whose real identity is hidden – combines the novel with feminist polemic.

–   by Fatema Ahmed   –

This article is a preview from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series (known in Italian as the Brilliant Friend novels) could be at the intersection of a publisher’s fantasy Venn diagram; they occupy the spot where Anglophone readers notice novels in translation and male critics read women seriously. This is a remarkable amount of commercial success and critical acclaim for what, on the face of it, is a female bildungsroman that begins in 1950s Naples. Three instalments of what Ferrante has said is really one novel have been published so far, with a fourth and final volume due to appear later this year. My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay are set over 60 years and run to some 1,200 pages in Ann Goldstein’s English translation. It all seems a great departure from Ferrante’s three previous novels, each of which is a slim work narrated by a woman in crisis, spanning a short period in the near present.

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The Paris Review

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Interviews

Elena Ferrante, Art of Fiction No. 228

Interviewed by Sandro and Sandra Ferri

INTERVIEWER

When does a book seem publishable to you?

FERRANTE

When it tells a story that, for a long time, unintentionally, I had pushed away, because I didn’t think I was capable of telling it, because telling it made me uncomfortable. Again, in the case of The Days of Abandonment the writing freed the story in a short time, over one summer. Actually, that was true for the first two parts. Then suddenly I began to make mistakes, I lost the tone. I wrote and rewrote the last part all that fall. It was a time of great anxiety. It doesn’t take much to convince yourself that you’ve forgotten how to tell a story. I didn’t know how to get Olga out of her crisis truthfully, as truthfully as I’d narrated her falling into it. The hand was the same, the writing was the same, there was the same choice of vocabulary, same syntax, same punctuation, and yet the tone had become false. For months I felt that the preceding pages were beyond my abilities, and now I no longer felt equal to my own work. It made me bitter. You’d rather lose yourself than find yourself, I thought. Then everything started up again. But even today I don’t dare reread the book. I’m afraid that the last part has only the appearance of good writing.

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