Thea Lenarduzzi on Elena Ferrante’s quartet as a television serie

On The TLS

Thea Lenarduzzi – Nov 20, 2018

It was never going to be easy, to take Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, some of the most beloved novels of the past decade, and turn them into a satisfactory television series, of thirty-two episodes, with eight per book – “satisfactory” not in the sense of “passable” but rather, “fulfilling expectations”. The difficulty lies in the vertiginous nature of those expectations. Her admirers are famously full-throated in their appreciation (so much so that, in 2016, the Observer could sketch the “Elena Ferrante fan” alongside “the foodie” and “the manspreader” as a “twenty-first-century type”). In Ferrante Fever, a documentary released last year – its title borrowed from the marketing slogan that has helped to sell millions of the books – Giacomo Durzi, driven by his own “overwhelming passion”, sought to capture the enthusiasm in interviews with readers, including Jonathan Franzen, Roberto Saviano and Hillary Clinton, who describes the series as “hypnotic . . . I could not stop reading it or thinking about it” (and this during the 2016 presidential campaign). An industry has been born, with companies offering trips around “Ferrante’s Naples”: for €250, with coffee and pastries, you could try a private tour, “Looking for Lila”, inspired by one of the Quartet’s protagonists.

We have seen this behaviour before, in the unslakeable thirst of the Janeites; think, too, of Louisa May Alcott’s devotees, apparently so numerous in their pilgrimages to Orchard House that the author would pretend to be a maid in order to escape them. (That Ferrante has admitted debts to Austen and Alcott, both in terms of their desire for anonymity and choice of subjects, only helps the comparison.) But, in the case of the Italian author, the hubbub may also account for the air of antediluvian cautiousness that characterizes the first two episodes of Saverio Costanzo’s adaptation – it is almost as though the director anticipates critics like the plague of “tiny, almost invisible animals” that the narrator-protagonist Elena Greco imagines come at night to consume the neighbourhood women with rage. Continue reading →

The TV series is just as unflinching and intimate as Elena Ferrante’s novel.

On The Nation

Sarah Marshall – Nov 20, 2018

In the first episode of My Brilliant Friend, the feverishly anticipated HBO adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel of Neapolitan girlhood, the story’s child protagonist, Elena Greco, hardly speaks. As the series begins, we see Elena at 60, and then at 6; the youthful Elena is played by Elisa Del Genio, an actor whose performance is mostly reactive, her angelically mournful face offering viewers an empathetic keyhole into her world. When she speaks, we are primed to pay close attention. From its first moments, My Brilliant Friend dedicates itself to the high drama—the joy, trauma, and mystery—of what many would call an unremarkable life, which is to say, in many ways, a woman’s life, and a girl’s.

In the bleak, impoverished neighborhood of her 1950s youth, the older Elena reflects in her voice-over, mothers were “as angry as starving dogs…. The men were always getting furious, but then they calmed down, whereas the women flew into a rage that had no limit and no end.” The viewer, watching young Elena react silently to a vicious brawl between the mothers in her building—a fight over the scarce love of men; a contest between the starving—is given a chance to see the darkness of the world that she is hurtling toward. There will be many other moments that afford a similar view.

The viewer experiences this scene as a hauntingly faithful gloss on the novel: Elena imagines tiny, swarming animals crawling up the stairwell of her building and into the apartments, the beds, and finally the women, a cockroach-like infestation of rage. Elena’s narration about these furious women, lifted directly from the book’s text, is now dramatized. The series itself feels like an exploration of where language can take us in such a medium, and where we must leave language behind and let the images do the work—and every viewer who was once a reader of Ferrante’s novel will have different answers to this question.

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As a reader, it’s easy to gloss over the violence and chaos in Ferrante’s story of two girls growing up in mid-century Naples. Onscreen, it’s much more urgent.

On BuzzFeed News

Ruth Curry – Nov 20,2018

What does a bad neighborhood look like in Naples, circa 1950? Monochromatic, drab, with dark soot and graying plaster and baked dirt puffing up in clouds when a cart or motorcycle or the rare automobile goes by. Laundry flapping everywhere, not quite clean. No greenery, no water, even though Naples is on the coast. Men clump in idle groups of three and four outside while indoors the women scream — at each other, their children, to no one at all. Brutal fights break out, three or four against one; the victim slumps bloody in the gutter and eventually his children help him up, crying, limping.

“We lived in a world in which children and adults were often wounded, blood flowed from the wounds, they festered, and sometimes people died. … Our world was like that, full of words that killed: croup, tetanus, typhus, gas, war, lathe, rubble, work, bombardment, bomb, tuberculosis, infection,” Elena Ferrante writes in My Brilliant Friend, the first in her quartet of novels about the coming of age of two girls in postwar Naples, which has now been adapted by the Italian director Saverio Costanzo into a miniseries for HBO, which began airing Nov. 18.

On The AV Club

Allison Shoemaker – Nov 18, 2018

It marks a major turning point in “Le Bambole (The Dolls)” when the daring Lila (Ludovica Nasti) stands in the courtyard of several apartment buildings, calling up to Lenù (Elisa Del Genio) to come out and play. It’s a big step. Before this moment, the two girls alternately circled, struck out at, or studied each other (the last, largely Lenù’s domain). They have connected in brief flashes, but this is a chance to turn a corner. Lila calls up, Lenù hears her, and it takes her only a moment to decide. She’ll come down, and a friendship will begin.

By the time she reaches the ground floor, Lila has turned a corner of her own—a literal one, around which she’s being violently confronted by one of the neighborhood’s big bad wolves. As she shouts up into the older boy’s face, we see Lenù process what’s happening, and realize the choice before her. But is it a choice? She came down those stairs. She’s in this now. She stands up for her new friend just as Lila stands up for herself, and within moments, they’re crumpled side by side in the dust.

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On Forbes

Sarah Aswell – Nov 19, 2018

During the first episode of My Brilliant Friend, women and girls fill the stairwell of a Naples apartment building–not a man is present. At the center of the action is two women fighting, while others try to separate them, and while the younger girls look on in confusion and horror. When one woman tumbles down the stairs, the protagonist of the story, Elena, faints while looking on.

The screen goes black, and the the narrator–an adult Elena–speaks:

As a child, I imagined tiny animals that came out of ponds, the abandoned train cars, the stones, the dust, and made their way into the water, the food, the air, making our mothers as angry as starving dogs. The men were always getting furious but then they calmed down, whereas the women flew into a rage that had no limit and no end.

As she speaks, a terrifying surreal moment in an otherwise realistic series takes place: we see horrifying black bugs pouring out of the sewers and streets and crawling into the mouths of the city’s sleeping mothers.

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On The Cut

Anna Silman – Nov 19, 2018

There are a lot of things I liked about HBO’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’sMy Brilliant Friend. I appreciated the chic Eileen Fisher-esque linen gowns worn by the show’s Italian tweens, I enjoyed the detailed vistas of 1950s Naples, and I loved the precocious child actors chosen to populate the show’s world. But throughout, I couldn’t help but feel that the show was missing an essential feature of the books: the index of character names.

When I first read Elena Ferrante’s epic quartet, The Neapolitan Novels, a few years ago — at the height of my Ferrante fever — I became weirdly obsessed with the indexes. Each book opens with a list of characters, grouped by family unit. We are introduced to the shoemaker’s family and the grocer’s family and the fruit-seller’s family and the baker’s family, followed by short descriptions of each member. This intertwining network of clans serve as the basis for the books’ social world, which grows more complex over time. My time reading the series was spent in a flurry of perpetual motion — flipping to the front of the book, flipping back to where I was, then flipping back to the front again — to make sure I was right about where each character fit in (I developed carpal tunnel right around the time Elena Greco, the porter’s daughter, and Lila Cerullo, the shoemaker’s daughter, graduated primary school). Continue reading →

Even if you’ve never read Elena Ferrante’s novels, this new eight-episode series will have you gripped.

On Vox

Todd VanDerWerff – Nov 18, 2018

I haven’t read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, the best-selling, heavily acclaimed quartet of books that form the basis for HBO’s new My Brilliant Friend. (Each book will be an eight-episode season of the show; I’ve seen seven of the eight episodes of season one, based on the first book, called, well, My Brilliant Friend.)

I know, I know. This is horrifying. Didn’t everybody read those books a few years ago? And pass them along to their friends with hushed admiration and excitement for everything the mysterious Ferrante (whose real identity is — at least officially — a secret) accomplished? And feel the tremendous power of Ferrante’s evocation of a bygone era in Italy? Well? Didn’t they?

It’s not that I had anything against the books — I always meant to read them, I swear — and I present this fact as the basis of what I’m going to say next: Freed from the hype surrounding the titles, and the questions on Ferrante’s identity, and everything else, this new series is a knockout, excavating the core story of the books and creating a beautiful coming-of-age tale, brimming with nostalgia, sorrow, and humor.

(I also say this because critics who have read the books seem to believe the series is a good adaptation, but perhaps too direct of an adaptation. So take that for what it’s worth, book fans.)

I never felt like I was missing out on something having not read the source material. I always felt like I understood what it was people adore about Ferrante’s world. And for me, at least, it is a triumph of world-building, as potent and richly realized as any sci-fi or fantasy show.

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Consciousness can be raised through any medium, including one that can cost over $100 a month.

On Huffington Post

Claire Fallon – Nov 16,2018

On USA Today

Kelly Lawler – Nov 16, 2018

In the second episode of HBO’s new series “My Brilliant Friend,” two precocious young girls reverently recite passages from “Little Women,” garnering hope and strength and inspiration from Louisa May Alcott’s words.

Author Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” book series is regarded with similar reverence, around the world but especially in her home country, Italy, the setting of the coming-of-age epics about two girls growing up in post-World War II Naples. As with so many book-to-screen adaptations, from “Harry Potter” to “Gone Girl,” bringing Ferrante’s words to the screen required extreme care, so as to not upset the legions of fans for whom the books have meant so much. HBO’s version of “Friend” (Sunday and Monday, 9 EST/PST, ★★★½ out of four) keeps the story of little Elena (Elisa Del Genio as a young girl, and Margherita Mazzucco as a teenager) and her brilliant friend Raffaella (Ludovica Nasti and Gaia Girace, respectively) in the language it was written with English subtitles, in part for authenticity and in part because it’s an Italian co-production. Whatever the motives, it was the right decision for this beautiful, buoyant story of friendship, survival and growing up. “Friend” is, for lack of a better word, quite brilliant.

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On The New Yorker

Katy Waldman – Nov 16, 2018

She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.” That is Elena Greco, the narrator of the novel “My Brilliant Friend,” talking about Lila Cerullo, the brilliant friend of the title and the other main character in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, a series of novels about two girls growing up in working-class Italy in the nineteen-fifties. Elena, known as Lenu, finds Lila’s way of speaking electrifying. But her analysis also applies to Ferrante, who imbues the details of chores and school with a crackling power that is difficult to describe or account for. Something happens when Ferrante reduces reality to words; the lines move like a child darting through traffic. How do you translate such forceful, hypnotic expression to the screen? That challenge both shapes and bedevils HBO’s new television adaptation of “My Brilliant Friend,” directed by Saverio Costanzo.

The Neapolitan novels follow Lenu and Lila as they support and compete with each other in a town shadowed by poverty and political strife. Lila is fierce, impossible, and uncanny. “She always did the things I was supposed to do, before me and better than me,” Lenu says. “She eluded me when I chased her, and at the same time, she kept on my heels to overtake me.” Lila, a shoemaker’s daughter, excels at school but quits to help her father at his shop, while Lenu keeps on, applying herself to Latin and Greek. Who will earn praise as a scholar, and who will inspire envy as a wife, and which option is more desirable? These are the questions haunting this first phase of their friendship.

One tenet of the Ferrante critical-industrial complex is that Ferrante’s novels have a dark, fairy-tale quality, as if some mysterious logic were at work beneath the surfaces of things. (“My Brilliant Friend” features a village, an ogre, and magical shoes.) Characters are deep and complicated; their interactions are charged. Everything feels meaningful, but the meanings are slippery and dangerous. “I had the impression that . . . many things, too many, were scattering around me without letting me grasp them,” Lenu says. This intimation of hidden, roiling histories and repressed understandings can seem like the book’s governing sensation.

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On Toronto Star

James Poniewozik – Nov 17, 2018

In 2011, HBO began a series based on a set of books whose legion of fans had exacting expectations. Game of Thrones required condensing a vast narrative, visualizing wonders like dragons’ flight and creating a world that spanned continents.

HBO’s new series My Brilliant Friend, based on the wildly popular Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante, is a different but no smaller challenge. The story of a febrile and rivalrous friendship between two girls in a working-class Italian neighbourhood in the 1950s, it is as intimate as Thrones is sweeping.

The first season, which begins Sunday, is set largely in a single cluster of apartments. Its drama, though punctuated by violence, is interior and inwardly focused. It enfolds warring families and shifting alliances, but in a setting where everyone is packed close and prying eyes and whispers are inescapable.

It is a game of courtyards, stairwells and balconies. But as earthbound as it is, My Brilliant Friend is no less transporting.For readers of the books, it is probably enough to know that the first season, which corresponds to the first of the four novels, sticks close to the source material. For newcomers, that is the story of Elena Greco, called Lenù, and Rafaella Cerullo, called Lila. They form an ardent bond their first year of school, in a dusty, lowrise neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples.

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