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My Brilliant Friend

My Brilliant Friend

Pages
331
Published
2011

Synopsis

Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo grow up together in a poor, violent neighborhood on the edge of Naples in the 1950s. Elena is quiet and studious. Lila taught herself to read before she ever started school and outpaces every classmate without seeming to try.

Their paths split when Lila's father refuses to pay for school past the elementary grades, so she goes to work in the family shoe shop while Elena continues on with her own parents' grudging support. The friendship survives on rivalry as much as loyalty, each girl measuring her life against the other's.

As teenagers, Lila's looks draw the attention of the Solara brothers, who run much of the neighborhood through money and threat. Marrying young looks like her way out, and at sixteen she accepts Stefano Carracci, a grocer's son. On her wedding day she learns he has struck a deal with the very family she meant to escape.

Elena narrates from old age, prompted by Lila's sudden disappearance, and the telling stays close to the two girls rather than to any single event. It is quiet, character driven literary fiction set against poverty and casual violence, and it opens the four-book Neapolitan Novels.

Authors

A
Ann Goldstein

Ann Goldstein (born 1949) is an American editor and translator from the Italian. She spent her career at The New Yorker, joining its copy department in 1974 and eventually becoming its head. She is best known for her translations of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, and has also translated Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, and other major Italian writers. She won the PEN Renato Poggioli prize in 1994 and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2008.

E
Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist. Ferrante's books, originally published in Italian, have been translated into many languages. Her four-book series of Neapolitan Novels are her most widely known works.