{"id":6469,"date":"2017-03-28T07:07:29","date_gmt":"2017-03-28T11:07:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6469"},"modified":"2017-03-28T07:07:29","modified_gmt":"2017-03-28T11:07:29","slug":"my-brilliant-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6469","title":{"rendered":"****My Brilliant Friend"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"My

photo: SherryRose, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By Elena Ferrante \u2013 Innate stubbornness perhaps delayed my reading of this smash literary hit, Book One of Ferrante’s four “Neapolitan novels,” and I read it now only because my book club selected it. I couldn\u2019t get past the cover, where The New York Times Book Review<\/em> is quoted saying \u201cOne of the great novelists of our time\u201d and The Sunday Times<\/em> says, \u201cElena Ferrante has established herself as the foremost modern writer in Italy\u2014and in the world.\u201d So much hype must surely propel expectations to unreachable heights.<\/p>\n

A lot to live up to.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read it now, and it is lovely. Not four books\u2019 worth of lovely, perhaps, but I am glad I read this first one. (My book group members who have read on have mixed views about the experience.) It is the story of two young girls, Lila and Elena, up to and mostly through their adolescence. The writing, in translation from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, is vivid and perceptive. An example:<\/p>\n

\u201cChildren don\u2019t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The book\u2019s most memorable feature for me is the strong sense of time and place\u2014a claustrophobic neighborhood outside Naples shortly after World War II. The intermingled families that live there demanded a list of characters, and the one in the front of my copy is well-thumbed. How this community weathered, survived, and felt about the war never featured prominently, perhaps because of the child\u2019s sensibility expressed in the quote above. Yet, it\u2019s hard to believe the war experience wasn\u2019t an almost-physical presence in the characters\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n

There are other holes in my understanding as well. Because Elena is the book\u2019s narrator, the reader has less access to Lila\u2019s quirky\u2014and likely more interesting\u2014consciousness, and her character never came into sharp focus for me.<\/p>\n

Ferrante has been coy about her true identity<\/a>, and speculation about who actually writes her books is rife. Given that \u201cElena Ferrante\u201d is a made-up name, why did she assign her narrator, a would-be writer, the same name? Are we to believe this is quasi-memoir? That decision seemed unnecessarily obfuscating and mildly annoying.<\/p>\n

Bottom line: Well worth reading at least this first book. After that . . . ?<\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Elena Ferrante \u2013 Innate stubbornness perhaps delayed my reading of this smash literary hit, Book One of Ferrante’s four “Neapolitan novels,” and I read it now only because my book club selected it. I couldn\u2019t get past the cover, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****My Brilliant Friend - lovely book, but four of them? Not for me.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[61,366,40,126],"tags":[911,912,910],"class_list":["post-6469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-character","category-drama","category-fiction","category-reading-2","tag-elena-ferrante","tag-my-beautiful-friend","tag-naples"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Gl","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6469"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6471,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6469\/revisions\/6471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}