My Brilliant Friend

“We’ll see who wins this time, I said to myself. I turned on my computer and began to write—all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory.” 

This excerpt introduces the lifelong competition between Elena and Lila: when one of them wins, the other will lose. However, the aging Elena’s real battle may be against memory. Some things she will surely forget. 

“Nu and Tina weren’t happy. The terrors that we tasted every day were theirs. We didn’t trust the light on the stones, on the buildings, on the scrubland beyond the neighborhood, of the people inside and outside their houses. We imagined dark corners, the feelings repressed but always close to exploding.” 

Elena and Lila project their own fear and suspicion of the neighborhood onto their dolls. Even their childhood games offer no escape from the harsh reality of an impoverished neighborhood, full of violence and intrigue. 

“I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don’t recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad.” 

Reflecting back on her childhood, Elena can judge that she and Lila grew up in difficult, even dangerous circumstances. However, at the time, the conditions they endured seemed nothing out of the ordinary. 

“One of the terrible scenes from my childhood begins with the shouts of Melina and Lidia, with the insults they hurl from the windows and then on the stairs […] and ends with the image, for me still unbearable, of the two neighbors rolling down the stairs, entwined, and Melina’s head hitting the floor of the landing, a few inches from my shoes, like a white melon that has slipped from your hand.” 

This visceral image of a woman’s head hitting the floor represents the bitter fight-to-the-death attitude of the women who are arguing over Donato Sarratore. The simile of a head being like a melon introduces the idea that poor, mentally unstable Melina is as fragile and disposable as a comestible. 

“Her cheeks flushed, the sign of a flame released by every corner of her body, and for the first time I thought: Lila is prettier than I am. So I was second in everything. I hoped that no one would ever realize it.” 

Even in childhood, Lila and Elena’s intense sense of competition encompasses all aspects of their lives—not just lessons, but also their physical bearing, especially as females, in the world.

“Fathers could do that and other things to impudent girls. Afterward, Fernando became sullen, and worked more than usual [...] the shoemaker wouldn’t even look at his daughter as long as her arm was in the cast.” 

After throwing Lila out the window, as Fernando Cerullo, shaped by a patriarchal neighborhood that reinforces his power, feels entitled to do, he is remorseful. However, rather than apologize for his violence, he copes by ignoring the injured Lila. 

“Suddenly she seemed small, smaller than I had ever seen her. She was three or four inches shorter, all skin and bones, very pale in spite of the days spent outside. And she had failed. And she didn’t know what the blood was. And no boy had ever made a declaration to her.” 

When Elena begins menstruating, while Lila remains childish and undeveloped, she believes she has moved ahead of Lila in the game of growing up. Lila’s smallness, accompanied by her failure at school, makes her less threatening. The polysyndeton—the repetition of the word “And”— emphasizes the long catalog of Lila’s failures. 

“If she wasn’t busy in the house or shop, I saw her talking now with this girl, now with that. I passed by, greeted her, but she was so absorbed she didn’t hear me. I always caught phrases that seemed to me beautiful, and they made me suffer.” 

Elena’s fascination with Lila and her manner of expression continues into adolescence, but the girls are separate now because Lila no longer goes to school. Lila knows the effect of her stories on Elena, so she keeps them from her friend. The suffering that Elena endures as a result of Lila’s use of language comes full circle later in the narrative when, after helping Elena with her article for the publication, Lila suffers as a result of Elena’s linguistic virtuosity.

“Maestra Oliviero [...] presented herself at my house without warning, throwing my father into utter despair and embittering my mother. She made them both swear that they would enroll me in the nearest classical high school.”

Maestra Oliviero’s visit causes Elena’s working-class parents to panic. They are embarrassed and cowered by their poverty in the face of the teacher’s middle-class status, and they allow Maestra Oliviero to encourage a scheme that they do not themselves understand. 

“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. But I also realized, with pleasure, that, as soon as she began to do this, I felt able to do the same, and I tried and it came easily.” 

Elena admires Lila’s storytelling gift, her ability to make the everyday occurrences of their lives fascinating. Elena’s ability to do the same is either a result of a shared talent or a symbiotic creative relationship between her and Lila: They are able to complete each other’s projects.

“While Lila was dancing, the Solara brothers arrived. [...] First, like masters of the neighborhood, as they felt they were, they looked in a vulgar fashion at Ada, who avoided their gaze [...] finally they noticed Lila, stared at her for a long time, then whispered to each other, Michele giving an obvious sign of assent.” 

When the Solara brothers arrive at Gigliola’s rock and roll party, they demonstrate their superior status in the neighborhood by intimidating a succession of people in the room. They begin by debasing lowly Ada, whom they once forced into their car and possibly raped, and finally fix their sights on the prize girl at the party, Lila. The possessive stare and the sign of assent indicate their intention to, once again, control the situation.

“She questioned me about the subjects I had for the day, what I had studied, and wanted precise answers. If I didn’t give them she besieged me with questions that made me fear I hadn’t studied enough [...] I had the impression that, as usual, I was sacrificing the warm deep sleep of the morning to make a good impression on the daughter of the shoemaker rather than on the teachers in the school for rich people.” 

Elena continues to regard Lila as a standard of learning and scholastic endeavor, regardless of the comparative high status of her schoolteachers. 

“It was like crossing a border. I remember a dense crowd and a sort of humiliating difference. I looked not at the boys but at the girls, the women: they were absolutely different from us.” 

When Elena and the other young people from her neighborhood visit a different zone of the city, on Via Chiaia, it is like entering another country inhabited by wholly different kinds of people. Elena realizes that not everyone is impoverished.

“She shook her head energetically. ‘I don’t even want him to touch them.’But she was as if overwhelmed by her own extreme reaction. Her lower lip trembled, something that never happened.” 

Lila displays a rare moment of vulnerability as she reveals the loathing and repulsion she feels towards Marcello Solara. She feels a sense of violation at the mere thought of Marcello touching the shoes she has so lovingly labored over. The trembling lip also demonstrates Lila’s youth and sensitivity, regardless of the tough front she puts up. Finally, this incident highlights the severity of Stefano’s betrayal when he gives Marcello the handmade shoes at the end of the book. 

“So I knew how to swim. My mother really had taken me to the sea as a child [...] I saw her in a flash, younger, less ravaged, sitting on the black sand in the midday sun, in a flowered white dress, her good leg covered to the knee by her dress, the injured one completely buried in the burning sand.” 

While away for the summer on the island of Ischia, Elena recalls a distant memory of a younger, more enthusiastic version of her mother. Up until this point, she has disbelieved her mother’s tales about the past, and she begins to think that there is more to her mother than she realizes.

“I thought that I finally had a story to tell that Lila could not match. But I knew immediately that the disgust I felt for Sarratore and the revulsion I had toward myself would keep me from saying anything.” 

Elena’s satisfaction at having a story equivalent to Lila’s tribulations is diminished by the shame she feels about Donato Sarratore’s sexual assault. Her silence is also a symptom of her struggle to comprehend both his behavior and her body’s response. 

“Every face, every street had a sick pallor [...] The people, the buildings, the dusty, busy stradone had the appearance of a poorly printed photograph, like the ones in newspapers.” 

Returning to the neighborhood after her stay in Ischia, Elena is hit by the harsh reality of life there. Complexions of “sick pallor”, especially in the summer in Southern Italy, seem anomalous and almost ghostly, while the analogy of the poorly printed photograph suggests that the neighborhood is a shoddy copy of a healthy community. 

“There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you’ll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is?’”

Lila’s energetic speech on the chaos of the world and, more particularly, her small neighborhood world, presents a godless universe. With her powerful rhetoric, she diminishes Elena’s achievements in her theology course. This speech also informs the argument Elena later launches at her religion teacher and the article she writes for publication. 

“After talk and more talk, they had decided by mutual consent to rise a step above the Solaras, above the logic of the neighborhood.”

After Marcello spreads the rumor that Lila regularly gave him blow jobs, Lila and Stefano decide, against the logic of the neighborhood, to ignore the Solaras rather than to seek revenge. For Elena, this is indicative of Lila and Stefano’s superiority, their determination to present a nobler mode of behavior. 

“‘The beauty of mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn’t find an outlet, Greco, and it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and it will be as though she never had it.’” 

Maestra Oliviero’s scathing comment on how Lila has wasted her talents by not finding an appropriate outlet highlights the precariousness of the soon-to-be-married 16-year-old’s predicament. Oliviero notes how the current graceful state of Lila’s body is transient and that soon there will be nothing left of the original, prodigious Lila. 

“Stefano proposed Venice, and Lila, revealing a tendency that would mark her whole life, insisted on not going far from Naples.” 

Lila’s choice of a honeymoon destination close to home, rather than in a glamorous, exotic Northern Italian city, indicates the visceral nature of her ties to the neighborhood. From Elena’s retrospective view, this act of choosing not to leave when she had the option to, seals Lila’s fate for life.

“‘You’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.’”  

The novel’s title, the epithet “my brilliant friend,”is the term Lila uses to characterize Elena, rather than the other way around. This is unexpected since Elena is the first-person narrator—and because she continually places Lila’s natural talent above her own achievements, which are earned only through intense study. The brilliance, which each of the girls could apply to the other, indicates how their dynamic of encouragement and competition binds their fate and cements their mutual desire to be exceptional. 

“The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth , those increasingly vulgar toasts.” 

At Lila’s wedding, Elena looks around with contempt at the people she has grown up with. She judges them with Maestra Oliviero’s definition of plebs. They are engaged with base, bodily matters such as ingestion, drinking, and sexual jokes.