My Brilliant Friend: Who Lives the Life Taken from the Other?

Geoffrey Chen

100 Works of World Literature · Article 100

# My Brilliant Friend: Who Lives the Life Taken from the Other?

Elena Greco, now in her sixties, hears that her lifelong friend Raffaella Cerullo—Lina to everyone else, Lila to Elena—has disappeared. Lila removes her clothes and cuts herself from photographs as if erasing every trace. Furious at this perfect disappearance, Elena sits at a computer and begins their story. My Brilliant Friend opens as a contest over narration: Lila deletes; Elena fixes her in memory.

The story returns to a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of 1950s Naples. Two girls grow within violence, debt, inherited feud, and narrow education. Lila learns with astonishing speed and surpasses the class; Elena is diligent, cautious, dependent upon approval, and always measures herself against Lila. They throw dolls into feared Don Achille’s cellar, confront him together, and buy Little Women with the money he gives them. Friendship is no gentle shelter. Fear, competition, imitation, and mutual propulsion constitute it.

After primary school, Lila’s shoemaker father refuses further study and throws her through a window when she persists. Elena proceeds to middle school, Latin, and high school; education and language slowly carry her beyond the neighbourhood. Lila directs invention into shoes designed with her brother Rino, but male family, capital, and marriage control execution. Violent, wealthy Marcello Solara pursues her. She turns to grocer Stefano Carracci, hoping marriage and business will hold the Solaras back. At the wedding Marcello appears wearing the shoes Lila made and Stefano promised to protect. Volume one ends when betrayal becomes visible.

The first volume, not a complete life

  • Author: Elena Ferrante, the pen name of an Italian-language writer.
  • Italian title: L’amica geniale, published in 2011.
  • English edition: translated by Ann Goldstein and published by Europa Editions in 2012.
  • Series: first of the four Neapolitan Novels, followed by The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child.
  • Time: chiefly from the girls at about six to Lila’s marriage at sixteen, framed by disappearance in later life.
  • Place: an unnamed postwar Neapolitan neighbourhood, with school, central Naples, and Ischia as partial outside spaces.

Do not import the later volumes as explanation for everything. The wedding is no final account of either life. It closes this volume’s first division of childhood, education, and class route.

Why begin with disappearance?

Lila does not merely leave home. She cancels her archive: clothes, photographs, traceable things. She turns the feared dissolution of boundaries into strategy, refusing continued definition and consumption.

Elena writes to preserve and retaliate. She violates her friend’s wish while insisting that shared history is not Lila’s alone to remove.

There is no innocent memorialist. The Lila available to readers is loved, envied, misunderstood, and reconstructed by Elena.

Elena narrates Elena

The narrator and pseudonymous author share a first name, producing autobiographical pressure without converting fiction into testimony. Time, viewpoint, motif, and suspense are composed.

The shared name sharpens an internal question: who writes whom? Elena becomes an author by writing Lila; Lila behaves like an unavoidable co-author and critic.

The more useful inquiry is not real identity but how female friendship becomes a source of knowledge and form.

Dolls in the cellar

Elena throws Lila’s Nu into Don Achille’s cellar; Lila responds by throwing Elena’s Tina. Attack becomes invitation: if you hurt me, we will face fear together.

The cellar holds imagined monsters, debts, and lost objects. They descend and fail to find the dolls, but convert terror into joint action.

Later resonances of a lost child should not erase the first volume’s immediate pattern: injury, replication, alliance.

Don Achille

Children imagine the neighbourhood powerbroker as an ogre. Adults know money, debt, and fascist-era entanglement.

When the girls demand their dolls, he gives them money. They cannot tell whether it is compensation, dismissal, or acknowledgement, and they use it for books.

Feared power accidentally finances literary ambition. No upward movement in the neighbourhood has an uncontaminated economic source.

Why Little Women matters

The girls reread it and seize upon Jo earning money by writing. They plan to produce a book together and escape poverty.

It reveals female creation as economic value, though its American household cannot simply transfer to Naples.

Lila writes The Blue Fairy early; Elena becomes the eventual writer. Talent, sustained schooling, and publication are three different distributions.

Is Lila cleverer?

As a child she seems self-taught in reading, calculation, language, and invention. Elena worships and fears the speed, often interpreting her own learning as pursuit.

But intelligence is not measured under equal conditions. Lila works in fragments around family labour; Elena learns duration, examination, and credential through school.

The novel compares what ability becomes when it enters different social channels, not two isolated brains.

Maestra Oliviero

The primary teacher recognises both girls and presses their families towards entrance examinations. She advocates for Elena through sternness, favour, and class judgement.

After Lila leaves school, Oliviero increasingly treats her as waste or decline and fails to honour The Blue Fairy. The institution that makes one girl visible deletes another.

A teacher can open a door and cannot independently alter household income or patriarchal decision.

Why Lila cannot continue

Middle school requires fees, books, and time withheld from labour. The Cerullos rely on shoe repair; Fernando sees no return in educating a daughter.

The refusal is gendered investment as well as poverty. Future craft is concentrated in Rino; Lila’s mind must prove immediate usefulness to the family.

Fernando throws her from a window. Educational sorting is enforced upon an injured body.

Why Elena can

The Grecos are poor too; her father is a porter at city hall, and her mother resists prolonged schooling. Teacher advocacy, limited paternal support, Elena’s compliance, and contingency open the path.

Opportunity is not effort alone. Family, judgement, examination, and luck participate.

Because the path feels revocable, Elena pursues marks and fears every failure will expose her as an impostor.

Friendship as competition

Lila’s imagined lead drives Elena through Latin, books, and examinations. Elena’s institutional achievement confronts Lila with the road denied to her.

They exchange knowledge and also conceal, test, belittle, and use. Competition does not prove friendship false; scarcity makes simultaneous success hard to imagine.

The deepest intimacy includes precise knowledge of how to wound.

Who is the brilliant friend?

Readers assume Lila because Elena narrates and Lila displays stunning ability. Before marriage Lila tells Elena that she is the brilliant friend and must become the best of all.

The title reverses. Lila transfers an interrupted educational desire to Elena and may extend herself through Elena’s future.

“My” expresses love and possession; “brilliant” offers praise and assignment. Each creates the other.

The neighbourhood as a world

The children barely understand geography beyond it; central Naples feels foreign. Surnames, debts, and inherited resentment form a cosmos in which parental history locates each child.

Poverty limits transport and imagination; dialect marks belonging; violence disciplines crossing.

When the girls attempt to walk to the sea and turn back, departure is exposed as requiring time, money, permission, and an imaginable route.

Fascism after fascism

The republic has arrived, but wealth and enmity formed under war and fascism persist. Don Achille, Solara power, Peluso accusations, and revenge keep the period inside daily life.

Children hear political insults without categories while living within debts those histories made.

History determines who owns shops, who is hated, and whose intimidation police will overlook.

The Solaras

Marcello and Michele combine car, money, and neighbourhood fear. Modern consumption travels with old coercion; courtship, credit, and partnership are difficult to refuse.

Marcello’s pursuit is not romantic persistence. He disregards rejection and uses gifts, family pressure, and public presence to narrow choice.

Their strongest power is the community’s growing conviction that business with them is inevitable.

Why Stefano resembles a new era

Don Achille’s son presents as gentler than the fathers. He runs a grocery, invests in Cerullo shoes, and tries to settle an old conflict with the Pelusos.

Lila also chooses him to escape Marcello. Marriage and enterprise appear capable of converting invention into income and safety.

Yet the gentler man controls capital and legal identity. If her designs exist through husband and brother, autonomy has no institutional protection.

The shoes

From drawings and materials, Lila and Rino make a men’s pair. Shoes make genius tangible and suggest equipment for walking away.

They are costly and size-bound; markets do not automatically reward creation. Stefano’s finance and Solara networks become necessary, and men compete for control.

Lila damages her hands making shoes and cannot decide who wears them. Separation of maker from product condenses her adolescence.

The wedding undoes the fairy tale

At sixteen Lila’s dress and banquet perform ascent from shoemaker’s daughter. She requires Stefano to exclude Marcello; he agrees.

Marcello arrives wearing the prototype. Stefano has transferred her creation and boundary to the Solaras for commerce or peace among men.

Fairy-tale shoes identify the true bride. Ferrante’s identify marital betrayal. Marriage combines economy, masculine alliance, and bodily control instead of resolving them.

Elena’s view at the wedding

She envies Lila’s beauty, money, and adult position while recognising marriage as enclosure. Nor can education yet feel like secure victory.

Elena watches Lila watching Marcello’s shoes. This layered gaze reminds us that we never receive Lila directly; we interpret Elena interpreting her face.

The recognition is powerful but not omniscient. The volume stops before consequences unfold.

Dialect and Italian

Neapolitan dialect governs neighbourhood life; standard Italian belongs to school, books, and central authority. The Italian novel usually narrates in standard language and reports when dialect is spoken, so social effect often carries difference.

Elena acquires standard Italian, Latin, and literary expression as passports outward and begins to feel shame about accent and family.

Lila develops linguistic force without credentials and continues to shape Elena. Certification and verbal creativity are not identical.

Bodies under public judgement

Puberty places the girls differently within public appraisal. Elena’s weight, skin, breasts, and menstruation produce shame; Lila shifts from sharp, thin child to a young woman men claim the right to pursue.

The body is not a neutral vessel. Food and hygiene are classed; male attention converts development into danger; dress and marriage display rank.

Ferrante refuses the elegant montage and records pain, awkwardness, and disgust.

The Ischia summer

Away on Ischia, Elena encounters sea, leisure, and wider company. Closeness to Nino Sarratore suggests a cultural life beyond the neighbourhood.

Nino’s father Donato assaults her at night. An adult source of care becomes threat, and Elena departs with confusion and shame.

Outside is not automatically free. Class boundary loosens while gendered power follows.

Why Nino is idealised

He reads, talks politics, and rejects his father’s frivolity. Elena projects education, love, and escape upon him.

She knows him incompletely, and Lila’s ability to attract his attention returns friendship to competition.

Idealisation reveals Elena’s need for an image of elsewhere, not Nino’s fitness to embody it.

Antonio and class direction

Antonio Cappuccio shares Elena’s origins, cares for her, and carries poverty and his mother Melina’s crisis. Elena dates him while comparing him to Nino.

She wants familiar desire and safety and fears fixation within the neighbourhood.

This is not merely the wrong boyfriend. Mobility turns intimacy into a decision about class direction.

Mothers as feared futures

Elena sees her mother’s limp, harshness, and domestic exhaustion as a future to avoid. Melina breaks down after Donato leaves; other women fight within poverty and male violence.

Girls treat mothers as negative destiny before understanding their constricted choices. The narration retains adolescent cruelty.

Adult retrospection gradually restores these women to social history rather than grotesque background.

Everyday male violence

Fathers strike children, brothers control sisters, boys throw stones, and husbands beat wives. Violence seldom disrupts order; it enforces it.

Girls learn moods, escape routes, and alliances. Intelligence serves bodily survival as much as examination.

Patriarchy exceeds a villain. Apparently decent, weak, or progressive men can use structural power when interests change.

Is Elena reliable?

She confesses envy, vanity, and malice, which supports trust without making memory objective. She composes childhood decades later and may place later understanding inside early scenes.

Lila resists fixing. Elena claims to know her thoughts and then admits conjecture. Unreadability drives the narrative.

Reliability asks not only whether an event occurred but why it receives this arrangement now.

Dissolving margins

Lila sometimes experiences the outlines of people and things losing stability, familiar reality disintegrating into frightening matter. The first volume associates this with fireworks and transformations in Rino and the neighbourhood.

It may evoke anxiety, trauma, bodily perception, or social collapse, but retrospective diagnosis can silence Lila’s own vocabulary.

The experience also describes the novel: self and friend, family and individual, maker and work do not remain cleanly separate.

Poverty and imagination

Poverty shortens time. Children must work or marry early; households cannot invest in uncertain talent; injury and failure lack cushions.

Wealth appears as shoe, car, television, and banquet, tangible but attached to debt, monopoly, and violence.

Elena’s education and Lila’s design both seek delayed return. School supports one; the other must be commercialised immediately.

Writing liberates and possesses

Books promise income and eventually help Elena leave a social position. Language preserves neglected lives and places female experience at literary centre.

But the book begins by violating Lila’s wish for erasure. Elena converts secrets, body, and failure into her work.

Authorship remains morally compromised. To narrate can express love and seize final interpretation.

Do not romanticise Lila

She is not proof that genius needs no school. Her life demonstrates how badly ability needs time, resources, and protection.

Marriage is not punishment for ambition. Under narrow options she designs an escape from Marcello and poverty; structure and misjudgement both contribute to failure.

Nor is she only Elena’s muse. Lila has creation, terror, and a desire to erase even when narration cannot fully return her voice.

Do not dismiss Elena

Jealousy does not invalidate friendship. The admission of ugly feeling is more truthful than idealised sisterhood.

Education is not simply betrayal of origin. It creates distance and remains a vital resistance to prescribed life.

Lila’s pressure benefits her and produces durable self-doubt. Mobility leaves her insecure on both sides rather than moving her neatly between identities.

Two growth lines and a third

For Elena track teacher, school, language, examination, and travel. For Lila track self-teaching, The Blue Fairy, labour, shoes, proposals, and negotiation.

At each point ask who pays, who permits, and who owns the result. Character and institution then appear together.

Also mark what they exchange—book, idea, secret, judgement, fear. Friendship itself is the third development line.

Why the ending compels continuation

The wedding shoe compresses creation, labour, male capital, class ascent, observation, and betrayal into one image. Consequences have not begun, yet promise has broken.

The disappearance frame tells us that decades later Lila still contests being recorded and defined. Every choice acquires a long echo.

The suspense is not only what Stefano will do, but how the two women remain propulsion and wound in one another’s lives.

Why it matters now

Education is still narrated as personal striving while housing, income, school resources, language, and gender distribute its possibility. Lila and Elena make marks inseparable from opportunity.

Creative work is still produced by those without credit or capital and controlled by investors, platforms, relatives, or partners.

Most radically, the novel makes female friendship—not an interval between romance and family—the principal relation through which a person understands self, class, and history.

Conclusion: brilliance is not private property

The novel repeatedly misidentifies its centre. Elena owns narration and Lila generates its force; Lila seems the genius and gives the title to Elena; school selects one girl while the other shapes her thinking from outside. Achievement and loss cannot be settled separately.

The neighbourhood contracts life into early labour, marriage, and dependence upon powerful families. Elena follows education outward through shame, imitation, and fear of exposure. Lila moves from self-teaching to shoe and marriage; at the wedding her creation is already on the feet of the man she rejected. Neither road is pure freedom and neither substitutes for the other.

In old age Lila tries to vanish and Elena answers with a novel. We receive a testimony of love and an act of possessiveness. The brilliant friend may be the one who reveals another possible life, makes you travel further, and leaves you wondering how much of that life is yours. Ferrante does not reconcile the contradiction. She makes it a form large enough for women’s experience to occupy world literature.

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