6. My Brilliant Friend – Elena Ferrante

Update: I hope everyone had a lovely and restful break, and that you’re all looking forward to The Goldfinch next week. I must confess, between all the mince pies and mulled wine of the holiday period, I forgot all about updating this post. I’m adding an article here which Henny has sent me, and which sheds a bit of light on the Goethe quote which opens the novel and on Goldstein’s role as a translator. If there’s anything else you’d like me to add to the post, please do say in the comment section. Unfortunately, my memories of our final session have become a bit hazy, so I’m struggling to summarise it! 

Anita Raja’s Five Fab Simple Steps to Literary Success

1. Tell, don’t show! Why waste your time on overly complicated imagery or subtle nuance? Your reader loves nothing more than when you list events dispassionately, so that your plot resembles a Wikipedia entry or a recipe book.
2. Forget punctuation! Understanding semi-colons and how to demarcate speech was just another hoop your secondary school wanted you to jump through for no reason. Why waste your energy, when commas and full stops will give your reader a general idea of what you meant?
3. The more characters, the better! Don’t worry about fleshing them out fully, or ensuring they have their own plot arc, or that they link to the protagonist in any meaningful way. Go for something a bit like the album cover to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club – a handful of characters worth remembering and then a bunch of other cardboard cutouts that can give your story the illusion of colour and variety.
4. Make it over 1000 pages long! Everyone loves doorstop epics, particularly the literary fiction crowd. And if they don’t, you can just chop it into quarters and it’ll look exactly like four ordinary books!
5. Refuse to engage in any way with the media celebrity machine. No Twitter account. No book tours. No discussion of your inspiration. No building of NAPLESMORE.COM, where fans can take a test to discover if they’re a Lena or a Lila*. Just no.

*bonus mini tip: make your two protagonists names almost identical!

So – before I rip my MA in Creative Writing into tiny pieces and set it on fire – can someone please tell me why the Neapolitan Series is:

a) a commercial success (1.2 million copies sold and counting); a 32 part TV series in production

b) a critical success (shortlisted for the International Man Booker 2016, praised by Zadie Smith, James Wood and various other members of the literary elite)

c) such captivating, compelling reading?

Of course, not all of our group agreed. Some found MBF boring, plodding and badly written (mostly for the reasons mentioned above). Others found it enjoyable but light – good for a holiday read but not much more. Others – myself included – were completely caught up in Ferrante Fever. So the question remains. What is is that Ferrante is doing right?

Passing the Bechdel Test with flying colours

I mentioned the Bechdel Test  in a previous post, and Pat mentioned it this week in relation to My Brilliant Friend. I’d definitely recommend reading into the Bechdel Test, but the basic idea comes from this 1985 comic by Alison Bechdel:

Only about half of all films pass the Bechdel Test. None of the original Star Wars trilogy or the Lord of the Rings trilogy pass, and nor do many children’s films, from Finding Nemo to The Little Mermaid. More recently, the Bechdel Test has been used to critique books too. Authors from A.A.Milne to Donna Tartt have been accused of presenting female characters as plot devices or accessories, included only to advance or act as a feature of a male character’s narrative arc.

You could open My Brilliant Friend up at almost any page and prove that it passes the Bechdel Test. The book is jam packed with girls discussing politics (Lena’s article), creative aspirations (Lila’s shoe design) or business plans (Lila’s plans for her shoe design). Of course there is romance, sex and marriage in between, but Ferrante has certainly tapped into something here: young girls are interested in a lot  more than boys and fashion, and the female market that Ferrante has apparently appealed to may well be drawn to the complexity of her female characters. It is realistic – but nonetheless rare in fiction – that Lena and Lila’s passions stem from their relationship with one another, and their desire to form an authentic self, not from the more stereotypical female drives portrayed in film and literature: to be married and to find love. In this respect, the symbolism of Lila’s shoe could be interpreted as an ironic spin on the traditionally female fascination with fashion. Lila doesn’t want to wear a pretty shoe: she wants to create a perfect prototype, then make money from it.

A Portrait of Italy’s Political History

One of the criteria we have discussed in terms of prize winning literature has been historical/geographical value. Many of the books we have looked at – The Sisters Brothers, Sweet Tooth, The Gathering – as well as many recent prizewinners – Wolf Hall, A Brief History of Seven Killings – have been celebrated for accurately or creatively representing a particular historical moment. My Brilliant Friend – and the Neapolitan Series as a whole – are certainly effective in their rich evocation of the shifting political and economic landscape of Naples (and Italy as a whole, as the series develops) following the Second World War.

Mu’s presentation gave us a much better overview of this than I am capable of, and you can read that by clicking here.. But – in short – many of the group were interested in the references to the dialect of Naples (Italian as a unified language was a new concept, since Italy itself was only unified in 1861), and to the presentation of the violence, poverty and patriarchal attitudes of the region, and their relation to the post-war era.

In our second class, we discussed Anita Raja (the recently exposed true identity of Elena Ferrante), and her right to anonymity. On one hand, we agreed that Raja is entitled to her privacy, and that her work should speak for itself. Just as George Eliot and Curer Bell before her, On the other hand, we discussed the fact that the name ‘Elena Ferrante’ is famous and respected enough that the books can’t entirely speak for themselves, as much as they might like to. Not only do they add intellectual clout to the works (on account of Ferrante’s critically acclaimed earlier works) but they arguably add an air of autobiographical authority. Although Raja did grow up in Naples (and has spent most of her life in Rome), the name ‘Ferrante’ undeniably sounds more Italian to the average bookshop browser.

 

Further Reading

• Click here to download the handout from our session.