Published in 2011, this -- the first in a quartet known as the Neapolitan Novels -- is by the author who uses the pseudonym Elena Ferrante.

Writing in 2013, James Wood tells us that Ferrante grew up in Naples, has a classics degree, is a mother, is probably no longer married, and when she's not writing, studies, translates, and teaches -- and that's pretty much all we know... But is any of that right? The literary world is not one to let sleeping dogs lie, and a quick Google search throws up a trail of -- pretty intrusive -- attempts to identify her, and paint her in rather different colours. (See these summaries from 2016, 2018, and 2021.)

I'd never heard of Ferrante until I read a review of Sally Rooney's Conversations With Friends, which compared the relationship between Rooney's Frances and Bobbi with the one between Lenu and Lila depicted by Ferrante in her quartet. Intriguing, I thought...

Anyway, back in February, while we were still on the Isle of Man, I mentioned that I was going to experiment with a language "pairing" (listen in one language, read in another), and had decided to start with My Brilliant Friend.

It was a while before I got round to doing this, the intervening months having been pretty full for various reasons. But I eventually embarked on listening to the original Italian (L'amica geniale, very well read by Anna Bonaiuto), and reading an Indonesian version (Sahabatku yang brilian, translated by Maria Lubis). I swapped methods, depending on what took my fancy. Sometimes I'd start by listening to a chapter, and then read its equivalent. Sometimes I'd reverse that process. Sometimes I'd alternate within an individual chapter.

It took a while to finish, of course. By following this practice, you're effectively covering the book twice. But it was interesting. And I'd definitely have struggled to pick up the detail of the Italian audio without the back-up of the Indonesian text.

You get two bits of paraphernalia with the written text that you miss out on in the audio-version. The first is a quote from Goethe's Faust. I found the Indonesian rendering a bit impenetrable, so I chased up the original German. Rough translation (God speaking): "Man's activity can all too easily slacken off, and he soon becomes fond of unconditional rest; that's why I'll gladly concede to him that companion who stimulates and acts, and must -- as the devil -- create." (Less rough, but somewhat laboured, is John Stuart Blackie's 1880 English verse translation: "For, in good sooth, the mortal generation,/ when a soft pillow they may haply find,/ are far too apt to sink into stagnation;/ and therefore man for comrade wisely gets/ a devil, who spurs, and stimulates, and whets."

So, you're on notice from the beginning: There's some sort of Faustian pact involved here. Meghan O'Rourke says of My Brilliant Friend: "Never has female friendship been so vividly described. But the friendship is also highly metaphorical... It is never in question who is the devil and who is the man searching for his level; but Lila is as much a genius demon or presiding spirit as she is a devil. This is a central concern of Ferrante’s: the way a female genius is demonised by culture, the way that, lacking an outlet, it may turn demonic. If these terms seem old-fashioned, well, so be it: Ferrante’s imagination is highly classical."

The next thing the text provides you with is a list of characters. Take a screenshot, because you're going to need to keep referring back... There are many families in this working-class Neapolitan neighbourhood, and they all have many offspring, and it's a challenge, at least initially, to remember who is who. The key players are the Greco family, including Elena (the narrator, who is also called Lenu or Lenuccia), and the Cerullo family, including Raffaella (aka Lina or Lila).


Bari, 2019. Due east of Naples... Occasionally, our protagonists visit the Neapolitan equivalent of smart areas like these, but not often...

I'll start with a couple of observations on the Indonesian translation before I discuss the actual book.

It's always problematic in a translation to know what to do with culturally specific references. Do you just leave it to the reader to Google what s/he doesn't understand? Or do you use some sort of explanatory apparatus (footnotes, endnotes, or a glossary)? Or do you gloss everything in the actual text?

Personally, I'm for the first route. If readers don't understand an unfamiliar term, then they can usually barrel on through, and it probably won't matter much. If they're curious, they can look it up for themselves. My next preference would be the second option: Take all the unfamiliar concepts and put them in notes or a glossary, for readers to use if they want. In this translation we have one footnote to explain the Italian Christmas folklore figure of Befana. Mostly, however, the translation goes with that third option, which is my least favourite: Original Italian word plus an explanation in Indonesian that somehow takes us out of the text, and puts us on the sidelines... The carabinieri, "the national military police", for example. Or spumante, "a kind of Italian sparkling wine". Or sorb apples, "a kind of small sour brown fruit". Conversely, for more difficult concepts that actually do have a bearing on the novel's theme (the Gracchi, the Camorra...), we get no help at all...

The most bizarre example of all this is not cultural but socio-historical, when the text attempts to explain "punch cards". Whereas the Italian just refers in passing to "the end of the sixties, the era of punch cards", the equivalent Indonesian passage labours along with "the late sixties, the era of punch cards [the term is rendered in English] -- rigid cards that contained commands for controlling automated machines or data in data processing applications". Seriously??

Occasionally, the Indonesian version leaves out bits. Because I have no written Italian text, it's hard to know how often that happens. And I found it odd that book titles (Little Women, Heart, and so on) -- which are rendered in Italian in the original text, regardless of their language of provenance -- are translated into English in the Indonesian version.



Another interesting issue is the Indonesian rendering of the Italian "plebe" (pleb, plebeian, commoner, riffraff), which we first come across when the girls' teacher, Maestra Oliviero, warns Elena to distance herself from Lila Cerrullo. I'm not really qualified to judge, but I think it's pretty difficult to translate this word. I've followed the English translation of the book, which uses "plebs". I think this is more pejorative than the Italian original, but then Maestra Oliviero is clearly using it pejoratively...

The exchange in Italian translates roughly like this:

"Do you know what the plebs are, Greco?"
"Yes, the populace, the tribunes of the plebeians, the Gracchi brothers."
"The plebs are quite a nasty thing."
"Yes."
"And if someone wants to remain a pleb, then he, his children, and the children of his children deserve nothing. Forget Cerullo, and think of yourself."

In this first exchange on the subject, "plebe" is rendered in Indonesian as "kasta terendah" (the lowest caste), which adds an additional (and not totally appropriate) set of connotations:

"You know what the lowest caste is, Greco?"
"Yes, commoners, the lowest caste tribunes are the Gracchi."
"The lowest caste is a disgusting thing."
"Yes."
"And if a person wants to remain in the lowest caste, then he, his children, and the children of his children don't deserve to receive anything. Forget Cerullo, and think of yourself."

As if itself dissatisfied with that rendering, the Indonesian translation reverts to the English word "plebs" when Elena, almost at the end of the book, when we're at Lila's wedding reception, recalls Maestra Oliveria's question: "You know what the plebs are, Greco?"

The Indonesian text then repeats the English word as Elena answers the question from her current perspective: "At that point I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when she asked me years earlier. The plebs were us. The plebs were the battle for food and wine [at the wedding], the quarrel over who should be served sooner and better, the dirty floor on which the waiters went back and forth, the people making toasts with vulgar swearwords. The plebs were my mother, who had been drinking wine, and now was leaning against my father’s shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, as he listened to the sexual jokes of the metal dealer."



Which is a good segue into what the book is about... Elena is our narrator throughout, and as she tells us in the Prologue, she's looking back several decades to tell the story of her lifelong friendship with Lila. Her motivation for writing is that the adult Lila has disappeared. Without trace. Cut by this extraordinarily complete exit, and driven by a kind of one-upmanship, almost a desire for revenge, Elena decides to document their life together. If Lila believes she can disappear, she thinks, then I will prove her wrong; she will continue to exist in my narrative.

In the story Elena subsequently tells, class is an important element. By the time we've reached that scene at the wedding, Elena doesn't know where she belongs. Like Lila, she's 17. But Elena is still at school, whereas Lila -- though extremely bright -- left years ago because her parents couldn't afford the fees. That was the first parting of the ways. Education puts these women onto divergent paths.

Looking round at the wedding reception, Elena feels she no longer belongs with these people -- with the exception of Nino, a clever but awkward and introvert young man whom she's covertly very fond of, and Lila herself, an auto-didact who is quick to get her mind around anything, but who has chosen a path that is likely to keep her embedded in the neighbourhood. The wedding is the second parting of the ways. As James Wood observes: "My Brilliant Friend is a bildungsroman in mono, not stereo; we sense early on that Lila will stay trapped in her world, and that Elena, the writer, will get out... [The book ends] with Elena watching the horizon, and Lila being watched by Elena. One girl is facing beyond the book; the other is caught within its pages."



The neighbourhood we're talking about is in the outskirts of Naples, and the main part of the story starts in the mid-1950s. It's a poor locality, and poverty goes hand in hand with violence. There's domestic violence; there's inter-family violence; there's sexual harassment; there's Mob-inspired violence (usually the source of any riches that might be apparent); there's a constant background noise of coarse words and insults; there's an ongoing sense of combat where the survival of the fittest is the dominant theme: "That was how life was. Really, that's how it was -- we grew up with the task of making things difficult for others, before they made things difficult for us." A kind of desperation grows from poverty and hopelessness, and it sparks fights, feuds, and vendettas.

Class is also marked by language. When characters use standard Italian (as opposed to Neapolitan dialect), this fact is specifically mentioned in the text.

Life is very confined for most people. Parents are too short of time, money, and inclination to take their children out anywhere. So it's a red-letter day when Elena's father takes her on a little excursion: "We spent that whole day together, the only one like that in our lives, I remember no other."

When, as teenagers, five of the neighbourhood's young people go out together, there's a real sense of rich and poor as they wander the more prosperous streets of the city. And of course the outing ends in a fight... When the young people are out and about together, there's always the looming possibility of male violence. Men are much higher in the pecking order than women. They call the shots; they make the rules. And wherever they are, they're loose cannons. You find yourself desperately looking for a hero among the males. But Donato Sarratore -- who you think is going to be a role model, someone who has risen above his working-class background to write poetry and even get it published -- turns out to be a lothario and a child molester... Rino, Lila's brother, is mercurial, petulant, and increasingly hard to manage. And Stefano, whom Lila marries -- she says she loves him, but we suspect it's more to do with getting rid of the bothersome Marcello Solara, and raising her status on account of Stefano's (albeit dubiously acquired) wealth -- starts out looking promising, but by the time the book ends, we have real doubts as to whether this marriage is going to work out...



So this is all a fascinating backdrop. But the truly inspired thing about My Brilliant Friend is its account of the relationship between Lila and Elena.

Lila is always the figure that Elena looks to, the foil she measures herself against. Lila is courageous, defiant, and stubborn. She can't be intimidated; she never holds back. She can also be downright destructive, manipulative, and nasty.

She's indubitably smart, and taught herself to read and write even before she started primary school. When Elena carries on with her schooling while Lila has to leave, the latter does her best to keep up, borrowing books from the library, and teaching herself Latin and Greek. When Elena initially doesn't perform that well, Lila actually spurs her on, and helps her to study. But then she realizes she can't compete -- or rather that her competition is not advancing her in any way. So she chooses to throw herself into the shoe business that is run by her father and brother, Fernando and Rino. She starts to design shoes, which she proposes they hand-make (thereby enhancing what was originally a shoe repair workshop).

Lila sometimes experiences a strange perception disorder, where things lose their boundaries. She also has a haunting guilt complex: "I make people do the wrong thing."



Elena, on the other hand, is the "good girl". As a child she feels that sticking close to Lila, even when her friend is perverse and violent, will somehow keep her safe. The other female figure in Elena's life is her mother, who is also her bugbear. Her mother squints and limps, and Elena finds her somehow repulsive and frightening, while recognizing from her current vantage-point that she was also downtrodden and abused. The always-fascinating and soon-to-be beautiful Lila, on the other hand, is constantly at the centre of some drama, while figuring out ways to take control of her circumstances.

Despite her admiration, Elena is often hurt by Lila. And often jealous of her. There's a constant rivalry between them -- and yet there's mutual need. They exploit each other, yet respect each other.

As Sarah Chihaya says: "I think one of the things that’s so interesting about this book is that we’re supposed to interrogate what friendship is. Because friendship is not nice -- a lot of the time."

There's a very poignant little exchange When Elena arrives to help her friend get ready for her wedding. Lila not only expresses doubts about getting married, but also encourages Elena to carry on studying. When Elena says that school will finish in two years, Lila replies: "Not for you, you're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, men and women." This is interesting, because up till now, we have assumed that the "brilliant friend" of the title is Lila -- the preternaturally intelligent Lila, who always seems to hover somewhere above her environment.

O'Rourke succinctly encapsulates the fascination of this strangely symbiotic relationship: "The two girls are almost inverses of each other, and for Elena this can be damaging; she begins early on to define herself by the absence in her of Lila’s qualities. The two girls fall in love with books. They decide they will write a novel together to become rich (and escape their impoverished neighbourhood). Instead, Lila writes one on her own -- The Blue Fairy -- in which the young Elena recognises, already, the blueprint of genius. In it is the voice that Elena will try to channel for the rest of her life, as she struggles to become a writer and to find her way in an upper-middle-class world, where she meets girls whose effortless confidence and style set them ineluctably apart from her and Lila... If the Neapolitan novels lack some of the focus of the early work... they raise fascinating questions about female creativity: is it somehow social in nature? What does it mean to absorb another’s voice? Is this an act of silencing, of plagiarism, or a way of honouring that friend?"

So, at the end of the book, we're poised on the brink. A big shadow -- in the shape of Marcello Solara, scion of the neighbourhood's most powerful family -- has already fallen across Lila's marriage. And Elena is unsure of the way forward, but feels herself called to leave her neighbourhood.

I definitely need to read the next part. Probably just in Italian, though...