I read and enthused about My Brilliant Friend, the first of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, back in September.

Since then, I've had a lot more involvement with this quartet. To date, in chronological order:

1. I watched Season 1 of the HBO television adaptation.
2. I read the second volume in the series.
3. I watched Season 2.
4. I watched Season 3.
5. I'm in the process of listening to the third volume.
6. I don't currently have access to Season 4 of the series, but I'll certainly read the final volume.

Having ended up with quite a long post about the first one, I'd originally planned to write a portmanteau post covering the rest, as I did with The Cazalet Chronicles. But then I realized it would be a monster, ridiculously unwieldy. So, I'll break it down into individual volumes.

First, though, I need to backtrack, in order to add a couple of notes on the television version of My Brilliant Friend.


Milan, 2019. Elena doesn't make it here until the end of the second book

Remember that I knew this text pretty well, having effectively covered it twice -- alternating listening in Italian with reading in Indonesian. So I was impressed by the faithfulness of Saverio Costanzo's adaptation (due in part, no doubt, to the collaboration of Ferrante herself on the script).

The eight episodes reportedly involved some 150 actors and 5,000 extras and a 14-block, purpose-built set, thus constituting "one of the largest television productions to have ever been filmed in Europe". (Whenever I watched these early scenes, I was appalled by the sheer quantity of dust on the streets. Every passing vehicle introduced an asphyxiation hazard. Was this how it really was...?)

The series garnered plenty of plaudits. Lisa Allardice, for example, speaks of "a TV adaptation that is truly sympathetic to its female characters and to the novel on which it is based". Emily Nussbaum likens its approach to that of "a caring translator who will illuminate but won’t impose".



But, of course, these are different media, and neither can replicate the other. It's not long before you become aware that things that are ambivalent in the book lean more obviously towards a specific interpretation in the series.

As Katy Waldman puts it, the TV adaptation takes a set of events and attempts to "slick them into a satisfying dramatic arc", whereas the book leaves things much less clear-cut. She continues: "Ferrante’s books are originals. A portion of their contradictory, elusive energy is lost without the psychological precision that literature makes possible."

This is also related to the question of point of view, which is projected much more subtly in the novel than on the screen. For Nicole Clark, "The novels are radical because the reader sees everything through Elena’s eyes..., and what happens in real time is less important than how these events shape her life and influence her relationship with Lila... The HBO adaptation is, instead, structured around very literal events happening in the town... We end up with a show about what goes on in Lenu’s life, rather than a show about how these events feel."

Nussbaum agrees, although she doesn't necessarily see that as less impactful: "In the book, we are aware at all times that we are reading a novel written by Elena -- and we also know that, outside this frame, we are reading a book by the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante, an author who, like Jo [in Little Women], conceals her identity. That wobbly frame of authorship, and the nagging anxiety about who gets to tell the story, is what drives Ferrante’s four-volume series." It's obviously difficult to convey that complexity on screen. "The book is a meditation on the intellectual outcomes of childhood trauma, an unfolding map of minds changing; the show, so focussed on the body, feels as if it were happening now."

As Nussbaum points out, though, the visual medium also gains in places. She gives as an example the incident where the girls read Little Women together: "The scene is dramatic, or maybe just specific and sensual, in a way that the version on the page can’t be, and really doesn’t try to be. There’s no dialogue in the book, no chest-pounding, no description of the girls’ clothes, and no quotes from Little Women. Ferrante’s book confides more than it describes -- that’s both its technique and its insinuating power."



The other thing the series can do more easily than the book is the language. In the novel, we are told when the characters are speaking dialect (a much better approach than trying to transcribe it, only to end up with something incomprehensible or even offensive); my audiobook version also stuck more or less to standard Italian, with perhaps a bit of a Naples accent here and there.

In the series, though, there's a lot of dialect. This is absolutely not a show I could have watched without subtitles... According to Justin Davidson, Neapolitan dialect "is impenetrable to an outsider from, say, even a few dozen miles away". But it's hugely significant. Costanzo uses "gradations of dialect to delineate class, reveal the characters’ psychology, and propel the plot". In the 1950s, when the novel opens, the only ones to speak Italian in the neighbourhood would have been people like teachers and librarians. Elena's journey away from this mode of speech -- from the dialect of her early years to the crisp Italian with which she answers the phone at the beginning -- is an important part of her overall trajectory.

Some quick final comments. The characters looked pretty much as I'd imagined them (maybe Stefano was a tad more chunky...); the Italian coast looked wonderful; and I liked the music (though Nussbaum didn't).

Overall, then, a great complement to the book.