My brilliant friend

A brutal but necessary look at the institutions that rule us

I must be honest, when I first started reading My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante's (alias) first novel from the Napolitan Series, I was just as amazed as confused.

While I read the senseless adventures of two friends in a miniscule neighborhood in Naples, and by senseless I mean the nonsensical acts of children to the eyes of an adult, I couldn't help but notice the similarities between their upbringing and that of my grandmother, a Brazilian woman raised in Rio. Still, the reason why an adult woman would dwell on the actions of children for the better part of three hundred pages was beyond me. In the beginning I felt lost, mostly for not being able to relate to a child's mind, something I later discovered. That's when it dawned on me.

To create a relationship that I believe must last for more than a thousand pages (the second book alone is more than four hundred pages long), she had to make me sink into the mind of a child. She had to make me live those experiences, and feel somewhat what children feel: Utterly lost and confused most of the time, for none have the emotional intelligence to comprehend the life of adults around them, only the ability to mimic them. And I found her brilliant for it.

am a part time teacher of children and the fact some of them come to me with certainties astound me. They are obviously thought this. And retrieving the lack of emotional intelligence I have previously mentioned, it is clear to me that their impediment will last longer than their childhood, for when they are confronted with the reality, that is, the fact none of them have any idea what they are talking about, only repeating words and beliefs that not their own, they crumble, often cry and some storm in violence. It is obviously a problem.

"She had to make me live those experiences, and feel somewhat what children feel: Utterly lost and confused most of the time, for none have the emotional intelligence to comprehend the life of adults around them"

Back to the book and its foot on reality, I had to stop and ponder at the lives of the adults portrayed in it. It is an ocean that separates the Napolitan culture of the second half of the twentieth century and my own , yet it is impossible to separate the resemblance of some gruesome institutions, how they play a part in people's lives and how much they still rule the common culture, not only in Italy, but in Brazil and many western countries.

Marriage and the hovering presence of religion are the ones that stand out the most, to me, in the first chapter of Elena's story and how it dictates how a woman is seen, considered and, most importantly, brutalized. And especially the two different paths Lenu and Lina (pardon me my intimacy, but I believe we have something of a history now) take in hopes to break with what they see, of what is expected of them, within their own family nucleus. I will not restrict the shackles of the institutions mentioned to the impact of the women alone. Men, in a more unaware sense, suffer immensely from these expectations, perpetrating behavior and patterns learned from their progenitors, creating a life of chaos and violence around them that is believed to be normal and even expected.

"Marriage and the hovering presence of religion are the ones that stand out the most, to me, in the first chapter of Elena's story and how it dictates how a woman is seen, considered and, most importantly, brutalized."

This woman, whoever she may be, stirred in me feelings that I confess I was not willing to feel at the time I first started reading her novels. I shut her book more times than I care to admit, and the last time it took me two years to pick it back up again. I truly believe that there are books that we just have to put down and go back to only when time is right and my shelves were packed with authors to fill the gap nicely. But when I returned I realized the story was the same, and it was I who had changed. I had matured enough to see within me, as I feel her book are sometimes mirrors of our own reality, and, if not prepared, will be taken over by surprise and scare away from it. That or read them as a simple novel, something to glance over, nothing more, which I believe is a shame. If you are venturing into Elena's world believe me when I say it, the cringing will stop and give way to productive anger, the kind that inspires you in perceiving the world you live in with a harsher but necessary light. And to end with a even more personal note, the final three books, I must say, I have read at record speed.