My Brilliant Friend and I

The first time I read My Brilliant Friend, I was in Cambodia and living in a room in a neighbourhood predominately for factory workers; the blue roofs of the nearby factories could be seen from our street. I remember the heat, the humidity. The whirring of the fan in my room. Next door to me were a trio of nuns from The Little Sisters of Jesus, my reason for moving there in the first place.

The Sisters were part of an order that was predicated, on the one hand, a contemplative life of prayer, and on the other, an engagement with the world. The nuns undertake jobs in factories all over the world as well as other types of low paid manual work, both in solidarity and as a form of witnessing. I had taken a room next to theirs, ostensibly to do my postdoctoral fieldwork research on them and on the possibility of a politics of presence within the context of rapid industrialisation in Cambodia.

On a whim, I downloaded My Brilliant Friend on my iPad and began to read it in my downtime. I had avoided what had been termed as ‘Ferrante fever’ for as long as I could—I usually avoid books recommended by white women that praise ‘female friendship,’ and so was certain that Ferrante’s book would hold nothing for me. Still, I started it. And found that I could not stop.

I was stunned. How could this book, set in 1950s Naples, remind me so much of my own childhood, growing up in a migrant family in the outer western suburbs of Sydney in the 80s?

How did Ferrante’s descriptions of Naples, and of the people who lived in that neighbourhood, ring so true for me, despite coming from a world and a time away?

Our world was like that, full of words that killed: croup, tetanus, typhus, gas, war, lathe, rubble, work, bombard, bomb, tuberculosis, infection.

We lived in a world in which children and adults were often wounded, blood flowed from the wounds, they festered, and sometimes people died.

From its opening pages, the prose (wonderfully translated by Ann Goldstein) evokes vivid but at the same time very precise images of a neighbourhood dominated by poverty, the Camorrists (mafia) and violence. It also evokes the anger that permeates; attacks are countered by further retaliatory attacks; violence is perpetuated by women as well as by men, indeed it is women who ‘were more severely infected than the men,’ because although they ‘appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.’

How did Ferrante’s descriptions of Naples, and of the people who lived in that neighbourhood, ring so true for me, despite coming from a world and a time away?

Violence is suffered not only from outsiders but also from within the family. Lila Cerullo, the titular ‘brilliant friend’ of narrator Elena Greco, is continually physically assaulted by her brother when she refuses to bend to his will over the shoes they are designing, ‘Every time Lila and I met I saw a new bruise,’ and her father throws her out of a window when she demands to be allowed to continue going to school. But Elena recounts this violence not as a sensationalised anomaly, rather it is a component of everyday life in the neighbourhood—the only thing they have always known.

As narrator, Elena gives a brilliant description of what it feels like to live in that neighbourhood:

I felt squeezed in that vise along with the mass of everyday things and people, and I had a bad taste in my mouth, a permanent sense of nausea that exhausted me, as if everything, thus compacted, and always tighter, were grinding me up…

The book is full of these striking descriptions that are at once specific, but also general, dispersed, as if trying to pin down something as intangible as the air around you. Elena’s narration walks a tight-rope between being both diffused and anchored in material reality. This style of writing reflects the themes of the novel: at once a concern with the material world and with the affective experiences that are inextricably tied to it.

This might account for why My Brilliant Friend and the other three books in the Neapolitan Quartet has resonated for so many different people—the experience of feeling stifled by our environments, especially while growing up, is perhaps universal at one point or other in our lives. The suffocation, the narrowing of possibilities, the feeling of compression that Elena feels inside her neighbourhood—it’s something I can certainly relate to.

For a period of time when I was around seven or eight years old, my family moved to a suburb of Liverpool in outer south-western Sydney that was predominately white and working class. Previous to that, and afterwards, we lived in predominately migrant working class areas nearby. We moved to Liverpool precisely at that time because we had been offered a heavily subsidised council house. It was a four-bedroom fibro for our family of six, the fibro painted a garish colour that in my memory lives on as a kind of pastel green. My Dad later told me that we had also been offered a council house in Glebe but that it was smaller so he didn’t take it. Glebe! How my destiny would have been so different if I had grown up in that inner-city hipster suburb.

We were only one of a handful of Asian families in the area, and most people there, like my family, lived in subsidised government housing. In school, I was the teacher’s pet. The only other Asian in my class became my best friend. I remember some of my classmates, all white and working class—Gary, a troubled boy who used to staple his fingers; Chris, who used to pick the wings off a fly; and Michael, who lived on the same street as me, whom the teacher said was so talented, but wasn’t it a shame his parents didn’t care much about his education.

We didn’t stay long in Liverpool. When I was around twelve or thirteen, my family built their own house in neighbouring Fairfield, one of those kit homes, and effectively climbed the social mobility ladder out of the area. My migrant parents were ambitious—we were never going to stay in that council house.

The suffocation, the narrowing of possibilities, the feeling of compression that Elena feels inside her neighbourhood—it’s something I can certainly relate to.

In Ferrante’s book Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, she states that: ‘If we look carefully, we are the destabilising collisions that we suffer or cause, and the story of those collisions is our true story.’ My migrant family’s time in a predominately white working-class suburb was sometimes a story of collisions. But that was only part of the story. Out of the fragments of that collision was a common experience between us, because in their everyday economic struggles these white working-class Australians also experienced a form of rootlessness similar to my family. My time there reminds me how much more I have in common with the white working class than the cosmopolitan circles I am more likely to move in now, people who might live in inner city enclaves like Glebe.

*

What I’m really reminded of when I read My Brilliant Friend, especially in the descriptions of the neighbourhood, is philosopher Simone Weil’s conception of ‘force.’ In her essay The Illiad: the poem of Force, Weil analyses the Homeric war poem:

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force, force that is manipulated by men, force that subdues men, and force that makes human flesh shrink…Force is what makes whoever is subjected to it a thing.

People can only employ and manipulate force, it doesn’t belong to them, even if in their delusions of power they believe it does. The use of force also deforms those who wield it as much as those oppressed by it.

Force is at the centre of the Iliad, a tale about a war; but for Weil, force is also at the centre of the world—indeed it is what rules the world. In My Brilliant Friend, force expresses itself in a range of economic, political and social ways in the neighbourhood that are largely gendered and misogynistic. And those who get hit by force, pass it onto others, in ‘a chain of wrongs that generated wrongs,’ with women and children often at the end of that chain:

Blows were given and received. Men returned home embittered by their losses, by alcohol, by debts, by deadlines, by beatings, and at the first inopportune word they beat their families…

Despite intentions, will and even desire, people’s actions are often influenced by forces external to themselves. In the novel, the local Camorrist and loan shark Don Achille is that force overshadowing the neighbourhood. Feared and despised, he bends residents to his will; Lila calls him the ‘ogre of fairy tales.’ But even he becomes subjected to force, when the tables turn and he is assassinated in his own home. No power is absolute in a person—it simply changes hands.

Weil wrote: ‘To define force—it is that that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.’ The people in Elena’s neighbourhood struggle not to be turned into a thing: by the mafia, by poverty, by misogyny. To do so, they often turn on each other.

And in the middle of it all stands Lila.

*

Is there anyone else in literature quite like Lila? Elena’s best friend since they were young girls, the bond between them is at once competitive and complicit. Lila doesn’t respond in the same way as the others to the operation of force in her neighbourhood. If anything, she is acutely aware of the underdog and those who suffer injustice. When a neighbourhood woman, Melina Cappuccio, the mother of one of their friends, becomes mentally unstable after the death of her husband and then develops an obsession with another male neighbour, only Lila sides with her against the rest of the neighbourhood. It is extraordinary to see a child go against social opinion, itself a form of force. When one of their friends calls Melina a whore, ‘without rancor, but because she was repeating the phrase that her mother used at home,’ Lila immediately slaps her so hard that she knocks her down.

The people in Elena’s neighbourhood struggle not to be turned into a thing: by the mafia, by poverty, by misogyny. To do so, they often turn on each other.

Lila is also a child prodigy—actually more than that, in that she manages to be a prodigy despite her surroundings. At six years old, she has taught herself to read and write, and continually does well in all her subjects at school. But her brilliance is not confined to her intellectual or academic capacities: On rereading the novel, I realise how much interest she displays in others, particularly those looked down upon by everyone else, like Melina. She is curious about the wider world—Fascists, monarchists, the mafia—in a way Elena is not. Her brilliance is being who she is, in spite of neglect, despite being judged for it: ‘Lila was too much for anyone.’

*