It took me a very long time until I considered reading anything by Elena Ferrante, particularly because I am very often skeptical when it comes to popular books. In a way, I wished that Ferrante books are receiving the time stamp which make them an reliable and serious literary success.
Many years and published books after, I decided that it is about time to start my own Ferrante adventure. For now, I´ve started with the first book from the Neapolitan Series, My Brilliant Friend, translated from Italian into German by Karin Krieger.
What impressed me from the very beginning was the relatively simple narrative construction, filled in with a story with a strong social accent. It is build around a friendship between two girls, living in a poor Neapolitan neighbourhood in post-war Italy. The country is slowly building up itself, but the wealth is slowly arriving in this part of the country, marked by strong social prejudice, and an outspoken level of aggressivity within families. Children and particularly women are the easiest target of the men/fathers anger, for reasons that may pertain to impudence. For Elena and Lila, the two girls whose voices are reflected into the story either as young girls or as mature women looking back to their childhood episodes.
The friendship between the two girls is build up through hardship of everyday life, their parents efforts to stop them from going to school, their sexual awakenings and desire to settle down, through marriage, relationships with men. In this violent environment, where old grudges from the time of the last war are still persistent, the violence being the answer to a wide range of personal and professional unhappiness. Although it may look despicable, for a very long time, those relationships between children and parents were for a long time predominant, particularly among socially disadvantaged categories.
Both the ambiance and the characters are well built, with an authenticity of their own, that can be easily placed withing a geographic realm and time. For this stage of discovering the Series, it was enough for opening my literary appetite for the rest of the series. Also for reading more by Ferrante, this very popular Italian writer in translation.
Rating: 3 stars
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