Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante
My Brilliant Friend, and Other Books I first read Elena Ferrante in 2016. My Brilliant Friend. Then came a long hiatus of eight years, until I picked up the three sequels in 2024. This is not a book appreciation post. It is simply a note to myself: I have never read anything quite like this. The story begins with Lila and Elena as mere children, and page after page, follows them through the many phases of their lives. Their paths collide, separate, and converge again. They become wives, mothers, lovers, estranged wives. They build careers, abandon dreams, succeed, fail, and sometimes simply drift. Basically, they live. Fully, messily, imperfectly. At its heart, this is a story about friendship. But Ferrante shows how friendship is never just friendship. It is intertwined with love, jealousy, competition, affection, admiration, resentment, dependence, and sometimes even cruelty. And all of it unfolds against a deeply textured social and political backdrop. Elena becomes a...
