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 well-respected writer, but the Neapolitan Novels are never simply about her career or her journey as a writer. The central thread remains the complicated, consuming relationship between two friends who spend their lives trying to understand, compete with, escape, and find their way back to one another.

But there is so much more. The tumultuous relationship between Elena and her mother stayed with me. It begins with rejection and misunderstanding, but slowly moves towards acceptance, recognition, and, eventually, an embrace of each other.

Many of the other relationships in the story carry the same tension between acceptance and rejection.

Maybe that is what life really is.

We are all products of our surroundings — our families, our neighbourhoods, our circumstances, the people who shape us. But what we ultimately become is not simply what we are given. It is also what we choose to make of it.

And perhaps that is what Ferrante captures so beautifully: a life is not one straight path. It is made up of choices, contradictions, attachments, departures, returns, and all the people we become along the way.