Literature with Chléo

Elena Ferrante 
L'amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend)

This book was published in Italy in 2011 by the author Elena Ferrante, whose identity is still a mystery.

This book, the first volume of a homonymous tetralogy, tells the story of two friends from a working-class neighborhood in Naples in the 1950s. Lenú, the narrator, and Lila are both academically gifted, but only Lenú will continue school beyond the compulsory age.

The book mixes macro-history with an almost sociological analysis of the place of women in post-war Italian society with micro-history with the small life of these two families living in Naples.

The child's view of the world, which is cruel, also shows the appearance of adolescence in the second half of the 20th century.

As you read the book, you find yourself oscillating between different readings of this friendship. At times I saw it as a toxic friendship where Lenú is under Lila's control. At other times I saw it as a complicated friendship filled with knots and twists. It is not a roman à thèse, a novel with a thesis but a female perspective on the world.

This woman's view of the world immediately made me think of of the concept of the female gaze theorized by Laura Mulvery (film theorist and feminist). Essentially, the female gaze is the way that woman are portrayed through the eyes of a woman instead of a man. Through the eyes of a woman, woman are seen as people with feelings and intelligence. Indeed, for if Lenú and Lila thought they were rivals, they turn out to be sisters.

One last thing this book shows us is the project of the author Elena Ferrante. In fact, she faded from the public scene with her first novel, where she chose to write under a pseudonym in order to exist only in literature. I find this desire in Lila, an irresolute personality, with a great creative narrative potential, but who is unable to materialize in a written form. On the other hand, Lenú reveals the traps of an impossible writing. Thus both voices search for a potential speech that would meet the canons of a supposed literary validity but collapses with the choice of a minor language, the childish memory.

You can find this book in Pomiechówek's library, and there is also a TV series that was made in 2018.