My Brilliant Friend: The International No. 1 Bestseller (Neapolitan Quartet, 1) Paperback – 11 Oct. 2012

I've come late to Ferrante, I know, but I adored this book. In precise, clear prose, it tells the story of two girls and their entwined lives in a small, poor Neapolitan neighbourhood in the years just after WW2 till what must be 1960. Drawing on a literary tradition of girls coming-of-age (I was reminded, particularly, of Antonia White's Frost in May quartet), it traces the fragile, febrile and sometimes hidden lives of girls becoming women and their negotiations with a patriarchal world, with questions of education, with boys, sex and marriage. Layered onto this is an acute depiction of locale: the volatile, macho neighbourhood where a group of families live in close proximity, magnifying friendships, frictions and enmities.At the heart of the book is the friendship of Lila and Elena, the narrator, one which stretches across their lives. From the start, it's a relationship that moves along a spectrum of intense bonding and difference, though however far apart they move, something always keeps them connected. Given that they are just 16 when this book ends, small events are treated with detail and are given emotional resonance within the context of these lives.Only at the end does Elena's viewpoint pan out as she assesses her place as both a member of this tight community and as someone somewhat alienated from it by her extended education (though Ferrante is astute enough as a writer to complicate even this positioning of Elena as the 'educated' and Lila as the 'unintellectual' one): 'The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts'.Ferrante's writing isn't striking or beautiful on a sentence by sentence level (possibly something to do with the translation) but it is clear, clean and precise. One of the things I loved most about this book is the reticence of surface emotions and the way what we feel emerges from the interstices of the text, from the things that aren't said: at points, I was physically anxious about what was going to happen to characters, especially Lila and her brother Rino.So a deceptively straightforward text that has no narrative tricks, no great revelations or twists or time-switches: it relies, instead, on immaculate, masterfully-crafted story-telling.

What can one say? ... after so many gushing words have been lavished on the (pseudonymous) author and her four-part series set in Naples: 'an unconditional masterpiece', 'a riveting examination of power', 'brutally, diligently honest', 'the truest evocation of ... friendship between women I've ever read', 'Ferrante will blow you away'.My Brilliant Friend is the first book in the series, taking the narrator, Elena Greco, and her fearless friend, Lina Cerullo, from childhood in the 1950s to the nubile age of 16 in the 1960s.Elena, the town-hall porter's daughter, is a clever, quiet girl in thrall to her mother. At school, she is in awe of Lina, the shoemaker's daughter who outshines everyone in the old-fashioned class tests with an icy and effortless ease. Even more impressive is Lina's quick mastery of every situation, passionate and daring, holding a knife to the throat of a son of the feared local mafioso when he disrespects Elena.Like Jane Austen, Elena Ferrante writes with precision and fluidity about small-scale, dramatic neighbourhood relationships, in which the development of the narrator's own self-awareness is the part-hidden core of the tale. Like Austen, the main characters, for all their intelligence, are emotionally impetuous. Like Austen, Ferrante tells us little of the environment in which the story takes place - though it is a time of huge social and economic change. As with Austen, the backdrop to Ferrante's world is one in which women (and most men) are powerless - but the heroines are cleverer than the men.Apparently small gestures - refusing to dance with a boy, or entering her father's shoe-making premises to help her brother - can be decisive moments.However, unlike the novels of Jane Austen, with Elena Ferrante everything is revealed. We are privy to the fears and desires of the narrator as we are plunged into the turmoil of a teenage friendship, in which a competitive and envious edge vies with a slightly unbalanced, almost cold admiration. The girls, Elena and Lina, are passionately close allies against a hostile world, rather than affectionate friends - and in this, I venture, Ferrante paints a true portrait of many a girl-girl friendship. The boys, for the most part, are leagues behind in the relationship game - and, as someone once said, we never really catch up.One can have quibbles with My Brilliant Friend. For example, the superhero nature of Lina is overdone, as when she teaches herself Greek from a dictionary; or when, with virtually no prior experience, she designs a sophisticated wonder-shoe. More tellingly, for this reader at least, the relentless focus on the daily emotional twists and turns of the teenage group, unleavened by humour or by any sense of greater purpose except biological, can become cloying.However, there is a lingering undercurrent of unease, hinted at early on when we learn from the older Elena - who is recounting the story as a kind of memoir - that decades later Lina has disappeared. And by the end of this book, Elena the narrator realises that she wants to move beyond her stifling neighbourhood and everyone she knows, including Lina. But will she be able to?This straightforward and unsophisticated story is a joy to read. It is a real page-turner, because it is so well-written (and well-translated), so emotionally focused and because its intensity makes the ordinary extraordinary. However, the drama is limited to the relationship between the two main characters, and I am not interested enough to want to read the rest of the series - but this may just be me.