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Prologue
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Brilliant Friend, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Female Friendship
Masculine vs. Feminine Violence
Women’s Work
Poverty, Social Climbing, and Sacrifice
The Uses of Community
Love, Sex, and Strategy
Summary
Analysis
Elena writes that her friendship with Lila began on the day they walked together up the stairs toward the apartment of Don Achille, a fearsome “ogre” of a man and the neighborhood loan shark in the girls’ small village on the outskirts of Naples, Italy. Elena, who was called Lenù as a girl, remembers watching the intrepid, fearless Lila “test [her] courage” each afternoon by sticking her hand into manholes, jumping from windows down the street, and sticking safety pins into her fingers. Whatever Lila did, Lenù did too, desperate to keep up with her brave friend.
By interweaving the story of climbing the stairs to Don Achille’s apartment with other scenes of daily life in the neighborhood of her childhood, Elena creates an atmosphere of dread, escalation, and terrifying but unspoken power dynamics. She shows that as a young girl, she was willing to follow Lila into unthinkable situations—even at great cost to herself.
Themes
On the afternoon, Lila decides that they need to go to Don Achille’s; Lenù is terrified. She has been taught that Don Achille must be avoided at all costs—Lenù and her family don’t even speak of Don Achille and his family out of a mixture of deference and fear. Lenù pictures Don Achille as a fearsome golem “created out of some unidentifiable material”—yet in spite of her fear, she follows Lila up the staircase toward Don Achille’s door.
This passage makes clear how terrifying the unspoken rules of Lila and Lenù’s neighborhood are. The girls have been taught to fear Don Achille, but they don’t understand that because he runs the financial ins and outs of the neighborhood, he is fearsome to their parents in a way that is much more practical than the “ogre” or golem-like fantasies that the girls have made up in their heads.
Themes
On the fourth flight, Lila “unexpected[ly]” pauses and waits for Lenù to catch up with her. When Lenù reaches her, Lila extends her hand. Lenù points to this moment and gesture as the moment which “forever” changed things between the two girls, solidifying the nature of their friendship.
Throughout the novel, Ferrante will examine how Lila and Lenù’s bond is based on a mutual tendency to emulate each other’s actions and experiences—this passage is the start of that transactional relationship.
Themes
