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Childhood: Chapter 11
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
Though Lenù and her schoolmate Gigliola Spagnuolo receive many more offers of affection from the boys in their class, Lila receives no male attention at all. She is unpopular, mean, and prickly. The only boy who shows her any sort of interest is Enzo, who one day brings her a bouquet of sorb apples. Lila insists she doesn’t want them. Enzo tells her that in that case, she should take them home and throw them away there. On the way back to their building, Lenù declares that she likes sorb apples as a test to see if Lila will give the apples to her. Lila, however, doesn’t offer them to Lenù and instead brings them home, where she hangs them prominently in her window.
This short chapter encapsulates the competing superiority and jealousy that Lenù feels toward Lila. As Lenù and her friends become interested in boys, Lila seems to shirk the idea of romance—yet she holds onto the bouquet given to her by Enzo, the very same boy who hurled rocks at her just a short time ago. Love and violence, this passage shows, are inextricable in the world of the novel—and as Lila and Lenù grow up, they’ll have to learn how to navigate these overlapping concepts.
Themes
