Book Discussion, Saturday, August 6, 2016, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Who is Elena Ferrante?

In one respect, my task this month was a lot easier than in previous months. I didn't have to trawl the internet looking up biographical information about Elena Ferrante. It turns out that "Elena Ferrante" is the pseudonym of a writer who has guarded his/her identity successfully and carefully in spite of wide success in Italy and abroad. In a way, though, that made my task more complicated, because volumes have been written about who this mystery writer might be.

As an intro, here's a video of a woman with a pleasant British accent talking about Elena Ferrante as a writer.



Ferrante has permitted some interviews (via email). I am linking to one from The New Yorker and to a two-part interview from Vanity Fair, part 1 and part 2. There also seems to be more controversy online about the covers for the English translations of Ferrante's Neapolitan novels as there is about the author's real identity. The crux of the controversy is: Why do such serious novels have covers that resemble those of mass-market romance novels? Here is an example of a typical article from Quartz, a business magazine published by Atlantic Media.

Before her four Neapolitan novels, of which My Brilliant Friend is the first, Ferrante wrote two other novels, "Troublesome Love," and "Days of Abandonment," which have been made into movies (in Italian, of course).

Benvenuti a Napoli

The rough neighborhood in Naples where the fictional Elena grows up is as strong an element of the story as the individual characters. The city of Naples was founded  by around 470 B.C. by the Greeks, and it has been under the dominion, variously, of the Romans, French, Spanish, Austrians, in addition to the Italians. It's historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Even the schlocky tourist-trap kinds of districts,  with their narrow cobblestone alleys, shops and stalls at street level, and living quarters (with balconies) above, are thought to be the closest living representation of what an ancient Roman city looked like.

Apparently, New Year's fireworks are still a big deal in Naples. Keep in mind that this is just in a residential district and not any kind of official display.



As in all of Italy, food is an important part of social life in Naples. In My Brilliant Friend, Elena and her friends are constantly going to the local pizzeria. In fact, the oldest known pizzeria in the world is in Naples.

Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba, Founded in 1830

In case you're interested, here's how Neapolitan pizza is made. All you need is a wood-fired oven that gets up to 800+ degrees.



For a little atmosphere, listen to Neapolitan-style music as performed by artists from all over the world.



Naples has it's own dialect, Napulitano, which Ferrante refers to often in My Brilliant Friend. For an idea of how it differs from standard Italian, the table in the middle of this Wikipedia page has the Lord's Prayer in a couple of variants of Neapolitan, a couple of variants of Sicilian, standard Italian, and Latin. You may have wondered if Ferrante actually writes in dialect when a character is speaking in dialect. As Ann Goldstein, Ferrante's one and only English translator explains in the video below, the answer is no.

Michele Zagaria, boss of the Casalesi Clan, arrested in 2011

Naples even has it's own crime mob, the Camorra, as represented by Don Achille in My Brilliant Friend. The Camorra is as old, if not older than the Sicilian Mafia, and more powerful in Europe. It is a much more clannish and horizontally structured organization than the more vertically integrated and hierarchical Mafia. In looking for videos on YouTube, most of them were too gruesome for my taste, but here's a pretty good story told in Vanity Fair.