"My Brilliant Friend"

[fiefoe]

"Naples 44'" was an outsider's view of that city, and Elena Ferrante's novel is the inside view, from the bottom. It's rare to see female friendship depicted and chronicled in such a microscopic way.

• Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don’t want to think about the rest. Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now:
• Our world was like that, full of words that killed: croup, tetanus, typhus, gas, war, lathe, rubble, work, bombardment, bomb, tuberculosis, infection. With these words and those years I bring back the many fears that accompanied me all my life.
• But in a confused way I felt that if I ran away with the others I would leave with her something of mine that she would never give back.
• I did many things in my life without conviction; I always felt slightly detached from my own actions.
• For years I imagined the pliers, the saw, the tongs, the hammer, the vise, and thousands and thousands of nails sucked up like a swarm of metal into the matter that made up Don Achille. For years I saw his body—a coarse body, heavy with a mixture of materials—emitting in a swarm salami, provolone, mortadella, lard, and prosciutto.
• but I don’t recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that’s all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.
• It didn’t occur even to Melina. The widow preferred to think that, because of his gentle spirit, he was put upon by his wife, and so she decided to do battle against Lidia Sarratore to free him and let him join her permanently.
• I suppose that that was my way of reacting to envy, and hatred, and of suffocating them. Or maybe I disguised in that manner the sense of subordination, the fascination I felt. Certainly I trained myself to accept readily Lila’s superiority in everything, and even her oppressions.
• Besides, she offered no openings to kindness.
• Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite.
• she was skinny, like a salted anchovy, she gave off an odor of wildness,
• But the most important thing that morning was the discovery that a phrase we often used to avoid punishment contained something true, hence uncontrollable, hence dangerous. The formula was: I didn’t do it on purpose. The conclusion we drew from this convinced us that it was best to do everything on purpose, deliberately, so that you would know what to expect. Because almost nothing had been done deliberately, many unforeseen things struck us, one after the other.
• We showed off our dolls to each other but without appearing to, one in the other’s vicinity, as if each of us were alone. At some point we let the dolls meet, as a test, to see if they got along.
• a lot of dust that thickened amid the tongues of light from the windows.
• tactile dysfunction; sometimes I had the impression that, while every animated being around me was speeding up the rhythms of its life, solid surfaces turned soft under my fingers or swelled up, leaving empty spaces between their internal mass and the surface skin. It seemed to me that my own body, if you touched it, was distended, and this saddened me. I was sure that I had cheeks like balloons, hands stuffed with sawdust, earlobes like ripe berries, feet in the shape of loaves of bread.
• He couldn’t know how undone I felt, how much anguish Tina’s disappearance had caused me, how exhausting the effort of keeping up with Lila was, how the compressed space of the courtyard, the buildings, the neighborhood cut off my breath.
• with us she spoke a scathing dialect, full of swear words, which cut off at its origin any feeling of love.
• Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence. She knew how to go beyond the limit without ever truly suffering the consequences.
• In that last year of elementary school, wealth became our obsession. We talked about it the way characters in novels talk about searching for treasure.
• Trained by our schoolbooks to speak with great skill about what we had never seen, we were excited by the invisible.
• I felt as if she had everything in her head ordered in such a way that the world around us would never be able to create disorder. I abandoned myself happily. I remember a soft light that seemed to come not from the sky but from the depths of the earth, even though, on the surface, it was poor, and ugly.
• “They’re still sending you to study Latin?” I looked at her in bewilderment. Was it possible? She had taken me with her hoping that as a punishment my parents would not send me to middle school?
• And the uneasiness that the discovery of her fragility brought me was transformed by secret pathways into a need of my own to be superior.
• Men returned home embittered by their losses, by alcohol, by debts, by deadlines, by beatings, and at the first inopportune word they beat their families, a chain of wrongs that generated wrongs.
• I ended up with Gigliola in a kind of swamp, we were little animals frightened of our own mediocrity,
• Instead, in her absence, after a slight hesitation I put myself in her place. Or, rather, I had made a place for her in me.
• I soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn’t excite me, only what Lila touched became important. If she withdrew, if her voice withdrew from things, the things got dirty, dusty.
• There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable.