"My Brilliant Friend"

[fiefoe]

Lenu's advances in her school is like the leveling up of a character in a game, probably the most uplifting thing in the story. With all other changes, danger lurks.

• In other words everything was quivering, arching upward as if to change its characteristics, not to be known by the accumulated hatreds, tensions, ugliness but, rather, to show a new face.
• Instead, she shrugged in her careless way, she had changed her idea of Little Women. “Now,” she explained, “to become truly rich you need a business.”
• Justice was not served by violence? Hadn’t Signor Peluso killed Don Achille?
• I, however, was overcome with amazement. On a single day I had attracted the attention of a young man like Pasquale, a new school had opened up before me, and I had discovered that a person who until some time earlier had lived in the neighborhood, in the building across from ours, had published a book.
• she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.
• I wanted her to be curious, to want at least a little to share my adventure from the outside, to feel she was losing something of me as I always feared losing much of her.
• Outside he behaved with a sociability, a relaxed courtesy, that at home he almost never had.
• Ah well. Naples, he said, had always been like that: it’s cut down, it’s broken up, and then it’s rebuilt, and the money flows and creates work.
• Was it possible that only our neighborhood was filled with conflicts and violence, while the rest of the city was radiant, benevolent?
• life ahead, exposed to the mutable fury of things but surely triumphant: I, I and Lila, we two with that capacity that together—only together—we had to seize the mass of colors, sounds, things, and people, and express it and give it power.
• Would she always do the things I was supposed to do, before and better than me? She eluded me when I followed her and meanwhile stayed close on my heels in order to pass me by?
• soon she would lose completely her air of a child-old woman, the way a well-known musical theme is lost when it’s adapted too fancifully.
• something had begun to emanate from Lila’s mobile body that the males sensed, an energy that dazed them, like the swelling sound of beauty arriving.
• Lila made a gracious skip of consent, clapped her hands happily. At the same moment, four males, of various ages, each convinced in a different way of his own absolute power, reached out toward the figure of a fourteen-year-old girl.
• He said things that we weren’t capable of understanding. He said that the Bar Solara had always been a place for loan sharks from the Camorra, that it was the base for smuggling and for collecting votes for the monarchists. He said that Don Achille had been a spy for the Nazi Fascists,
• there are no gestures, words, or sighs that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that human beings have committed and commit.
• I would have been content even with one from the class above mine, the main thing was that he should wear long pants.
• She said, “When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.”
• And they thought that what had happened before was past and, in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too.
• The glittering fury of the city slowly faded, died out, letting the sound of the cars, the horns emerge. Broad zones of dark sky reappeared.
• Now it seemed that money, in her mind, had become a cement: it consolidated, reinforced, fixed this and that. Above all, it fixed Rino’s head.
• It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me: the fear that, in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance.
• The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face: it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it had the vivid orderliness that I imagined would belong to conversation if one were so fortunate as to be born from the head of Zeus and not from the Grecos, the Cerullos.
• She wrote, in the last pages, of feeling all the evil of the neighborhood around her. Rather, she wrote obscurely, good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn. Marcello, if you thought about it, was really a good arrangement, but the good tasted of the bad and the bad tasted of the good, it was a mixture that took your breath away.
• wealth that existed in the facts of every day, and so was without splendor and without glory.
• When you saw her, she gave off a glow that seemed a violent slap in the face of the poverty of the neighborhood.
• she seemed to have discovered the joy of dipping into the inexhaustible well of her beauty, and to feel and show that no shape, however beautifully drawn, could contain her conclusively, since a new hairstyle, a new dress, a new way of making up her eyes or her mouth were only more expansive outlines that dissolved the preceding ones.
• I knew—perhaps I hoped—that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again.
• But for six years now I had also been following daily a path that they were completely ignorant of and in the end I had confronted it brilliantly. With them I couldn’t use any of what I learned every day, I had to suppress myself, in some way diminish myself. What I was in school I was there obliged to put aside or use treacherously, to intimidate them.
• 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.