#L’amica geniale

[epifaniacintilante]

“Relationships between women don’t have solid rules like those between men,” says the Italian author Elena Ferrante. “I was interested in recounting how a long friendship between two women could endure and survive in spite of good and bad feelings, dependence and rebellion, mutual support and betrayal.”

[theancientmar1ner]

no one has ever described girlhood like elena ferrante. the expectations. the inherent dissatisfaction, with your body, with who you are, or rather who you’re becoming. the competition. being the centre of your universe, viewing everyone pretty much exclusively in relation to yourself. learning not to. beautiful and in sparkling prose and not overly romanticised. i am so emo abt my brilliant friend rn. Elena Ferrante the woman you are.

[printempsdessens]

The Story of the Lost Child Chapter 27: Compromises

[foolsonthehills]

lenu understanding nino by repeatedly being like who wouldn’t love lila is so insane when you go to a few pages back and she always sees nino as someone akin to herself. she loves nino because of what being with him could mean for her, what potential she can unlock, as if he’s her but a few steps ahead. and she doesn’t reproach him for kissing and loving lila. it’s literally her saying she would’ve done the same. who wouldn’t have? it’s only natural to love lila.

[juneblogs]

it had never occured to me there are people who watched the same show and read the same book series as me who’ve come out of it believing lila doesn’t genuinely love enzo. thinking her choice to enter a relationship was out of necessity, since she knew enzo was more than fond of her. or that because motherhood was difficult for lila, her pregnancy with tina must not be an earnestly made decision. and that it was enzo’s way of ‘taming’ her… horrible, horrible.

how incredibly insulting to both lila and enzo.

[kafkaesquegf]

my dealer: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called “My Brilliant Friend” 😳 you’ll be zonked out of your gourd

me: yeah whatever. i don’t feel shit.

5 minutes later: dude i swear i just saw my loved ones lose their concrete forms and be reduced to abstract manifestations of their basest instincts

my buddy Lila pacing: the Solaras are lying to us

[maxdibert]

Sometimes a family is you, your childhood friend with whom you maintain a toxic, sapphic-tinged codependency, her partner who used to throw rocks at you as kids but turned out to be the only decent man you’ve known in your lives, the good-for-nothing son from your friend’s first marriage, your daughters from your first marriage to the man you cheated on with the father of your third daughter, and the youngest daughter of your friend and her life companion. Welcome to The End of the Nuclear Family with Lenù Greco and Lila Cerullo by Elena Ferrante.

[pristina-nomine]

Thinking about L’amica geniale in relation to Wuthering Heights, and how much it denies any catharsis that comes from repetition. WH brings the whole thing full circle, by repeating the same patterns in the second generation - but having Heathcliff’s death allow Cathy 2 and Hareton to be together, and Heathcliff himself be reunited with Catherine in some kind of way. In My Brilliant Friend we see Tina and Imma as their mothers' 2.0 version. But then Tina vanishes and the repetition pattern goes off the rails. Her intelligence won’t be allowed to flourish and express itself; Imma will never have a lifelong Brilliant friend. Elena loses Lila, and they will never be reunited.

[giyuko]

i love having the eye to see snoopy everywhere because it made me realize the coincidence of lenù being at the newsstand when the linus edition was the "oh, lila, tu mi farai impazzire!!" one...

[reginaphalange2403]

They’re everything to me if you even care

[epifaniacintilante]

Lena is a complex character, obscure to herself. She takes on the task of keeping Lila in the net of the story even against her friend’s will. These actions seem to be motivated by love, but are they really? It has always fascinated me how a story comes to us through the filter of a protagonist whose consciousness is limited, inadequate, shaped by the facts that she herself is recounting, though she doesn’t feel that way at all. My books are like that: the narrator must continually deal with situations, people, and events she doesn’t control, and which do not allow themselves to be told. I like stories in which the effort to reduce experience to story progressively undermines the confidence of she who is writing, her conviction that the means of expression at her disposal are adequate, and the conventions that at the start made her feel safe.

(Elena Ferrante)

[theancientmar1ner]

Lenù just makes my chest hurt. I can’t explain it properly but sometimes when she’s narrating her inner thoughts it makes me cry a little even if it’s nothing too sad. just the sense of confusion, and being unable to put together all the pieces of your life and make sense of them, unable to plan ahead. it feels so murky and it’s so painfully relatable. I think part of growing up is the element of control - over pretty much everything. what you eat, what you wear, what you say, how you look, how you present yourself - and when you’re young, it’s sort of a massive destabilising part of your life yknow, it’s a real source of insecurity, feelings of inadequacy and real profound sadness, aimlessness - because no matter what you do you’re not really in control, so how can you know that you’re really yourself, that you know who you are at all?

I also think (and really hope) that as you get older, that feeling will fade. Slowly, sure, but what better time to learn who you are than when you are finally a person in your own right? Finally in control?

I hope to see her learn what SHE cares about, what she likes and what she wants from the world - not what Lila wants, or what she thinks is the right thing to go along with. I can understand her, i’m not saying at all it’s wrong or silly of her - It seems to me that wanting to feel caught up with the people you love, in the same place and on the same path is the safest and most natural thing for a teenager to want. I hope that as time goes on she will realise what she wants from life is hers to define, and hers to take.

I haven’t got so far in the book or in my own life to say this for sure - but i’m excited to see Lenù grow into herself, truly. It gives me hope.

[printempsdessens]

Lila and Lenu - My Brilliant Friend

[folkloristico]

whoever was in charge of this casting deserves a raise a kiss on the check and my unconditional love

[iheartrockmusic]

Nino “I couldn’t stop talking about myself for five fucking seconds so I got a child kidnapped” Sarratore

[20th-century-gothic]

i’m sorry but lila cerullo is so ace & non-binary coded