#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

[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.

[carsonsmccullers]

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.

[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

[ophelianwater]

lenú and donna and how they defined part of their self in relation to lila and laura. lenú tries to free herself from that whilst donna, even more after laura's death, dissolved herself into laura - the relationship with james being the prime example.

[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...

[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

[maxdibert]

In this house, we support mentally unstable women who’ve been shamed for not fitting into traditional standards of femininity, who’ve had enough of the oppressive society that treated them like spoiled brats just for not keeping it together, and who’ve decided to say screw it all and give in to their rage and violence, doing whatever it takes to get revenge or rise above those who dragged them through the mud.

[reginaphalange2403]

They’re everything to me if you even care

[jessmalia]

gonna go ahead and post my elenanino playlist even though it feels unfinished since i just started the third book tonight

(song suggestions are welcome by the way!)

[folkloristico]

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

[carsonsmccullers]

lenu greco and paul mccartney have a lot in common like they’re obsessively in love with their much more “brilliant” friend that doesn’t seem to try at all and is born just greater, they want to escape the poverty and mediocrity of their parents in any way necessary and while living between people that deep down never respected them because of the class difference, they also get chastised for betraying their roots by the people who were left behind