“We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.” So Elena Greco, called Lenù by those who know her, describes the adventure that cements her friendship with Raffaella Cerullo, known familiarly as Lina or Lila, a friendship that Lenù will narrate across six decades in the novels of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. The first novel in the series, My Brilliant Friend, is devoted to the girls’ school days and teenage years. It begins with them playing with their dolls and ends—in cliff-hanging form—in the middle of Lila’s tumultuous wedding. The apprehensiveness of childhood—the uncanny allure of dark cellars, the liberating mischief of stone throwing or shouting in a tunnel—is perfectly drawn, as are the classroom rivalries of girls and boys that foreshadow relationships between them that will develop and transform as elementary learning is outweighed by the lure and luck of circumstance.
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