Elena Ferrante’s novels have one element in common: they emerge from within. Buried stories surge to the surface due to the writing style, and maintain a burst of energy on the page and a concomitant solemnity that infects and shocks the reader.
Now it’s time for a new Nepolitan story, which promises to be the first of a series. It is called The Brilliant Friend and begins with a disappearance, that of a Signora Lila. It is her son, Rino, a forty-ish do-nothing, oblivious to what’s going on around him, who realizes after 15 days that his mother is missing. He decides to call his mother’s closest friend, Elena Greco, who has been living in Turin for many years.
Elena, the first-person narrator, immediately realizes that Lila’s disappearance was necessary and for a long time Elena was expecting it. Elena asks Lila’s son to look into his mother’s closets, and he discovers to his amazement that she has taken everything away, leaving absolutely nothing behind.
This is the premise, the emptiness, that compels Elena to sit down at the computer and calmly (digging deep into her past) reconstruct the story of her friendship with Lila. The story takes us back to an impoverished suburb of Naples, separated from the rest of the city and its rich neighborhoods, just as Little Italy was separated from affluent New York .
We are in the fifties: Elena is the daughter of a bailiff and Lila of a cobbler. For a while they study and play on opposite sides of the courtyard, and then their friendship is cemented by their decision to go to the most feared man in the neighborhood, the usurer, Don Achille, a real ogre right out of a fairy tale.
The Brilliant Friend flows from the soul like an eruption from Vesuvius. It stops with the marriage of sixteen-year-old Lila to the owner of a delicatessen shop, the son of the usurer, Don Achille. The flashback ends exactly fifty years earlier from the point where the narrative began.
or a closer reading: From this point to reach the end of the story, where the narrative began, there is a gap of exactly fifty years.
List of revisions and changes:
My strategy was to make a fluent translation yet try to keep the content and the style of the review as close to the original as possible.
i romanzi = novels
have in common an element (awkward syntax ) = have one element in common
they come from within = ‘emerge’ reflects better coming to the surface
due to the writing= ‘writing style’ because it is the way the story is written that makes such a strong impression on the reader.
solemnity = I don’t exactly know what the ST meant by it , so I did not change it.
lo impressiona = impresses him = I found this translation too lame after a strong verb like ‘infects’
To notice the disappearance……. = I completely rearranged this sentence and I combined it with the following half sentence. I start the sentence with her son Rino and cluster together all the adjectives that describes him. Instead of a forty -year -old idle, and not very attentive what happens around him a changed it to = quarantenne = fourty-ish, nullafacente= do-nothing (more idiomatic) , ‘poco attento a quanto gli accade intorno’ = ‘oblivious’, include that whole concept. And the punchline ‘missing ‘ I placed on the end of the sentence.
‘disappearance is wanted’ = it is not quite clear what the writer means by ‘è voluta’ Looking up all the meanings of the word I decided on ‘was necessary’
poi faranno amicizia quando decidono….‘ I understood the word ‘fare’ to make someone else do something. So it is not that they became friends and then they decided to go to don A. but the daring act of going together was the catalyst to their