Who will earn praise as a scholar, and who will inspire envy as a wife, and which option is more desirable? These are the questions haunting this first phase of their friendship. “She eluded me when I chased her, and at the same time, she kept on my heels to overtake me.” Lila, a shoemaker’s daughter, excels at school but quits to help her father at his shop, while Lenu keeps on, applying herself to Latin and Greek. “She always did the things I was supposed to do, before me and better than me,” Lenu says. The Neapolitan novels follow Lenu and Lila as they support and compete with each other in a town shadowed by poverty and political strife. How do you translate such forceful, hypnotic expression to the screen? That challenge both shapes and bedevils HBO’s new television adaptation of “My Brilliant Friend,” directed by Saverio Costanzo. Something happens when Ferrante reduces reality to words the lines move like a child darting through traffic. But her analysis also applies to Ferrante, who imbues the details of chores and school with a crackling power that is difficult to describe or account for. Elena, known as Lenu, finds Lila’s way of speaking electrifying.
“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.” That is Elena Greco, the narrator of the novel “My Brilliant Friend,” talking about Lila Cerullo, the brilliant friend of the title and the other main character in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, a series of novels about two girls growing up in working-class Italy in the nineteen-fifties.
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