My Brilliant Friend Book Review

The Book That Defines a Generation—Or Does It?

When The New York Times Book Review crowned Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend as the #1 book of the 21st century, I’ll admit I was skeptical. I’d already read it twice by then—once when it first appeared in English back in 2012, and again before the HBO series premiered. Both times, I’d closed the book feeling impressed but not transformed. Not greatest-book-of-the-century transformed, anyway.

But here’s what I’ve learned after living with this novel for over a decade: Ferrante doesn’t aim to transform you. She aims to expose you.

What Makes This Friendship So Damn Uncomfortable

The opening line of the novel is deceptively simple—elderly Elena Greco learns that her oldest friend, Lila Cerullo, has disappeared without a trace. In response, Elena does what any writer would do: she breaks her promise and writes everything down.

What follows is not your typical coming-of-age story. Set in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples in the 1950s, the novel tracks two brilliant girls—Elena (Lenù) and Raffaella (Lila)—as they navigate a world that has no interest in nurturing their intelligence. One girl escapes through education. The other gets trapped at sixteen in a marriage that promises safety but delivers something far more sinister.

The friendship between these two is the least sentimental portrait of female connection I’ve ever encountered. There’s admiration, yes. But there’s also envy so thick you could choke on it. Competition that borders on cruelty. A push-and-pull dynamic where neither girl can fully exist without measuring herself against the other.

As UC Berkeley professor Mario Telò notes, Ferrante has the courage to show that friendship is always layered with “ugly” feelings—competition, envy, jealousy, forms of implicit hostility. Reading it feels like someone’s finally said the quiet part out loud.

The Violence Nobody Talks About

Here’s what surprised me most on my first read: the relentless brutality. Not just physical violence—though there’s plenty of that—but the psychological violence of being a girl in a place where your potential is seen as a threat.

One reader’s assessment captures it perfectly: the novel should come with a rating for violence, because growing up in this Naples neighborhood is genuinely dangerous. Fathers beat their children with frightening regularity. Boys throw rocks at girls who outperform them. Women accept cruelty as the cost of survival.

Ferrante doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t soften it for our comfort. And that unflinching gaze is exactly what makes the book work. This isn’t poverty porn or misery tourism—it’s an honest accounting of what it means to be brilliant in a world designed to crush you.

The Class Question That Really Matters

According to Belgian bookstore owner Frederic, the key ingredient that makes My Brilliant Friend universal is its social and economic portrait: “It’s for those who are neither rich nor powerful”.

He’s right. This is fundamentally a book about class, not gender—though gender certainly shapes how class operates. Both girls are intellectually gifted, but only one family is open to their daughter continuing her education. That single decision creates two radically different life trajectories.

What makes Ferrante’s handling of this brilliant is her refusal to sentimentalize education as salvation. Elena gets out, yes. She becomes a writer. But she also becomes someone who makes terrible choices, who uses people, who can’t quite shake the Naples neighborhood from her bones. The moral, if there is one: you can take a girl out of the Naples slums, but you can’t take the Naples slums out of the girl.

Why Ann Goldstein’s Translation Deserves Its Own Standing Ovation

I want to pause here to acknowledge something crucial: we’re reading Ferrante in English through Ann Goldstein’s translation, and it’s extraordinary work. The prose feels simultaneously intimate and distant, confessional yet withholding. Translators worked hard to preserve Neapolitan words, vivid expressions, and character names while maintaining the original essence, and it shows.

Ferrante’s voice—urgent, unsentimental, occasionally brutal—comes through perfectly. The text moves with a strange rhythm, sometimes rushing ahead, sometimes slowing to excruciating detail. It mirrors the way memory actually works.

The First Volume Problem

Let me be blunt about something: if you’ve only read the first volume, My Brilliant Friend, you should tell yourself that you never finished the novel. The four books in the Neapolitan Quartet are really one continuous narrative spanning nearly 2,000 pages.

The first novel itself does not and cannot stand alone. It’s an opening movement, not a complete symphony. The real power of Ferrante’s vision only becomes clear when you follow these women through sixty years of their intertwined lives—through marriages, affairs, children, political awakenings, and the slow accumulation of choices that can’t be undone.

That said, judging My Brilliant Friend as a standalone entry point? It’s a hell of an invitation.

Why It Works

The novel’s genius lies in its specificity. Ferrante obsesses over details—the exact shade of someone’s jealousy, the precise weight of a glance, the particular texture of humiliation. She builds an entire world from granular observations, and somehow that microscopic focus makes everything feel larger, more mythic.

As one reader described it, the minutiae of Elena and Lila’s lives takes on mythic proportions, pulling you along on a tense and frightful story. What looks like domestic realism reveals itself as epic tragedy.

The book also benefits from Ferrante’s mysterious anonymity. Not knowing who she is—or even if “she” is one person or several—adds weight to the work. It’s interesting that Ferrante hides behind her pseudonym while Lila also wants to remain anonymous throughout the story. The layers of authorship mirror the layers of identity within the text.

The Verdict: Greatness That Demands Everything

Is My Brilliant Friend the best book of the 21st century? That’s a bold claim that probably says more about what we need right now than about objective literary merit. We’re hungry for stories about complex women. We’re ready to see female friendship depicted without romance or gloss. We want fiction that grapples honestly with class and power.

Ferrante delivers all of that, but she asks a lot in return. This isn’t a comfortable read. It won’t make you feel good about humanity. It probably won’t even make you feel good about yourself, because Ferrante has a way of exposing the small cruelties we all carry.

But it will stay with you. Years later, you’ll think about Lila’s fierce intelligence trapped in circumstances she can’t control. You’ll think about Elena’s escape that isn’t quite an escape. You’ll think about two girls who loved each other and competed with each other and shaped each other in ways neither could fully understand.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Brilliant Friend (Europa Editions, 2012) by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein, is available in hardcover, paperback, and as part of the Neapolitan Quartet box set. The HBO adaptation concluded its four-season run in 2024.