91 pages • 3 hours read
Elena FerranteMy Brilliant Friend
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
PrologueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue: “Eliminating All the Traces”
Prologue, Chapter 1 Summary
Lila’s son, Rino, telephones Elena, the first person narrator, to tell her that his mother has been gone for two weeks. Rino reports that Lila has been wandering the streets of Naples and acting strange. While Rino claims he has done everything to find his mother, going around to hospitals and the police, Elena trusts him little, believing that “he had no brain, and in his heart he only had himself” (19). Rino wonders whether Lila is with Elena. Rino sobs to hear she is not, but Elena tells him to stand on his own two feet and not to make any further attempts to look for his mother.
Prologue, Chapter 2 Summary
Lila’s real name is Raffaella Cerullo. Everyone shortens Raffaella to Lina, but, to Elena, she has always been Lila. Long ago, Lila confided in Elena that she wished to disappear “without leaving a trace,” for “every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found” (20). Elena, who thinks she knows Lila, though there is a hint of uncertainty, believes her friend has achieved this dream.
Prologue, Chapter 3 Summary
Days pass and Elena receives no correspondence from Lila. This is typical; Lila prefers the telephone to written correspondence. Elena feels distant from Lila, especially because she has thrown out all of her friend’s possessions. Reluctantly, Elena calls Rino, who still has no news. Elena asks him to look in the closet and when he does, he finds none of Lila’s clothes or other possessions. More eerily, Lila has also cut her face out of the photographs Rino finds of himself and his mother. Rino wonders if the stuff has been stolen, but Elena refutes the idea. She also refuses Rino’s request to come and stay with her. Elena feels angry that Lila, at the age of sixty-six, wanted to disappear and “eliminate the entire life that she had left behind.” Experiencing Lila’s disappearance as a personal insult, Elena determines to win by invalidating Lila’s quest to disappear and writing all the details of their story (23).
Prologue Analysis
Ferrante’s prologue sets the scene for the intimate and yet antagonistic relationship between two women, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo. Elena prides herself on having the most reliable knowledge of her mysterious friend. For example, Elena considers that she is “the only one who knows what she means” when Lila expresses the wish to disappear without leaving a trace and so looks disparagingly on Rino’s more conventional ideas about finding his mother(20). Rino’s belief that Lila is with Elena, also gives Elena, the first-person narrator, authority to locate Lila.
Ferrante introduces the idea of competition. Elena feels that Lila is “overdoing it […] expanding the concept of trace out of all proportion” and determines to beat Lila at this game (22-23). Elena’s way of winning will be to write “all the details” of Lila’s life as it intertwines with hers and thereby reinforce Lila’s presence. Given that Elena has also cleared out all objects that had anything to do with Lila, the competition is less between Lila and Elena, than between Lila’s presence and her absence.
Ferrante’s writing style is sharp, unemotional, and closely observed. For example, the prologue reverses expectations of gender. The male character Rino, an overgrown mamma’s boy, is deeply emotional, bursting into tears. He admits to being unable to sleep and asks to come and stay with Elena. He also feels helpless to find his mother by himself, deferring the responsibility to the police and Elena. Elena, on the other hand, is rational and tackles the problem of Lila’s absence intellectually, demanding to know about the contents of her wardrobe. Believing Lila to be as rational and autonomous as herself, Elena also dispels all notions of violent crime and victimhood. The decision to disappear is one Lila made for herself, and there is no need to chase after her and save her. Instead, Elena feels that the only way she can reverse Lila’s absence is intellectually, by using her own talents as a writer and storyteller to reconstruct the woman who seeks to erase all traces.
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