translated from Italian, Book 2 in the Neapolitan Novels series
I became interested in the novels after watching the HBO series My Brilliant Friend. I immediately fell in love with the two main protagonists, Lila and Lenù, little girls growing up in post WWII Naples. The telling of their brutal childhood is handled with raw innocent grace: difficult childhoods are difficult to narrate. Following Book 1, which lays out the girls’ lives in their dusty square of multi-family apartment buildings, the broken adults, the near feral children, their bare-bones school, and the steely bond between the two, this Book 2 reaches into their adulthood, such as it is. Lila marries at 16, hardly an adult, while Lenù eventually leaves the grey life of Naples by train, attends University in Pisa, to gain academic status, and new bonds.
Their lives sharply cut away from each other by outward appearances. But both battle restrictions set upon them from within and out, in the backdrop of the 60’s, as social, gender, class upheaval brews. Lila weaponizes all resources within her grasp to fight the life that seems decided before she was born, a life still full of suffocating limits and violence. Meanwhile, Lenù, given opportunities of freedom that Lila can no longer even dream about, wrestles with a chronic unease of not ever escaping her Neapolitan identity no matter how accomplished, masterful and socially connected she becomes. And in these struggles, their bond is measured and tested. I am really looking forward to reading Book 3. The filmed series is very enjoyable, but the writing offers a more exquisite tale.
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