I am a passionate devotee of both Elena Ferrante’s novels and the Italian television series adaptation of the novels that appeared on HBO. It has been a while since the series appeared on television, but its final season is finally now playing on HBO (“My Brilliant Friend: The Story of the Lost Child”) and truly deserves to be seen.
Both Ferrante’s quartet of novels and the television series explore a wide range of themes that include class; crime; familial rage and repression; ambition; motherhood; feminism; political turmoil; and especially the nature of the profound friendship, in this case over six decades between two Neapolitan working-class girls, the bookish, ambitious Elena (known as Lenù) and her unpredictable (she can be mean and kind on different occasions), sometimes self-destructive, brilliant friend Lila. It is a friendship built on conflict and competition and long intervals without seeing each other—one that sees constant shifts in feeling and commitment, where love and hate are deeply entwined. The television series achieves something unique: sustaining the emotional complexity of the novels without diluting its intensity and psychological nuance.
Lenù is the series’ narrator, and by the fourth and final 10-episode series, has become a successful writer, having left her conventional, chauvinist professor husband and returned to her native city of Naples. She is involved again with Nino, her lifelong romantic obsession and an academic intellectual with great charm, who is neither politically nor personally trustworthy. Lenù, a feminist, is aware that her autonomy is badly compromised by her passion for the manipulative and deeply flawed Nino. But she is now pregnant with his child and dealing with her dying mother, who loves Lenù but tends to invidiously compare her to the extremely sharp and powerful Lila, who has become a dominant neighborhood figure—and is also pregnant.
More will follow on the next seven episodes in December.
