Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Brilliant Friend, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Female Friendship
Masculine vs. Feminine Violence
Women’s Work
Poverty, Social Climbing, and Sacrifice
The Uses of Community
Love, Sex, and Strategy
Summary
Analysis
Nino arrives in the evening but shows “not the least emotion” upon seeing Lenù—Lenù believes Marisa must have called or written to him to tell him that she was there. Over the next few days, Nino is quiet and introverted. One night, when Lenù falls asleep reading, she wakes up with the light off and the book closed. Lenù believes Nino has tucked her in—she feels a “flare of love” for him. The two begin talking slowly and sparsely over the next few days, but Lenù is often tongue-tied around Nino, whom she wants to impress with conversations about books and reading.
The way Lenù feels around Nino mirrors the way she often feels around Lila. She wants to impress him—just as she wants to impress Lila. She spends a lot of time reading into the tiniest details of her and Nino’s interactions for clues as to the inscrutable Nino’s feelings, just as she often tries to understand what’s going on in Lila’s head.
Themes
One evening, Nino confesses to Lenù that when they were young, he envied her relationship with Lila—he was jealous of their close friendship yet never had the courage to try to make friends with them. He admits that as a young boy, he liked Lenù “a lot” and thought that they’d be engaged one day. Lenù blushes. When Nino asks about Lila, Lenù’s answers become short and clipped as she tells him about Lila working in her father’s shop. Lenù stops writing to Lila after this conversation.
Nino’s complicated confession in this passage disheartens Lenù and makes her angry at Lila—she feels that Nino, like Pasquale and so many others, has only ever wanted to use her to get close to Lila. In reality, what Nino is saying is much more complex: he is speaking openly about his awe and admiration for Lila and Lenù’s special friendship and expressing desire to have such a relationship—a luxury rarely afforded to young men.
Themes
One evening in August, Nino joins Lenù down by the beach after dropping Marisa off with her friends in town. He sits beside her and starts telling her about his hatred of his father. He cites Donato’s cruel treatment of Melina—and the façade of a family man Donato adopts around his own wife and children—as his reasons for loathing the man. Donato, Nino reveals, is constantly unfaithful and always taking on new lovers. Lenù tries to defend the “passion” Donato and Melina shared. Nino tells Lenù that she doesn’t understand him, but Lenù insists that she does. Nino kisses Lenù gently and tells her he’ll be leaving in the morning, before his father arrives. Together they walk back up to the house.
Nino knows who his father is—but Lenù, who has seen facility with writing and language as a mark not just of intelligence but of moral rightness all her life, is unable to heed Nino’s warnings about Donato. Lenù’s idealism and innocence will soon be put to the test—and Nino will not be there to offer her warnings anymore.
Themes
