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
Lenù stays awake crying all night and doesn’t fall asleep until dawn. When she wakes, she realizes she has missed saying goodbye to Nino. The days that follow are sad and difficult. Lenù finds a paper bookmark Nino has left behind and takes to kissing and licking it each night as she weeps.
The bookmark Nino leaves behind is reminiscent of books, language, and literature—symbols throughout the novel of Lila and Lenù’s competitive friendship. Lenù experiences a similar relationship with Nino as she does with Lila—one that’s steeped in competition and ideas.
Themes
When Donato returns for his two-week holiday, Lenù finds herself calmed by his reassuring, gregarious presence. At night, Donato plays guitar for his family and Marisa’s friends. Lenù is struck by how different Nino is from his father: Donato is outgoing and warm whereas Nino is cold and withdrawn. As Lenù begins to enjoy Donato’s presence more and more, she sees him as a balm not just against Nino’s aloofness, but against Lila’s as well. Lenù writes one final letter to Lila, lamenting the fact that she hasn’t heard from her all summer, and then throws herself into her devotion to the entire Sarratore family, imagining that she’s one of them.
Rejected by Nino and feeling further away from Lila than ever before, Lenù decides to make use of the community around her and throw herself into her relationships with the Sarratores. Lenù feels abandoned by both Lila and Nino—so she stops writing Lila letters, perhaps in hopes of inspiring in Lila the same isolation she herself feels.
Themes
Donato shares articles he’s written with Lenù, and she begins to admire him even more for his “high-flown sentences” and great feeling as a writer. Lenù has an increasingly difficult time reconciling Nino’s words about his father’s cruelty and betrayals of Lidia with the man she has come to know. Lenù understands Melina a bit better—she now sees how Melina’s “fragile mind” failed to adjust to the “rough normality” of life without her lover. Lenù continues clinging to her love for Nino and her sadness over missing him.
Lenù has spent her whole life in academic competition with Lila and has used language, literature, and writing to get closer to her friend. As such, she sees Donato’s success as a writer not just as a mark of intelligence but of moral goodness.
Themes
