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
Lila is happy: in less than a month, she has gotten rid of Marcello, found a way to move forward with her shoe designs, and become engaged to a wealthy young man. Lila has everything, and as Lenù returns to school she is full of dread and boredom. She begins to see Lila less and less—but she sees her fellow student (and Stefano’s brother) Alfonso more often. Lenù finds her friendship with Alfonso “soothing”—they don’t talk very much, but just being around him is nice. She begins to use him to “escape” from Nino, who has, since the start of the school year, been attempting to talk to Lenù. Lenù avoids Nino at all costs, unsure of how to handle her feelings for him. Though she’s still consumed with passion for him, she cannot look at him without seeing (and feeling) Donato.
Lenù sees how happy Lila is, and she attributes Lila’s newfound comfort and happiness to the ways in which Lila has strategically used Stefano to escape her situation with Marcello. Lenù attempts to emulate Lila’s canny strategy by using Alfonso to escape from Nino. This is yet another situation in which Lenù mirrors Lila’s behavior in an attempt to replicate her friend’s actions—and achieve similar results for herself.
Themes
One day, while walking home with Alfonso, Lenù spies Donato on the railway embankment in his conductor’s uniform. When she does a double take to see if it is really him, though, he is gone. In the midst of this “confusing” time, Lenù seeks Alfonso’s company more and more often—but she is careful not to give him the impression that she’s attracted to him. It would be “humiliating,” she feels, to be with the little brother of Lila’s fiancé. Nevertheless, she feels it is somehow right that the journey the two of them began when they first climbed the stairs to Don Achille’s apartment has ended with the man’s sons taking care of each of them.
Lenù is a sentimental person—she’s very invested in the ideas of fate and destiny. She feels there is something cosmic or predetermined, then, in the idea that because her and Lila’s friendship began in earnest with a visit to the fearsome Don Achille’s apartment door, it is only fitting that his sons, in his absence, have taken responsibility for the two of them. Lenù is grateful for Alfonso because of how their friendship keeps her tied to both Lila and Stefano—but at the same time, she doesn’t want to get too close to him and be seen as desperate to keep pace with Lila through any means necessary.
Themes
