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 begins developing a crush on Antonio, who has been “discreetly” courting her for weeks. Lenù stops seeing Lila and Stefano very often—but Lila remains the central topic of Lenù’s gossip sessions with her other friends. Pasquale, still wounded by Lila’s relationship with Stefano, nevertheless jumps to the Cerullos’ defense when he hears that Silvio Solara has threatened to squash Fernando’s shoe business before it even begins. Lenù tries to defend Lila’s relationship with Stefano and her newfound love of shopping and glamour, but when Pasquale accuses Lila of taking advantage of Don Achille’s black-market fortune and profiting off the “blood of all the poor” of the neighborhood, it creates a rift in their friend group. Pasquale implies that Lila is a “whore” for getting engaged to Stefano, an accusation which drives a wedge between him, Antonio, and Enzo.
This short chapter shows how Lila’s decisions send ripples of tension, violence, and cruelty throughout her friend group, inspiring profound rancor among the young men she knows. Pasquale especially, but also to some degree Enzo and Antonio, feel some directive to protect Lila’s honor—they feel that in getting engaged to Stefano, she has become an unrepentant social climber obsessed only with money and control. The men don’t take into account the nuanced reasons behind Lila’s decision—and the sacrifices she has had to make in order to pursue a better life after being denied an education.
Themes
