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 is deeply saddened by Nino’s news about her article, but she tries to maintain a front of indifference. She looks around the room: the festivities are winding down, and Lila and Stefano are smiling and talking as they sit at their table. The dance floor is still full of Lenù’s sweaty, debauched friends and classmates; the floor is splattered with sauce and wine. Overwhelmed, Lenù tries to hold back tears. She realizes that she had been clinging to her upcoming publication as a way to confirm that she “really had a destiny” and that school would really deliver her from her fate. She recalls what Maestra Oliviero told her years ago out the plebs, and she realizes that the plebs are her friends, her neighbors, and her own family.
Nino gets up to leave. Lenù tries to get him to stay a little longer by asking him to visit the bride’s table with her, but he refuses and heads out the door. Lenù envies Nino for being able to come and go from the neighborhood as he pleases. Lenù fears she’ll never make it out as Nino has—she feels that studying is useless.
Lenù sees Nino—and the impassioned academic and political life he represents—as a ticket out of the neighborhood, and she laments feeling unable to follow him or to earn his respect.
Themes
At the height of her despair, Lenù notices a shift in the room. She looks to the doors and realizes that the Solara brothers have arrived. Lila whispers urgently to Stefano. As Marcello sits down at Lila and Stefano’s table and crosses his legs, all of the color drains from Lila’s face—she is “whiter than her wedding dress.” She stares at Marcello’s feet with a gaze that Lenù feels could shatter the wine bottles in front of her on the table. Marcello is wearing Cerullo shoes. Rather than wearing the display pair, he is wearing the very pair bought earlier by Stefano—the very first pair that Lila and Rino ever made, the pair that “ruin[ed]” Lila’s hands.
As Marcello appears wearing Lila’s Cerullo shoes prototype, it’s implied that Marcello either purchased the shoes from Stefano at a higher price or else forced Stefano to give him the shoes for free. Either way, it’s clear that Marcello and the Solaras will continue to control the neighborhood and to dictate the behavior of those under their influence. It seems that even in the face of Stefano and Lila’s marriage, the Solaras will be able to retain an outsized amount of power to demand or extort whatever they want, from whomever they want it from. Lila’s despair is matched only by her rage at Stefano for kowtowing to Marcello—a move she sees as a cowardly betrayal.
Themes
