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 believes everything that Lila tells her—and so Lila’s declaration about Don Achille hits Lenù hard. She becomes frightened to her core and even gets sick with a fever over the days that follow. She stays home from school for several days, and when she returns to the streets and to school, she feels her neighborhood has changed. She can now see the “underground air bubble” of the cellar pressing up against the lives of her family and neighbors above ground.
Lenù’s fears of Don Achille continue to worsen, even making her sick as she considers just how powerful the man truly is and how much his influence “bubble[s]” beneath everything. Again, Lenù’s fears reflect the fears in her community—but she literalizes them, conceiving of Don Achille as a fairy-tale monster rather than a particularly powerful, violent man of flesh and blood.
Themes
Around this strange, sickly time, Lenù receives her first declaration of love. One afternoon, while returning home from buying bread, Lenù realizes that Nino and his brother are behind her. Nino catches up with Lenù and declares, in proper “school Italian,” that he wants to marry her when they are grown up. He asks if Lenù will be his fiancé. Lenù is filled with longing but answers that she “can’t” and runs away. She begins avoiding Nino, whose declaration, she feels, has come at an impossible moment: in the midst of her grief over losing Tina, her exhaustion over keeping up with Lila, and her fear over the threat of Don Achille and the cellar. Soon, Nino begins to avoid Lenù too. Lenù doesn’t tell anyone about their exchange for fear of embarrassing Nino.
In this passage, as Lenù receives a declaration of love from her crush, she balks at the attention and denies Nino—a decision which will haunt her over the course of the years to come. The fact that Nino offers up his declaration in “proper” Italian rather than the Neapolitan dialect (which he, Lenù, and all their neighbors speak day to day) shows again how important a symbol language is. It represents an opportunity to prove oneself, differentiate oneself, and gain the attention of others.
Themes
Lenù flashes forward in time. The Sarratore family is moving out of the neighborhood: Donato, Nino, and Lidia load a wagon with their household items, drawing the attention of their neighbors. Though the official reason for their move is that Donato has secured a better house through his job with the railroad, rumor has it that Lidia is forcing Donato to abandon the neighborhood to escape Melina. As the Sarratores ready their wagon to leave, the sounds of crashing and screaming begin to echo from Melina’s apartment. Her tortured cries frighten Lenù and Lila. Melina begins throwing objects out of her window down to the street, shattering them on the ground. The Sarratores, all packed, begin leaving. Melina throws an iron out the window—it lands just inches from Nino, making a hole in the ground.
As Elena recalls the day that the Sarratore family moved out of the neighborhood, her wistful sadness at watching Nino leave is overshadowed by the terror of Melina’s violence. Melina seems to mirror the violence that the men in the neighborhood exhibit, as she spares no one and thinks of no consequences. She exhibits a mixture of rage, fury, and desire for vengeance that threatens the very lives of her lover’s children.
Themes
