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 thinks about blood: blood is what pours from wounds, but it’s also, according to her father, what connects her own mother to Don Achille through a “very distant relationship.” Lenù is frightened by her father’s hatred of Don Achille and the insults he often drunkenly hurls against the man after dinner. Lenù is afraid that Don Achille, with his “sensitive” ears, will overhear her father’s insults and murder him.
Lenù considers the frightening parts of life she doesn’t yet understand—she knows that Don Achille is fearsome and feared, but not exactly why. As a result of being protected from the reality of her neighborhood, she makes the situation even more fearful in her own head.
Themes
Don Achille’s “sworn enemy” is Signor Peluso, a carpenter with a gambling problem. Carmela and Pasquale, two of Lenù’s classmates, are the children of Signor Peluso. Their family is poorer than Lenù’s own, and Carmela and Pasquale are always trying to steal school supplies and toys from Lila and Lenù. Carmela and Pasquale’s father blames his “ruin” on Don Achille, claiming the man took all his carpentry tools and doomed his business. When Lila and Lenù are in second grade, a rumor of a terrible fight between Don Achille and Signor Peluso breaks out. Apparently, one recent Sunday after Mass, Don Achille responded to Signor Peluso’s screams by adopting his “most hair-raising form” and hurling Peluso against a tree, leaving the poor man spilling blood everywhere.
This passage demonstrates how casually and frequently violence is deployed in Lenù’s neighborhood. As the men around her squabble over money, honor, and perceived slights, blood is often spilt and reputations are often ruined. Lenù lives in a violent, dangerous world, the effects of which will continue to define the ways she seeks to escape it as she grows older.
Themes
