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
Rino, Lila’s older brother, begins to insist that Lila taught herself how to read and write by sitting with him each afternoon while he works on his homework. Rino, six years Lila’s elder, was taken out of school when he was barely 10 years old—his father Fernando now takes him to work every day at his tiny cobbler shop to mend shoes. Lenù doubts that Rino, who was never studious and who never advanced past the fifth grade, taught Lila anything. Lenù believes that Lila really has taught herself how to read and write.
The studious Lenù, who loves school, is full of “weakness” and defeat at the realization that the “bad” Lila has surpassed her academically. Though barely six, Lenù understands that excellence in school is a way to please those around her. Lenù is the favorite of her siblings and her father, and she’s desperate to please her distant, angry mother, whose wandering eye and pronounced limp make her fearful to Lenù. As such, Lenù knows that success in school is the only thing keeping her mother from sending her to work.
This passage introduces the idea of how badly Lenù wants to escape a fate in which she winds up like her mother. Lenù believes that succeeding in school is her ticket out of a life that resembles her mother’s miserable existence, and this is likely why her envy of Lila’s academic achievements is so pronounced.
Themes
Lenù laments that after Signora Cerullo’s visit, she is never singled out as special in Maestra Oliviero’s class anymore—Lila is now the one called to sit beside the teacher during lessons as a beacon to the other students. Lenù feels she has been demoted. She feels not only jealousy but an intense sense of doom. She becomes focused on Lila and determined to “model [her]self on that girl”—she never wants to let Lila out of her sight.
