Where to start with this rich, dazzling, devastatingly insightful quartet of companionship — the most fluent (according to me and everyone I know who has read it) rendition of female friendship you could hope to find in literature? It begins with 66 year old Elena finding out her best friend of six decades, Raffaela—Lila, as she is known—has deliberately disappeared without trace: disturbing Elena, but giving her license to reflect on their relationship without her input. Growing up in 1950s Naples, the pair are drastically different: where Elena is blonde, busty and industrious, Lila is dark, small and ‘brilliant’, intellectually speaking—inspiring in Elena a bilious mixture of admiration and writhing jealousy as she, working day and night to justify her going to school rather than helping her family, is pipped to the post by her more naturally gifted peer. Ferrante captures the obsessive nature of close friendship—‘I decided I had to model myself on that girl; never let her out of my sight, even if she got annoyed’—and the oppressive effects of that: receiving an extraordinarily evocative letter from Lila while away on holiday, Elena writes: ‘Lila’s world, as usual, rapidly superimposed itself on mine.’ In friendships, as in all relationships, there is always an element of dependency, and Elena lives through Lila. ‘If she withdrew, if her voice withdrew from things, the things got dirty, dusty,’ Elena writes, and this vicarious energy pervades the novel as it propels and quashes her by turns. She is fascinated, inspired, motivated and subordinated. If you’ve ever inhabited this kind of all-consuming communion with a BFF, this is your song.
