HBO’s My Brilliant Friend adaptation: reviews and recaps

Every week, we pick a new episode of the week. It could be good. It could be bad. It will always be interesting. You can read the archives here. The episode of the week for December 1 through 8 is “L’isola (The Island),” the sixth episode of the first season of HBO’s My Brilliant Friend.

My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series based on the novel of the same title by Elena Ferrante, is a triumph of worldbuilding. As Elena and Lila run around their cramped, grimy Neopolitan neighborhood, all harsh angles and grayed-out tones, you feel that you are learning every inch of the neighborhood along with them. You rule the place, just like Elena and Lila sometimes feel they do — and you are trapped there, with the violence and the poverty, just as they really are.

“I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: It was full of violence.”

So says narrator Elena Greco near the beginning of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. The bestselling novel is now an HBO series, and the screen adaptation drives home one of the book’s core messages: For Elena (Elisa del Genio), her best friend/double/nemesis Lila Cerullo (Ludovica Nasti), and all the children growing up with them in working-class postwar Naples, violence undergirds every interaction. (Spoilers for the first two episodes of the show, and mild spoilers for the books, follow.)

Erica Goldsmith and Kate Dunlop were friends the way lots of moms are friends with parents in their child’s class: peripherally. That is, until they realized they were both reading My Brilliant Friend, the first of Elena Ferrante’s quartet of books called the Neapolitan novels.

The books, Erica says, gave the Seattle friends a shorthand for each other and a launch pad for a deeper connection that wouldn’t have existed had they not both been reading the same book. “When you talk about the books with other women in particular, you find out which parts resonated with that person. You’re like, ‘Oh tell me more, why did that appeal to you and that appeal to me?’ And you learn something in that,” she says.

I haven’t read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, the best-selling, heavily acclaimed quartet of books that form the basis for HBO’s new My Brilliant Friend. (Each book will be an eight-episode season of the show; I’ve seen seven of the eight episodes of season one, based on the first book, called, well, My Brilliant Friend.)

I know, I know. This is horrifying. Didn’t everybody read those books a few years ago? And pass them along to their friends with hushed admiration and excitement for everything the mysterious Ferrante (whose real identity is — at least officially — a secret) accomplished? And feel the tremendous power of Ferrante’s evocation of a bygone era in Italy? Well? Didn’t they?