Is my brilliant friend gay
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It is a brilliant novel, easily one of my favorites I read this year and one that consumed my thoughts and emotions in its epic of adolescence. The plebs were us. Marcello, his brother, has some interiority: He’s a jerk, but when Lila holds a knife to his neck after he makes a crude pass at Elena, he becomes romantically obsessed with her, and almost sensitive in a way that makes you feel sorry for him.
He can even smile.
That’s just what good lighting, styling, and writing will do for you. With the ferocity of animals trapped in cages, they plot their escape from their oppressively provincial village, always with one eye on the other, using men as pawns in their battle to achieve freedom.
Watching this series, I felt a mixture of bewilderment and exhaustion.
Elena’s inability to manifest an original thought hampers her studies, and it is also what prevents her from making out with her hot friend. I particularly enjoyed how language is so central to the book, but also an aspect that is both connection and competition. The Solaras are well-dressed, well-funded, and total jerks: They spend most of Ferrante’s novels as recurring boogymen, using their money to rule the neighborhood, yoking women into their orbit, and manifesting the pro-capitalist fascist ideology that haunts Italy throughout the twentieth century.
Marcello is the pretty one.
So she fights back. In a friend, I’m a bit ashamed to say, it’s a dealbreaker. Make your role count for something.” More on this in the following weeks.
– “I know women destroyed by pregnancy.”
– “What men don’t want to hear and women are afraid of saying.”
– “Men behaved as if their desires were necessarily ours.”
– “Men only get married to have a faithful housemaid.”
How Many Times Did I Cry/Tear Up In This Episode: 3
adaptation • Elena Ferrante • LGBTQ • My Brilliant Friend • TV
My Brilliant Friend, the acclaimed Elena Ferrante novel and recently released HBO show, centers around Elena “Lenu” Greco and Raffaela “Lila” Cerullo, two best friends growing up in Naples, and the people in their neighborhood.
Here we find life in a changing world as ‘a sticky, jumbled reality’ and watch the ways various ambitions play out to survive it. The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and now was leaning against my father’s shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, at the sexual allusions of the metal dealer.
If I were to take a step back to watch myself with my own beautiful, brilliant, funny, special, magnificent friends, would I too wonder in amazement at the chastity of said friendships?
There are women in my life who I intend to keep in my life until the day we die, preferably together, preferably while vaping.
It is not far out from the downfall of Mussolini and the fascists, which still casts a dark shadow over everything.
Though in hard times, one often finds a companion to bear the burden and what better companion for the perceptive Lenù than Lila, a girl seemingly misunderstood but in whom Lenù find ‘the characteristic of absolute determination.’ Their dynamic across the years is something that will forever shake inside me and I found it such a powerful expression of the ways we tend to perceive ourselves through the fragments reflected back by others.
I've had quite the run of great books at the end of this year and this is another headed straight to my "favorites" list. I’ve always assumed being gay required a fleeter foot along a trickier path than the one the heterosexuals walk, but how do the straights summon the energy to have so many relationships that are so fundamentally unsatisfying?
The pace and introspective narration—which sets Lenù’s sharp mind like a scalpel upon all she encounters—lulls the reader into an intimacy with the characters as if you, too, have grown up alongside them and each moment of anger or betrayal hits all the harder. Some of the casting is so-so: The lanky, floppy-haired Antonio is fairly forgettable, a no-no considering he becomes such a pivotal character.
Michele, though?
There are some absolutely breathtaking moments of writing here, the whole final sequence especially had me shivering in literary glee and tension, particularly the moment where we get an unexpected insight on the ‘brilliant friend’ of the title. Lila’s mind is more acute to unforeseen possibilities, but the village communist is only able to teach her about the mafia and the black markets, and unfortunately there’s no one in town who can do the same with lesbianism.
These characters spin around each other, allegedly smart, yet also so dumb.
Reader, I am not proud, but the facts are the facts. In a prospective partner, I welcome all attempts to disturb my sense of well-being. Tradition is partly a reflection of the world as it exists, partly an interpretation by those with more social power and privilege, and partly shaped by those who want to form a closer relationship with the world around them so they can, at the very least, understand it.
Tradition can be inclusive, enlightening, and comforting.
If I were to take a step back to watch myself with my own beautiful, brilliant, funny, special, magnificent friends, would I too wonder in amazement at the chastity of said friendships?