Our Brilliant Friends: Three Seminars on the Neapolitan Novels

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For a second summer in a row, we are delving into the world of Elena Ferrante. This time around, our series of three seminars will focus on the Neapolitan Novels, which for many has marked the entry point into Ferrante’s Naples. Published between 2011 and 2015, the four novels follow Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo over the course of their sixty-years-long friendship. The world of the Neapolitan Novels have changed our reading lives, and the way in which we understand authorship and translation. My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in the series, topped The New York Times Book Review list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. A television adaptation directed by Saverio Costanzo has garnered critical acclaim, and Ferrante’s success has created renewed interest in the writing of Italian female authors. 

We will explore the Neapolitan Novels one theme at a time, rather than one book at a time. We will discuss friendship, dissolving margins, and motherhood, while also working through questions of translation, class, gender, sexuality, as well as other emotions and ideas these novels have ignited. 

We invite you to join us, whether you’ve read the whole series, the first novel, or none of it at all! Each conversation will be open to all levels of familiarity with Ferrante’s work and we will provide passages from the novels themselves, as well as excerpts from other texts, that have informed our own reading. As always, we invite you to read Ferrante in the original Italian, Ann Goldstein’s English translation, or any other language through which you encountered the Neapolitan Novels. Translation, and its impact on our reading of Ferrante, will be a major theme throughout our conversations. 

We will meet at Tills Bookshop by the Meadows for an intimate discussion, surrounded by second-hand books at 18:30 on June 20th, July 4th, and July 18th. Join us for another Ferrante summer!

Date:

For a second summer in a row, we are delving into the world of Elena Ferrante. This time around, our series of three seminars will focus on the Neapolitan Novels, which for many has marked the entry point into Ferrante’s Naples. Published between 2011 and 2015, the four novels follow Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo over the course of their sixty-years-long friendship. The world of the Neapolitan Novels have changed our reading lives, and the way in which we understand authorship and translation. My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in the series, topped The New York Times Book Review list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. A television adaptation directed by Saverio Costanzo has garnered critical acclaim, and Ferrante’s success has created renewed interest in the writing of Italian female authors. 

We will explore the Neapolitan Novels one theme at a time, rather than one book at a time. We will discuss friendship, dissolving margins, and motherhood, while also working through questions of translation, class, gender, sexuality, as well as other emotions and ideas these novels have ignited. 

We invite you to join us, whether you’ve read the whole series, the first novel, or none of it at all! Each conversation will be open to all levels of familiarity with Ferrante’s work and we will provide passages from the novels themselves, as well as excerpts from other texts, that have informed our own reading. As always, we invite you to read Ferrante in the original Italian, Ann Goldstein’s English translation, or any other language through which you encountered the Neapolitan Novels. Translation, and its impact on our reading of Ferrante, will be a major theme throughout our conversations. 

We will meet at Tills Bookshop by the Meadows for an intimate discussion, surrounded by second-hand books at 18:30 on June 20th, July 4th, and July 18th. Join us for another Ferrante summer!

18th July - Our Brilliant Friends - Pay-if-forward ticket
£5.00
4th July - Our Brilliant Friend - Pay-it-forward ticket
£5.00
20th June - Our Brilliant Friends - Pay-it-forward
£5.00

Friday 20th of June: Friendship and its discontents 

Throughout the Neapolitan Novels, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo’s worlds revolve around one another. Their friendship haunts Lenù, the series’ narrator, for six decades. It is an intense and tumultuous bond that overshadows all other intimate relationships the two women engage in during their lives. This is a love more powerful, more painful, more complicated than any other, and Elena Ferrante builds an entire world around this obsessive, remarkable entanglement. 

In the first session of Our Brilliant Friends, we will explore what female friendship means to Ferrante, to Lenù and Lila, and to us. Alongside Ferrante’s powerful writing about friendship, we will touch on other writing such as Cross-Stitch, a touching novel by Jazmina Barrera and translated by Christina MacSweeney, the music of boygenius, and the 1978 film Girlfriends, by Claudia Weill. Join us in our discussion of friendship, class, jealousy, and love! 

Friday 4th of July: Smarginatura, or dissolving margins

Throughout her work, but especially in the four novels of the Neapolitan Novels, Ferrante engages beautifully with the idea of margins - those that already exist, those that we build for ourselves, and those that break, melt, bend, dissipate even. While mainly associated with the character of Lila, Smarginatura – the dissolving of margins – affects the entirety of the world of the Neapolitan Novels. During this session, we will explore its meaning in connection with personal identity, societal rules of behaviour, writing and art, place, and the perception of reality. Borrowing ideas from Julio Cortázar, Angela Carter and Ferrante’s own critical apparatus, we’ll also think about our own experience of making and unmaking margins, as well as what happens when they disappear. 

Friday 18th of July: Mothers, Daughters, Desire, and Repulsion

No one has written quite like Ferrante on pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. These fundamental moments of life, of all human life on this planet, are so often under-intellectualised and under-discussed. Ferrante insists upon them as vital. For Ferrante, as Jacqueline Rose writes, ‘motherhood is at the irreducible core of her fiction’. Although often overlooked by reviewers, mothers (and particularly representations of the mother-daughter relationship), are everywhere in Ferrante’s writing. Ferrante tells us that “the literary truth of motherhood is yet to be explored.” “The task of the woman writer today,” is not to “keep talking about it in an idyllic way”, as they do in the guidebooks, which leaves mothers feeling “alone and guilty” but “to delve truthfully into the darkest depth”. And yet, Ferrante also avows that “I think that nothing is comparable to the joy, the pleasure, of bringing another living creature into the world. [...] I think that the most extraordinary thing in my life was to conceive and give birth.”

This final session will read the Neapolitan novels through their depictions of pregnancy, motherhood, and mother-daughter relationships. Come ready to discuss love, disgust, abandonment, repulsion, care and responsibility in patriarchal society. 

Note on ticketing:

Tickets for each individual session are £5, and you can buy tickets for all three sessions for £12. With your ticket, you can also enjoy 10% off our curated In Other Words bookshelves in Tills.

There are a limited number of concession tickets available, for £2. No evidence is needed for a concession. If you feel you would struggle to cover the full price, but want to take part in the event, please feel free to pay the concession price. If you can afford to, you can also buy a pay-it-forward ticket (£10), to support the concession tickets and make additional concessions available. 

Tickets ensure fair compensation for all contributors, as well as the upkeep of the spaces that host us. You can learn more about our work and support our varied projects, which include our interview series ‘Talking with Translators’, reading groups, participatory workshops around translation, as well as research.