My Brilliant Friend

                                        

I just finished the first part of Elena Ferrante Neapolitan quartet – My Brilliant Friend. I am dazzled and still a bit confused. This is now the time to sort out my thoughts and reflect on what the book really represents to me.  It moved me. At the same time I am aware of the fact that the books I have read lately moved me more than it was my experience in the past. And I always read. Maybe not that intensively in some years as now, but there was always a book in my briefcase and another one on my night table. There was a long time in my life I did not read novels or very few of them. This has suddenly changed. Maybe it happened under influence of a close friend, the husband of my best girlfriend and a teacher of literature? Whatever the reason, I really enjoy my new reading choices. After Karl Ove Knausgaard, Donna Tartt and A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara it is time for Elena Ferrante and her four books about Naples and lives of two friends Elena and Lila. All of the books made a big impression on me and enriched my life considerably. I also found answers to many of existential questions especially reading A Little Life. I intend to re-read the book soon.

I read with equal to the current intensity during my gap year, I spent this time in Warsaw. I just moved there from a small town, the town I never liked or felt at home, to the big smoke where I did not have any friends from the start. While preparing for my entry exams to join the faculty of math I was wondering from time to time if I should not rather study literature, psychology or philosophy. At the end I made a practical choice to study math and even if it was not my calling it allowed me to find good and interesting jobs during my long career and do it with ease.

Looks like now again I am looking for ways to live my life more meaningfully and to reach peaceful contentment.  Hence, books play a special role in my life right now. I am looking for pointers. Ralf Waldo Emerson said that “other men are lenses through which we read our own minds” I would say that some books can play such role as well and I am counting that I will find some answers and ideas by reading.

Ferrante’s story tells us that the environment in which we grow up determines who we later become and how we live our lives. Scary thought, so looking at my own roots, I immediately found arguments that this does not apply to me. But even if I have strong arguments to support my view, there are moments I am not all that certain if I am right. I grew up in a town that I never liked and I had not become close to anyone during my childhood to reminisce with my early years. When I moved to Warsaw I did not turn back to recall the past years. Sometimes I think that my life started in Warsaw. There is at least one friendship from my Warsaw times that formed parts of me and is still important. Somebody said that Ferrante tells us “no self can be left behind” and that we can not escape our past. Hmm… Here I lose my conviction that I was able to fully escape the inheritance of the shabby, industrial, narrow-minded town I grew up in.

                                   

I can not argue with the Ferrante view that women identities are shaped by their men. That  sometimes their selves may be distorted or even destroyed by men they love. It happens that men are also formed by women, but this is not that prevailing and it is rather their mothers that impress their stamps of soul ownership not so much their beloved. Such is our earlier conditioning and traditions.  

I am aware that I have been strongly influenced by important men in my life. I was even formed by them to some extent. I must say that a lot of this influence was a good one, but I may have lost my identity for a number of years.

As I am waiting for the next two Ferrante books to be delivered by Book Depository, I will be thinking more about what My Brilliant Friend told me about myself and life in general. Ralf Waldo Emerson said that “other men are lenses through which we read our own minds” I would say that some books can play such a role as well. This is how I consider the book I have just read.