Elena Ferrante is an author who has been getting a lot of positive press lately and not without reason. She's an incisive, but charming writer with a good story to tell.
I just finished "My Brilliant Friend," the first book in her Neapolitan Novel series, and while I greatly enjoyed it -- even though it was difficult to keep track of who was who from time to time -- I couldn't help but be struck by her use of a couple of very basic devices to first suck readers in and then to get them to purchase the next book.
"My Brilliant Friend" opens with a prologue in which readers immediately learn that someone who is obviously important has vanished without a trace, something that person apparently long planned to do. It's a standard "hook," isn't it? There's a mystery here and immediately we want to know what happened even before learning anything about the person in question.
Chapter 1 opens long before the disappearance takes place. The person who ultimately disappears and the person through whose eyes the story is told are both young children in a socially cloistered, poor neighborhood in Naples. What follows is a classic coming-of-age story and a story about how two very different personalities cope with the challenges of their milieu.
As the years pass rather slowly it soon becomes clear the mystery won't be solved in this book. Readers are going to have to purchase multiple titles, generating significant revenues for Ms Ferrante and her publisher, to find out what happened.
The second device occurs in the last sentence of the first book, where something startling is revealed, calling into question what we thought we knew about another important person and what that might mean for one or more of the other characters. It's probably an element of the mystery, too, we immediately suspect.
Gosh! Better rush out and quickly purchase the second book in the series.
Does this sound more like soap opera than serious literature? Well, yes, but I'm sure there are many who would argue it's the only way to get people to read "real" books anymore. So perhaps Ms Ferrante and her editors deserve our approbation as opposed to the reverse. They've figured out how to sell literary fiction in a market that seemingly only wants escapist page-turners of one genre or another.
The bottom line: here's my blurb for "My Brilliant Friend" (an ironic title, by the way). "GOOD STUFF!"
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