My Brilliant Friend Recap: The One with Don Achille

Elisa del Genio and Ludovica Nasti in My Brilliant Friend.

We’ll be recapping each episode of My Brilliant Friend. This recap is written by someone who has read (and loved) the original books, but there will be no spoilers for future plot points. New episodes are airing Sunday and Monday nights, through December 10.

Four years pass in the course of this episode—sort of. Right after the cold open there’s a transition that suggests months have gone by, and when Lila (Ludovica Nasti) and Elena (Elisa del Genio) go to recover the money they received from Don Achille (Antonio Pennarella), it seems to be summer. But it’s longer, surely—the girls go from learning how read and write in the first episode, to reading their hard-won Little Women so many times they memorized whole passages. By the time the episode ends, Elena is gearing up for middle school, which would make both of them about 10 years old.

My Brilliant Friend chooses to encapsulate Don Achille’s life and death in this one episode, even though mostly, he is not present. Pennarella has exactly one scene to make an impression, and he does, chewing that grimy cigarette as he looks over tiny, defiant Lila, wondering what to make of her. Lila hates Don Achille, while Lenù mostly just fears him—her cordial “Buona sera, buon appetito” (good evening, have a nice meal) as she flees was a genuinely funny moment in an otherwise tragic episode—and yet Lila values his money even more than Lenù does. Lenù wants to buy more dolls, but Lila has her sights set on whatever comes after childhood, and her ambition and creativity is desperate for an outlet beyond what the neighborhood can easily offer her. The money gifts them a book; the book inspires Lila to create an illustrated fairy tale out of cheap paper and crayons. The book, The Blue Fairy, is proof of what she’s capable of, but by the end of the episode, no one cares what Lila is capable of. The money simply fueled a fantasy; perhaps that is why, when Achille is killed, Lila is so obsessed with the details of his death.

The question of whether or not girls should be educated seems distant, from an American perspective: Domestically, college students are now majority female. But within the lifetimes of many Americans the reality was more complicated; and when you venture further afield, the question of girls’ education, even on the basic literacy level, is much more controversial than it should be. The kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls or the acid attack against Malala Yousafzi, which have since become global talking points and inspiration for NGOs, are escalations of a simpler arithmetic—one that seeks to limit the spaces where a girl might be safe, or might be encouraged to succeed

What’s striking about My Brilliant Friend is how this struggle to be seen is treated so tenderly, from the perspective of the girls who suffer—not, instead, as the struggles of people somewhere distant and backwards, somewhere else. The girls see—with what is by now becoming their signature devastating clarity—how their families are prepared to justify denying them this opportunity. I appreciate how complicated My Brilliant Friend makes these symmetrical family conversations, which reflect both narrow-minded prejudice and the anguish of poverty. I watched “The Money” twice, and I’m still wondering exactly what happened between Elena’s parents (Annarita Vitolo and Luca Gallone) to move them to have her attend middle school. By contrast, in Lila’s house, Fernando (Antonio Buonanno) mostly holds the floor in argument with Lila’s older brother Rino (Tommaso Rusciano) while Nunzia (Valentina Acca), a woman who has given up, does housework in the background. (I’m taking a swing here, but it’s interesting to me that Lila’s doll was named “Nu,” the first syllable of her mother’s name; Nunzia’s helplessness and inability to act is the first thing Lila chucks from her life.)

This culminates in one of the most heartbreaking images in the entire series, where Fernando, driven to fury by his willful daughter, throws her out a window. The force breaks the girl’s arm. In Elena’s narration, the moment is so quickly described it is almost disposable—but only because there seems to be no other language to address what has occurred. “Suddenly the shouting stopped and a few seconds later my friend flew out the window, passed over my head, and landed on the asphalt behind me. I was stunned. Fernando looked out, still screaming horrible threats at his daughter. He had thrown her like a thing.” None of the characters live in a world where they can acknowledge how terrible Fernando has been to his daughter, and so the moment passes into the violence of the rest of their lives. But on-screen, it is stark and horrible. Lila’s half-smirk, as she insists she isn’t hurt, is shattering.

On some level, the entirety of the Neapolitan novels boil down to this single rupture, in the otherwise parallel lives of Lila and Lenù: One continues on to middle school, located outside the neighborhood, while the other isn’t permitted to. Lila’s intense fantasies about Don Achille stem from this realization, as do her close observations of the Pelusos and the Solaras. When Alfredo Peluso (Gennaro Canonico) is arrested by the Carabineri, the camera—and, presumably, Lila—watches how Manuela Solara (Imma Villa) takes the news. By the end of this episode, Lila goes from a girl who seeks to see the broader world—and, with her little book, to contribute to it—into a girl whose concerns are constrained into ever-tighter circles. If she is to be kept from school, her furious, brilliant energy will stew in the neighborhood, and already, its power can be felt.

The neighborhood that Lila and Lenù grow up in is based on Rione Luzzatti, a neighborhood that is still so poorly regarded, a writer for The Guardian couldn’t even get her tour guide to take her there. It’s just a couple of miles away from the ocean; perhaps four miles away from the fanciest oceanside district. The section of the episode where Elena and Lila skip school to walk to the ocean is lovely, suffused with the naive joy of youth. Nasti’s mask of defiance, as Lila, is so well maintained that it’s alarming when she drops it, here, looking behind her in trepidation as the distance between her and the village lengthens. Elena, by contrast, looks lighter and taller, for every step she takes away from the village. She would keep going, all the way to the ocean, but Lila suddenly doesn’t want to.

It’s likely that Lila tried to set Elena up for a punishment; it’s also likely that Lila wanted the punishment to be the end of Elena’s hopes for middle school. It seems that Elena’s mother didn’t want her to go to middle school, but it also seems as if she refrains from using Elena’s disobedience as leverage to take her out of school. It’s true that Lila is terribly oppressed in the neighborhood, and she knows it; but it’s also true that she’s afraid of the rest of the world once she’s outside of her familiar confines. It’s true that Lila wants Elena to stay with her. But it’s also true that she wants Elena to leave, to succeed, to be something she can’t be. My Brilliant Friend establishes this from what is nearly the very beginning: Elena and Lila can’t both leave the neighborhood. Someone is going to have to stay behind.

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Full ScreenPhotos: 11 Nonfiction Books to Read This Fall

The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings by Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen’s posthumous The Flame (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) opens with “Happens to the Heart,” a poem written in the last year of his life. “I was always working steady / But I never called it art / I was funding my depression / Meeting Jesus reading Marx,” it begins. Cohen, whose awards are too numerous to mention at length, but include accolades ranging from the 2011 Glenn Gould Prize to a posthumous 2018 Grammy for best rock performance for “You Want It Darker,” died at the age of 82 the night before the 2016 presidential election. A few weeks before, he’d told a reporter he was “ready to go,” but was planning to put together the book that became The Flame—a compilation of poems and song lyrics alongside illustrations and select entries from his journals—before he did. Fans will be moved by the intimate look inside the brain of the legendary (and multi-talented) songwriter. (Amazon.com)

Photo: From Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

In two deeply researched articles for Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis, the author of several best-sellers including The Undoing Project, Flash Boys, The Big Short, The Blind Side, and Moneyball, took readers into the depths of the Departments of Energy (September 2017) and Agriculture (November 2017) in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. The Fifth Risk (W. W. Norton) compiles these two exposés and adds a third deep dive, this time into the Department of Commerce. Lewis points to trends across all departments, the strongest being the lack of expertise and knowledge those new departmental leaders appointed by the president are exhibiting; given that the federal departments are essential for keeping the government running smoothly, Lewis’s findings are especially unsettling. (Amazon.com)

Photo: From W. W. Norton.

The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen may be best known for his novels (Purity, Freedom, The Corrections), but arguably the most controversial of the literary Jonathans is also a prolific essayist. In The End of the End of the Earth (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a collection of personal essays that range in topic from his love of wild birds (which is vast) to an appreciation of Edith Wharton to a post-9/11 musing, Franzen displays his signature precision and deadpan humor. Come for the snappy sentences, stay for Franzen’s explanation of his public fight with the Audubon Society, which once called his stance on bird conservation “odd climate neo-denialism.” Inside baseball at its finest. (Amazon.com)

Photo: From Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister

Rebecca Traister’s 2016 All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation made waves for its exploration of how the American single woman was growing as a demographic, and therefore becoming an increasingly powerful political and economic force. Now, two years later and months into the Trump presidency, Traister returns with Good and Mad (Simon & Schuster), which speaks to the current zeitgeist by looking at its historical precedent. “Remember all men would be tyrants if they could,” she writes, quoting Abigail Adams’s words to her husband, John, in 1776. “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion.” From suffragettes to #MeToo, Traister’s book is a hopeful, maddening compendium of righteous feminine anger, and the good it can do when wielded efficiently—and collectively. (Amazon.com)

Photo: From Simon & Schuster.

Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World by Bethany McLean

Ten years ago, a lot of people hadn’t heard of fracking, but today, this process of collecting oil and gas from shale rock is well-known. In the past few years the practice has boomed, encouraging those in the energy industry, Wall Street, and politics (including the president) to hope—and ambitiously declare—that it’s just a matter of time before America becomes completely energy-independent, ending the U.S.’s reliance on foreign suppliers like Saudi Arabia and Russia. The journalist and V.F. contributing editor Bethany McLean, who closely covered the Enron scandal, co-authoring the 2003 best-seller The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, takes a closer look at this lofty goal in her new book, Saudi America (Columbia Global Reports), undermining the enthusiasm of energy-independence claims—but not for the reasons we would assume. “The biggest reason to doubt the most breathless predictions about America’s future as an oil and gas colossus has more to do with Wall Street than with geopolitics or geology,” says McLean in an introduction to her book—in other words, it’s not a well-positioned, predictable supply of oil and gas on U.S. soil that’s creating the buzz around this energy stream. Rather, McLean suggests, the boom should actually be attributed to low interest rates. “Questions about the sustainability of the boom are no longer limited to a small set of skeptics,” she writes, predicting how this burgeoning industry will affect our own politics (as it threatens Saudi Arabia and Russia’s energy dominance) and bringing in the industry’s key players, including the late Aubrey McClendon, co-founder of Chesapeake Energy, the fracking start-up which grew swiftly before failing spectacularly. (Amazon.com)

Photo: From Columbia Global Reports.

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

The memoir All You Can Ever Know (Catapult) is written with all the style and narrative of great fiction, so it’s no surprise that acclaimed novelists Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere) and Alexander Chee (Edinburgh, The Queen of the Night) have sung its praises. The debut, written by Catapult magazine’s editor in chief, Nicole Chung, traces the author’s life from being put up for adoption by her Korean parents when she was born prematurely in a Seattle hospital, to being raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. Chung describes a childhood of constantly being the only nonwhite child in the room, of never seeing people who looked like her, and of facing prejudice because of it. As these and other layers of the seemingly uncomplicated adoption come to light, Chung highlights the difficulties not only of her unique situation, but of adoptees in general. In a recent article about the book, Chung wrote, “I often wonder if I would have become a storyteller if not for adoption. On the one hand, that is in my genes: my birth father is a writer. Yet I do think it was partly feeling like an outsider—not just in my white family, but in the place where I grew up—that made me almost desperate for a way to express who I was.” (Amazon.com)

Photo: From Catapult.

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce by Colm Tóibín

Lady Caroline Lamb used the phrase “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know” to describe her lover, Lord Byron, in the early 19th century. (Lady Caroline notoriously exceeded Byron on all counts, and he ended the affair after only months. Her subsequent wrath resulted in a scandal that forced Byron to leave his home country of England.) Irish writer Colm Tóibín, the author of fiction (including 2009’s Brooklyn, the basis of the 2015 film starring Saoirse Ronan), nonfiction, and two plays, re-purposes Lady Caroline’s words for the title of his new book, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know (Scribner), which explores the relationships between these three iconic Irish writers and their fathers. The book, a reckoning with the greatness of Tóibín’s literary predecessors, introduces the dads through the Dublin neighborhood where they all lived and worked (Beckett also makes an appearance), reflecting on modern Irish cultural identity in the process. Tóibín concludes the book with a poem by James Joyce, written on the occasion of his only grandson’s birth, titled “Ecce Puer” (literally translating to “behold the young boy”):

Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.

Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!

(Amazon.com)

Photo: From Scribner.

The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings by Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen’s posthumous The Flame (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) opens with “Happens to the Heart,” a poem written in the last year of his life. “I was always working steady / But I never called it art / I was funding my depression / Meeting Jesus reading Marx,” it begins. Cohen, whose awards are too numerous to mention at length, but include accolades ranging from the 2011 Glenn Gould Prize to a posthumous 2018 Grammy for best rock performance for “You Want It Darker,” died at the age of 82 the night before the 2016 presidential election. A few weeks before, he’d told a reporter he was “ready to go,” but was planning to put together the book that became The Flame—a compilation of poems and song lyrics alongside illustrations and select entries from his journals—before he did. Fans will be moved by the intimate look inside the brain of the legendary (and multi-talented) songwriter. (Amazon.com)

From Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

In two deeply researched articles for Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis, the author of several best-sellers including The Undoing Project, Flash Boys, The Big Short, The Blind Side, and Moneyball, took readers into the depths of the Departments of Energy (September 2017) and Agriculture (November 2017) in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. The Fifth Risk (W. W. Norton) compiles these two exposés and adds a third deep dive, this time into the Department of Commerce. Lewis points to trends across all departments, the strongest being the lack of expertise and knowledge those new departmental leaders appointed by the president are exhibiting; given that the federal departments are essential for keeping the government running smoothly, Lewis’s findings are especially unsettling. (Amazon.com)

From W. W. Norton.

The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen may be best known for his novels (Purity, Freedom, The Corrections), but arguably the most controversial of the literary Jonathans is also a prolific essayist. In The End of the End of the Earth (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a collection of personal essays that range in topic from his love of wild birds (which is vast) to an appreciation of Edith Wharton to a post-9/11 musing, Franzen displays his signature precision and deadpan humor. Come for the snappy sentences, stay for Franzen’s explanation of his public fight with the Audubon Society, which once called his stance on bird conservation “odd climate neo-denialism.” Inside baseball at its finest. (Amazon.com)

From Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister

Rebecca Traister’s 2016 All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation made waves for its exploration of how the American single woman was growing as a demographic, and therefore becoming an increasingly powerful political and economic force. Now, two years later and months into the Trump presidency, Traister returns with Good and Mad (Simon & Schuster), which speaks to the current zeitgeist by looking at its historical precedent. “Remember all men would be tyrants if they could,” she writes, quoting Abigail Adams’s words to her husband, John, in 1776. “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion.” From suffragettes to #MeToo, Traister’s book is a hopeful, maddening compendium of righteous feminine anger, and the good it can do when wielded efficiently—and collectively. (Amazon.com)

From Simon & Schuster.

The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters: The Tragic and Glamorous Lives of Jackie and Lee by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger

In The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters (Harper), New York Times best-selling authors Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger paint a lush picture of the complicated relationship between sisters Jackie Onassis and Lee Radziwill, from their childhood spent in eleven-room New York apartments, to their high-profile, high-drama marriages and affairs, and to their separate attempts at sustaining careers (to varying degrees of success). Gossipy gems are studded throughout the book, which is made up in part from frequent Vanity Fair contributor Kashner’s pieces for this magazine: when Jackie met the then-congressman John F. Kennedy, she was working as the Times-Herald’s “Inquiring Cameragirl” and asked him, “If you went on a date with Marilyn Monroe, what would you talk about?” (Amazon.com)

From Harper.

Professor at Large: The Cornell Years by John Cleese

Compiled from a series of talks that the great wit John Cleese has given as Cornell’s guest lecturer from 1999 to 2017, Professor at Large (Cornell University Press) offers a fascinating insider look at the mind behind Monty Python and Fawlty Towers. Cleese’s lectures are, expectedly, equal parts entertaining and thoughtful, and include a discussion on screenwriting, notes on religion and satire, and tips on fostering creativity, which include marrying a so-called “tortoise mind” with a “hare brain,” and learning to promote a near dream state when exploring new ideas. (Amazon.com)

From Cornell University Press.

Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

The origins of Billion Dollar Whale (Hachette) go back to 2015, when co-authors Tom Wright and Bradley Hope—Wall Street Journal writers who have both been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes—began reporting on a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund following rumors about its huge debts and sketchy business dealings. The book provides a definitive, gripping inside account of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal (known as 1MDB) involving the former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s channeling $700 million from the government-run strategic development company 1Malaysia Development Berhad to his personal bank accounts. The real center of the story, though, is an innocent-looking Wharton grad by the name of Jho Low, the Penang-based financier embroiled in the scandal who, with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others, managed to swindle roughly $5 billion, pulling off one of the biggest financial frauds in history—and exposing the secret nexus of finance, Hollywood, and politics in the process. (Amazon.com)

From Hachette.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, whose previous books—Sapiens: A Short History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow—took a sweeping look back at humanity’s past and forward to its future, now turns his focus to the present with 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Spiegel & Grau). That he’s completing the trilogy now is opportune: this is a particularly confusing time to be alive. “In a world deluged by irrelevant information,” Harari writes in the introduction to his new book, “clarity is power.” His contribution to clarity: 21 succinct lessons for humanity to understand the world as it is today. In the days leading up to Homo Deus’s U.S. publication, Harari discussed the current climate in a TED Talk conversation with Chris Anderson: “I think the basic thing that happened is that we’ve lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories. And for the last few decades, we had a very simple and very attractive story about what [was] happening in the world,” he said. Harari marks 2016, the year the U.S. elected Trump as president, as a turning point—“the moment when a very large segment [of the population] stopped believing in [the] story. . . . And when you don’t have a story, you don’t understand what’s happening.” (Amazon.com)

From Spiegel & Grau.

Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World by Bethany McLean

Ten years ago, a lot of people hadn’t heard of fracking, but today, this process of collecting oil and gas from shale rock is well-known. In the past few years the practice has boomed, encouraging those in the energy industry, Wall Street, and politics (including the president) to hope—and ambitiously declare—that it’s just a matter of time before America becomes completely energy-independent, ending the U.S.’s reliance on foreign suppliers like Saudi Arabia and Russia. The journalist and V.F. contributing editor Bethany McLean, who closely covered the Enron scandal, co-authoring the 2003 best-seller The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, takes a closer look at this lofty goal in her new book, Saudi America (Columbia Global Reports), undermining the enthusiasm of energy-independence claims—but not for the reasons we would assume. “The biggest reason to doubt the most breathless predictions about America’s future as an oil and gas colossus has more to do with Wall Street than with geopolitics or geology,” says McLean in an introduction to her book—in other words, it’s not a well-positioned, predictable supply of oil and gas on U.S. soil that’s creating the buzz around this energy stream. Rather, McLean suggests, the boom should actually be attributed to low interest rates. “Questions about the sustainability of the boom are no longer limited to a small set of skeptics,” she writes, predicting how this burgeoning industry will affect our own politics (as it threatens Saudi Arabia and Russia’s energy dominance) and bringing in the industry’s key players, including the late Aubrey McClendon, co-founder of Chesapeake Energy, the fracking start-up which grew swiftly before failing spectacularly. (Amazon.com)

From Columbia Global Reports.

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

The memoir All You Can Ever Know (Catapult) is written with all the style and narrative of great fiction, so it’s no surprise that acclaimed novelists Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere) and Alexander Chee (Edinburgh, The Queen of the Night) have sung its praises. The debut, written by Catapult magazine’s editor in chief, Nicole Chung, traces the author’s life from being put up for adoption by her Korean parents when she was born prematurely in a Seattle hospital, to being raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. Chung describes a childhood of constantly being the only nonwhite child in the room, of never seeing people who looked like her, and of facing prejudice because of it. As these and other layers of the seemingly uncomplicated adoption come to light, Chung highlights the difficulties not only of her unique situation, but of adoptees in general. In a recent article about the book, Chung wrote, “I often wonder if I would have become a storyteller if not for adoption. On the one hand, that is in my genes: my birth father is a writer. Yet I do think it was partly feeling like an outsider—not just in my white family, but in the place where I grew up—that made me almost desperate for a way to express who I was.” (Amazon.com)

From Catapult.

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce by Colm Tóibín

Lady Caroline Lamb used the phrase “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know” to describe her lover, Lord Byron, in the early 19th century. (Lady Caroline notoriously exceeded Byron on all counts, and he ended the affair after only months. Her subsequent wrath resulted in a scandal that forced Byron to leave his home country of England.) Irish writer Colm Tóibín, the author of fiction (including 2009’s Brooklyn, the basis of the 2015 film starring Saoirse Ronan), nonfiction, and two plays, re-purposes Lady Caroline’s words for the title of his new book, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know (Scribner), which explores the relationships between these three iconic Irish writers and their fathers. The book, a reckoning with the greatness of Tóibín’s literary predecessors, introduces the dads through the Dublin neighborhood where they all lived and worked (Beckett also makes an appearance), reflecting on modern Irish cultural identity in the process. Tóibín concludes the book with a poem by James Joyce, written on the occasion of his only grandson’s birth, titled “Ecce Puer” (literally translating to “behold the young boy”):

Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.

Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!

(Amazon.com)

From Scribner.

Credit:Vanity Fair

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