Timeline
I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us
As previously said, My Brilliant Friend is set in Naples during the 1950s.
This influences very much the type of circumstances that our characters live in, starting from the fact that they both inhabit a rather poor and ignorant part of the town, from which not many manage to run away.
It is also important to point out that this first installment is set in the years after WWII and this is quite evident in the discourse of many of the adults, starting from Don Achille, who gained his earnings through the black market.
Unlike the adults, many children are not fully aware of the war passed, if not for the terrible feeling of Death left behind, terrorizing them to the point that it adds to many things that might make you end up dead.
To build a timeline of the events going through in the books, it’s quite difficult for a few reasons:
- Elena Ferrante doesn’t ever state – aside from a few occasions – the years in which the events happen, which makes it rather difficult to reconstruct a proper timeline; I have tried to do so through basing myself on the hints that Elena Ferrante leaves behind.
- It’s rather complex to represent linearly the events that take place throughout of the course, because, right since the start, the story is told through flashbacks and a backwards narration; the events aren’t told one after the other, but instead some events are started at certain chapters, discarded for another one, and brought back chapters later.
For example, considering that Lenù is stated to be born in 1944, I inferred that she must have started school around September 1950; still this is meant to be a simple approximation to allow the reader to further contextualize the characters’ lives.
This might appear like an obstacle for a reader, and for this I have tried to recreate this timeline to allow readers to further understand both the focal points of the story and to also contextualize in time the main events of the book.