Grapevine anniversary, My Brilliant Friend, Pulped Fiction
Happy 3rd anniversary to the Grapevine!
I dedicate this issue to the Grapevine’s number one supporter and fan, Ella, whose birthday was yesterday. Thank you for your wisdom, patience and neverjudgmental friendship! 🙏🏻
Hello and happy Sunday!
This weekend marks the third anniversary of the Grapevine! Sometimes stats and milestones take away the serendipitous feeling of an endeavour like this, but it helps to look back and see where we started and how far we’ve come. This post is the 197th.
The main page of my Substack now says:
Whether you’re new or have been here from the beginning, or you joined somewhere along the way
for being here.
Here’s a nostalgic look back on the first Grapevine ever.
My Brilliant Friend
It’s hard to believe My Brilliant Friend will be thirteen this year. It seems like not long ago, Elena Ferrante was winning everyone’s hearts with her writing, compounded by her anonymity.
Though we have not yet met to discuss the gem that is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, we wanted to keep the pace going and picked a shorter, more book club-friendly book for our next read.
A modern masterpiece from one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.
Goodreads.com (331 pages)
It is part of a trilogy and it remains to be seen if we will embark on reading them all, or if we’re sticking to the first one.
Looking back on the years since the book was released it amazes me how I managed to always skirt around it. There was a time when it was everywhere and everyone around me was reading it, and the reason why it came back into focus for me was that I rewatched White Lotus recently, and one of the main characters was reading it on her honeymoon.
The book saw a resurge in interest after 2018 when it was adapted into a mini-series.
According to the New York Times, the director of HBO's My Brilliant Friend shares a haunting connection with Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous author of the Neapolitan novels. Despite never meeting her, the director corresponded with the author for over a decade, seeking to adapt her novella The Lost Daughter (which was eventually adapted by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starred an amazing Olivia Colman who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in it).
Eventually, Ferrante challenged the director to create an adaptation that pleased them both. Still, it took nine more years before Ferrante suggested him as a director for My Brilliant Friend. The author has been heavily involved in the adaptation process, ensuring authenticity and providing feedback on scripts.
I came across this passage from an article in The New Yorker about a specific scene in the book and how it’s depicted on screen.
In one of the loveliest sequences in Elena Ferrante’s novel “My Brilliant Friend,” two girls read “Little Women.” But Elena and Lila don’t merely read the book together. They recite it, they memorize it. They fantasize about emulating Jo March, who escaped poverty by writing. They wreck it with their love: “We read it for months, so many times that the book became tattered and sweat-stained, it lost its spine, came unthreaded, sections fell apart.”
This sequence is a delight in the TV adaptation, too, which is currently airing on HBO. On a bench in their grungy, violent Naples neighborhood, Elena and Lila lounge, bodies entwined, wearing shabby dresses, reading in unison, in Italian. (The show has English subtitles.) Excitedly, Lila recites a passage in which Jo herself reads out loud, from her first published short story, to her sisters, without telling them who wrote it. At the passage’s climax, when Jo reveals herself as the author, the two girls read Jo’s words together, their faces shining, as Lila pounds her chest: “Vostra sorella! ” (“Your sister!”) It’s a thrilling moment, which threw me back to the wild vulnerability of childhood reading. The scene is dramatic, or maybe just specific and sensual, in a way that the version on the page can’t be, and really doesn’t try to be. There’s no dialogue in the book, no chest-pounding, no description of the girls’ clothes, and no quotes from “Little Women.” Ferrante’s book confides more than it describes—that’s both its technique and its insinuating power.
The New Yorker
When I was in high school, our French teacher, a very elegant rich lady with idealistic views of the world, had a saying: a book will always lead you to another book. I can see her in my mind’s eye, clinking the rings on her fingers together, standing in front of the class and looking up, talking about her love for books and how as humans, if we don’t read, we have nothing.
Every time I come across a reference to another book or to another author in my reading, I think of her. Having read Little Women for our book club, I look forward to savouring these moments, to relive the scenes from Alcott’s world through fictitious people’s eyes.
Pulped Fiction
If you think you ran out of ideas of what to do with your time or money, you may be inspired by this story.
British artist David Shrigley pulped thousands of second-hand copies of The Da Vinci Code and transformed them into special editions of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Shrigley was inspired by a charity shop's request to stop donating copies of the Dan Brown novel and acquired 6,000 books to carry out his project, known as Pulped Fiction. As Orwell's works came out of copyright in 2021, Shrigley decided to reprint Nineteen Eighty-Four and replace the discarded novels with it. The pulped editions will be available for sale at the Oxfam store in Swansea, where the idea for the project originated, six years after its conception.
I really wish they’d picked a better thumbnail for this video, though.