Lenù and Nino’s relationship is complicated, and they never become a legitimate couple.
During this time, Lenù has a longstanding crush on Nino Sarratore which continues into her teenage years despite dating Gino and Antonio. The girls manage to remain friends over the years despite several rough patches and the very different lives they lead as adolescents. From that point on, Lenù’s academic success is a major source of tension in the girls’ relationship, and Lenù feels simultaneously jealous of Lila’s romantic pursuits yet oddly superior because of her own schooling.
As children, Lenù and Lila bond over their shared love of language and their desire to write a book-but while Lenù admires Lila’s natural intelligence, it is Lenù who’s allowed to continue past elementary school and into middle and high school. Though supportive of her schooling, Lenù’s father is unenthusiastic about her success and he doles out the physical abuse that Lenù’s handicapped mother is unable to inflict. From an early age, Lenù realizes that an education is her only means of attaining a better life than the one her miserable, angry mother leads. Over the course of the book, Elena reflects on her and Lila’s entwined but often divergent paths through young womanhood as they dream of escaping their violent, insular, and economically-depressed neighborhood. At this time, she was known as Lenù, and her life revolved around her “bad” but magnetic friend Lila Cerullo.
The protagonist and narrator of My Brilliant Friend, Elena Greco is a woman in her sixties looking back on her 1950s childhood and early adolescence in an impoverished neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Italy.
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