A friendship
de Silvia Avallone
translated from Italian by Françoise Brun, Liana Levi, 528 p., € 23
This story of an all-consuming friendship between two teenage girls inevitably recalls The Prodigious Friend, by Elena Ferrante. As brilliant a storyteller as her Italian colleague, Silvia Avallone slips into the meanders of the same river that carries Beatrice and Elisa in its turbulent waves. And it is in T., an important seaside village “imprisoned in his anonymity”that the two teenagers met at the turn of the 2000s.
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The novel opens with the discovery of a Polaroid escaped from Elisa’s diary. We are in 2019, she is 33 years old and teaches literature at the University of Bologna. Behind the photo, a date – June 14, 2001 – and four words – ” Friends forever “. Elisa, carrot-red hair cut short, an oversized sweatshirt, a suspicious smile. Beatrice, red lips, purple nails, emerald eyes, life to bite…
Then come the memories of five years of a crazy friendship that will end the night Italy won the football World Cup. A quarrel that has lasted for thirteen years. Elisa then feels the urgency to tell their story, at least “her” truth of their tumultuous relationships, made up of fascination and rejection, love and hatred, humiliation and reconciliation… “We could do each other good and harm, we had each given ourselves the keys to enter into the fragility of the other. »
The truth behind the masks
With her lively pen, with a keen sense of narration and hard-hitting dialogue, Silvia Avallone dissects the daily lives of the two friends: scooter rides, first flirtations, selfies and flamboyance for one, books and discomfort for the other… But what makes the novel so captivating are the characters who revolve around them, each weaving the threads of a canvas in the center of which Beatrice and Elisa take shape…
In the first place their mothers who “spread throughout (their) being like a creeper”. That of Elisa, a worn worker, with a messy love: “Why do you love me so little, mum? » That of Beatrice, married to a rich man, whose sole objective is to make her daughter a fashion star. Equally endearing are the men. Paolo, Elisa’s father, a reserved man whom his daughter bullies, one of the first to see the potential of the Internet. Niccolo, his brother, who sinks into alcohol and drugs. Their lovers, Lorenzo and Gabriele, overwhelmed by their excesses.
What can Elisa reveal about Beatrice, who has become a world-famous social media icon? Silvia Avallone probes the relationship between writing and fiction while Elisa searches in her talisman book, Lie and spell by Elsa Morante, the truth behind the masks…