“My Brilliant Friend,” the first installment of the quartet exploring the stormy, lifelong relationship between two Neapolitan girls — Elena (“Lenù”) Greco and Raffaella (“Lila”) Cerullo — was an instant hit. The novel has already been adapted for the stage and screen. This year Italian artist Mara Cerri gave it a whole new life as a graphic novel. Cerri, who also illustrated Ferrante’s children’s book, “The Beach at Night,” collaborated with Italian writer Chiara Lagani and translator Ann Goldstein to create the new edition. Here Cerri explains her process. (This essay was translated from the Italian by Edoardo Andreoni.)
Elena Ferrante’s narrative is a layered structure in which no thread is ever lost, but each resurfaces in the right place, supported by and connected to the rest. Everything I drew was already present in the text. Yet when the written words were broken down into faces, expressions and dialogue, the narrative revealed itself in a new light. That’s simply because the language of comics, born from the collision and interplay of text and images, generates new emotional connections and insights for the reader.
I used acrylic colors and ink on paper to create the panels. I tried to use color so that it would serve the narrative, modulating it with the scenes. Each frame was drawn on a separate sheet, so they could be assembled differently as the story developed. (After we created a sufficient number of panels that could convey the tone of the work, we shared them with Ferrante; she approved the direction we took and supported our freedom of vision and expression with this adaptation.)
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To draw Lila and Lenù, I needed to feel intimately, in my body and my hand, the physical and psychological differences between them — to discover how their different temperaments live within each of us.
In the scene where the girls climb the stairs to meet the neighborhood loan shark Don Achille, the light suddenly comes on and surprises them like two wild creatures: It’s a decisive moment to capture their two natures, which in that moment cannot be hidden.
The drawing style has the materiality and density of Ferrante’s writing. It engages intimately with the environments in which the story is set. The Neapolitan neighborhood, the buildings’ walls, the texture of the streets are one with the characters who inhabit them. Yet, childhood and wonder pierce through like beams of light, revealing blue skies.
This is also what happens on Enzo’s face, the boy who hits Lila in the head with a rock. His face reveals a sensitivity that will explode much later in the book — it’s like a horizon. It’s a face I’m attached to: I remember being on the phone with Chiara Lagani while I was drawing it.
Chiara has often played Elena Greco onstage with her company Fanny & Alexander. On many occasions, it was her voice that set the temperature and internal movement of the drawings. She selected scenes from the book with razor-sharp precision. She learned to work with the silences and pauses that drawing requires, always with the utmost respect and dedication to the original novel.
I’ve found myself rereading what we had created and discovering only then the reasons behind some of the choices we made. The scene in which Lila takes the money from Don Achille’s hand looks like an old fresco. Color fades and all that’s left is the red line of Don Achille’s hand and Elena’s features. The impulse is to erase that moment, blank out its memory. But the dialogue in the speech balloon leaves no escape: “And remember they were a gift from me!” Those words forever mark the moment when Lila and Lenù accept Don Achille’s money. For Lila, that moment will always be a stain.
The scene of the dissolving boundaries is a masterpiece in the novel. Ferrante traces two planes of reality: the colorful fireworks that explode in the sky conceal the brutality of the gunshots. Lila notices this first. The fireworks are fluorescent meteors that shatter the sky and tear the veil of reality. Lila’s face becomes that of a porcelain doll, irreparably cracked. The symbolic elements of the novel came together spontaneously in my hands.
My Brilliant Friend
The Graphic Novel
From the novel by Elena Ferrante
By Chiara Lagani (Adapter), Mara Cerri (Illustrator) and Ann Goldstein (Translator)
Europa Editions. 256 pp. $26
correction
A previous version of this story referred to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan series as a trilogy. It is a quartet. This version has been corrected.
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