I prefer to think of myself as being inside a tangled knot; tangled knots fascinate me. It’s necessary to recount the tangle of existence, both as it concerns individual lives and the life of generations. Searching to unravel things is useful, but literature is made out of tangles. —Elena Ferrante   My Brilliant Friend (L’amica genial) is the initial eight-episode miniseries in a planned thirty-two-part production of The Neapolitan Novels, a quartet of books written by the enigmatic Italian writer Elena Ferrante and translated into English by Ann Goldstein. It is a co-production between American cable network HBO…