Your rating:
“Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly. The sentence was uttered under his breath, in the apartment that my parents, newly married, had bought in Rione Alto, at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri. Everything—the spaces of Naples, the blue light of a very cold February, those words—remained fixed. But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story, while in fact I am nothing, nothing of my own, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even the one who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.”
No posts yet
Kick off the convo with a theory, question, musing, or update
Your rating:
(2.5) admittedly I've only read to page 114 but I would have expected this book to grip me in the same way as My Brilliant Friend. This novel fell flat. So far it has been slow and I've found the characters highly irritating. Not for me, will not be continuing. Disappointed.
0I really really enjoyed this. I swore off coming of age novels a while ago because I was annoyed of the same themes and conflicts coming up, but I cannot resist Elena Ferrante. I loved following the main character as she jumped to conclusions, self analyzed, misunderstood, and correctly characterized the actions and events of her family and relatives.
The writing flowed like water. In that it was refreshing and sweet and didn’t need to be chewed on. IT HYDRATED ME. The drama was so. satisfying. I don’t know why. But the way that family secrets and desires unfurled in casual afterthought sentences at the end of chapters really kept me reading. despite all the drama, there was no villain, no one unredeemable. Every character grew somewhat and made themselves susceptible to change.
Also the Roberto /intellectuals vs non intellectuals dimension was so casually suspenseful.
One of my fave books of the year! Effortlessly a lovely novel.
0 0