Reviews
Entirely captivating
the books feels like looking at an old photo of yourself and not even recognizing that it’s you
full review to come but this was compelling enough for me to read in two sittings — just not as good as i expected, and this might be entirely my fault. i just i felt the story to be way too repetitive (more than it needs to be) at times. beautifully translated though!
I was gifted this book and immediately was so excited to read it. I found this story so unique and compelling, I devoured it in a really short time. While a classic it was so refreshing to read and a very interesting view of the female experience of abandonment.
Although this read was repetitive at times, it was interesting and captivating. Whether good or bad captivating, it was a raw expression of the author and the story she wanted to write. I liked the lack of subtleties and softness at times, the honesty, the lack of care as to what a reader would think about her words. This book made me personally become more aware of how people can lose themselves in difficult times, it felt ridiculous at times, but it also awakened a sense of vigilence and power in the woman in me, who also tends to get frightened about abandonment and dependency on other people.
damn. it’s not often i read a book cover to cover and stay viscerally engaged but miss feronte managed it! what an interesting and depressing protagonist and an interesting and depressing society and ugh men and yeah great book!
This book was so well structured and well-written for being based off a singular event that happens in the first sentence of the book. The writing explores deeply the complications of motherhood and womanhood in modern society and does it in a way that flows so smoothly along with the rest of the plot. It’s an extremely depressing read in some sections while Olga kind of moves in and out of depressive episodes and hallucinations but one that always kept me engaged and had a generally happy ending so that’s always good!
The typical Ferrante style shines through, while also managing to bring something new to the table. This was at times a very, very hard, emotionally draining and heavy read, but once Olga's sanity rises back up to the surface, it feels more than rewarding. Did it touch me as much as My Brilliant Friend did? No, but that's more a problem of the experiences I've had versus the things this book talks about. On that note, I hope that I won't ever be in a situation to relate to this fully.
loved this gave the women destroyed by simone de beauvoir (which was referenced a couple of times in this) the protagonist just seems so real and her actions are understandable even if they’re a bit morally dubious
I did a no-no...I judged a book by it's cover. And, of course, it misled me. I was in the mood to get lost in a story of a woman freeing herself from the chains of a limiting life...losing herself in passion and a bit of ecstasy thrown in for good measure. If I would have read the book jacket, I would have been enlightened that I was treading into a completely different variety of losing oneself. But, I didn't...(because sometimes I want no hints). While the writing was OUTSTANDING, I found myself irritated by the pages and pages of a woman in the throes of mania. I'm all for a healthy breakdown every once in awhile, but this one went a bit too far for my personal taste.
Ferrante is decidely not my typical read, but I wanted to contrast her with Knausgaard, since I've seen so many comparisons of the two. I had a complicated relationship with the book, and with the narrator. Simply put, she descends into a sort of madness after her husband leaves her, and the entirety of the book documents this descent. The minutiae is everything, and that's the point. Ferrante puts us so far into the reader's head that we start to feel things with her as she goes about her daily life. It was tough to get to that point of empathy- for me, at least. Her descent involves so much self-pitying, so much destructiveness, and so much outright cruelty (even towards her own children) that I began to wonder if Ferrante even *wanted* her readers to like the narrator. If you can pull through that, and the rambling abstractions that all too often accompany madness, this is an incredible read.
Highlights
I hated the idea that he knew everything about me while I knew little or nothing of him. I felt like someone who is blind and knows that he is being observed by the very people he would like to spy on in every detail.
The whole future-I thought-will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead, attention with Inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning. But it won't be wose than the past.
But as for me, if all the features that I had assimilated from him had once seemed to me lovable, how, now that they no longer seemed lovable, was I going to tear them out of me? How could I scrape them definitively off of my body, my mind, without finding that I had in the process scraped away myself?
In order to write well, I need to go to the heart of every question, of a smaller, safer place. Eliminate the superfluous, Narrow the field. To write truly is to speak from the depths of the maternal womb.
Wash the body, eliminate all unpleasant traces of physiology. To levitate. I wanted to detach myself from the earth, I wanted him to see me hovering on high, the way wholly good things do…I thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty. I thought anxiously, is this forgetfulness.
Time is a breath, I thought, today it's my turn, in a moment my daughter's, it had happened to my mother, to all my forebears, maybe it was even happening to them and me simultaneously, it will happen.
Hold the commas, hold the periods. It’s not easy to go from the happy serenity of a romantic stroll to the chaos, to the incoherence of the world.
“On the table I saw a metal clip for holding scattered papers together. I took it, I clipped it on the skin of my right arm, it might be useful. Something to hold me.”