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4.47 AVERAGE
4.47 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The newest addition to my desert island reading list and one of the best books I've ever read. Twice as good as My Brilliant Friend, which I also loved.
How easy it is to tell the story of myself without Lila: time quiets down and the important facts slide along the thread of the years like suitcases on a conveyor belt at an airport; you pick them up, put them on the page, and it’s done.I'm not surprised that both my and the average rating for the second of a burgeoning saga of life is higher than the first. [b:My Brilliant Friend|13586707|My Brilliant Friend (The Neapolitan Novels, #1)|Elena Ferrante|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1343064947s/13586707.jpg|19174054] rightfully had the myopic gaze of childhood with all its tyrants and ghouls and children-as-financial-investment-that-you-can-thrash-the-life-out-of, but much as I can't imagine very many adolescents fluent in Italian picking it out to read, so too is the audience of translated historical fiction going to be of the older sort. The ratings are similarly high for the third and even higher for the penultimate fourth, which aggravates the temptation that comes with a narrative of chronological lifespan of cross referencing receptive audience age with that of the pseudonymous writer and seeing where that voice, incisively expressive even within the necessarily repressive structure of the mind of a youth before the age of the Internet and the smartphone, comes to ground. An ultimately fruitless fallacy, what with the adults denying any scrap of a younger self with every diatribe against Millennials and children ignorant in the face of the void of the future, but that just goes to show what a wonder these books are, and what a triumph it will be if the second half does indeed hold up.
It’s more complicated to recount what happened to her in those years. The belt slows down, accelerates, swerves abruptly, goes off the tracks. The suitcases fall off, fly open, their contents scatter here and there. Her things end up among mine: to accommodate them, I am compelled to return to the narrative concerning me (and that had come to me unobstructed), and expand phrases that now sound too concise.
I approached my seventeenth birthday with one eye on the daughters of the stationer and one on Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.Only certain people can make a living off of taking themselves seriously, and I mean right off the bat, not after having to deal with the public erasure of their names and their faces and their particularly unique and excruciating bullshit that each member who looks and sounds like them has to undergo. I'm never going to be able to find the institutionalized reception of this work and the series in general anything but ridiculous, for all it's "This came out of nowhere! How could it have actually come from somewhere?" straight from the pages of [b:How to Suppress Women's Writing|1047343|How to Suppress Women's Writing|Joanna Russ|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348197924s/1047343.jpg|158173]. I can't imagine how constipated all these reviewers are if they are able to write or speak something like that with a straight face, all this "new" and "written by a woman" and the only comparison they could ever make to another member of the gender is to a woman two centuries back. Oh, but this one's angry, so she's unique. Here's the thing about the wunderkind pruned from a particular demographic every five years or so: they come, they see, they burn out, absorbed into a single line in a book of a thousand or the pages of various history books that talk about how they were hugely popular in their day but, mysteriously, have faded almost completely with time.
We were, in short, on the side of the violation, but only because it reaffirmed the value of the rule.This is a bildungsroman with equally heavy academia and soap opera, not erotica, but my review of [b:Delta of Venus|11041|Delta of Venus|Anaïs Nin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388793271s/11041.jpg|1369571] still applies, in that it's not that it was the prose, or the characters, or the themes, or any combination of these things that I could point in the general direction of in order to explain my love. It's cause this author's doing what many a great author does and takes things seriously, but ups the ante by taking those things seriously that everyone says you shouldn't. The workings of [b:Romeo and Juliet|18135|Romeo and Juliet|William Shakespeare|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327872146s/18135.jpg|3349450], explicated with all its toxic masculinity and feminine lust and welded to the mafia, the domestic life, and the perspective, of all things, of a woman. Not a stereotype, but someone who enjoys academia (to a point), sex (to a point), men (to a point), women (to a point), thinking, feeling, writing, lust, avarice, pride, envy, and has not yet but certainly will grow into the oh so appealing persona she has so carefully cultivated with all the monstrous dexterity of a social climber working in a society that either wants her to be fucked or to fuck off.
I was stunned, I had never heard a man talk about himself like that. The whole time, even when he spoke of his own brutality, he used a dialect full of feeling, defenseless, like the language of certain songs. I still don’t know why he behaved that way.The appeal for me is obvious, seeing as how I am a mere one, soon to be two, years older than the protagonist is at the turn of the last page, and close enough to envy her early successful orientation towards literature and shy away from everything else. I have also finished one stage of school, I will also be attending the wedding of a couple of friends of similar age to mine, and I have also been fumbling, to various degrees of failure and success, with this business called living. What I loved most, perhaps, was the narrative's lack of pandering when it came to interiority of any and all, something nearly all male authors should be ashamed of themselves when comes to their own spread of characters. Indulge in the exploration of the sadist, if you will, but if that's all you've got, the fact that you've been favored for the last five hundred years doesn't bode well for the next. Luckily for me, this was not one of those much lauded q-tips of the same old same old, but the bleeding ax of someone who writes because there is no way around it, but doesn't use that as an excuse to write badly.
The hours passed, but it was impossible for me to accept that he was as profound in confronting the great problems of the world as he was superficial in feelings of love.
She felt only that time had passed, that what had been important was important no longer, that the tangle in her head endured and wouldn’t come untangled.I zipped through this half out of reason of due date, half out of that I could, half out of how pleasurable it was to find so many pleasures escaping from their boxes decreed by polite society and fornicating in abandon. Do I think it's great literature? Time will tell with that one. Will I read the fourth as of yet un-to-readed book in this series? Probably, but many a staggered halt with former bibliographically long winded favorites has made me wary of sequential commitment. Should everyone read it? Sure, if they can stand to consider never reading a book by a white male for the rest of their life. If your reaction to that particular frame of thinking is violent, the book will do all too well without you.
“Don’t read books that you can’t understand, it’s bad for you.”
“A lot of things are bad for you.”
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I was really excited for this book after devouring the first in the series, but it was a denser, less entertaining read. Parts of the plot excited me, and I continued to want to know what would happen to these characters, but the unlikability of all the characters started to wear on me. Still, I respect the author's commitment to angry, jealous women, and the story had some twists.
Really enjoyed this - probably more than the first one, once I had got into it
Še boljša kt prva! Ne morem vrjet da nimam naslednjega dela in da resno razmišljam da bi šla kupt knjigo z rdečimi platnicami, tok je dobra serija. Priporočam.
challenging
hopeful
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
in every way an upgrade on book 1. probably helped by the fact I read it in Naples and Ischia and Amalfi.
at one level a total soap opera that is impossible to put down. at another a sneaky work of absolute literary genius, one that contains the entire world.
at one level a total soap opera that is impossible to put down. at another a sneaky work of absolute literary genius, one that contains the entire world.
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
What gripping writing that portrays the ever shifting, tumbling emotions that tie Lila and Elena together so inseparably throughout the years. A deeply psychological book? With biting commentary on gender and class.