Reviews

Real real good, Ferrante does it again! At least, for me. But halfway through this book I was seized with rage and frustration and anxiety. Even then it was clear that she had really captured something. A powerful book that felt timely on a personal note and depicted this particular experience with all its ugliest truths. Her writing is just… phenomenal.

Some of my favorite bits:
Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knickknacks in the hands of their straying men.

I felt over every inch of my body the scratches of sexual abandonment, the danger of drowning in scorn for myself and nostalgia for him.

Women without love die while they are still alive.

Don’t let yourself break like an ornament… the destroyed woman… my job, I thought, is to demonstrate that one can remain healthy. Demonstrate it to myself, no one else. If I am exposed to lizards, I will fight the lizards. If I am exposed to ants, I will fight the ants. If I’m exposed to thieves, I will fight the thieves. If I am exposed to myself, I will fight myself.

A long passage of life together, and you think he’s the only man you can be happy with, you credit him with countless critical virtues, and instead he’s just a reed that emits sounds of falsehood, you don’t know who he really is, he doesn’t know himself.

I decided, enough pain… I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, while I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.

The responsibilities that we had shared were all mine now, even the responsibility of having been unable to keep our relationship alive.

I have to relearn - I said to myself - the tranquil pace of those who believe they know where they’re going and why.

How much of him would I be forced to love forever, without even realizing it, simply by virtue of the fact that I loved them?

But the emotion was surprisingly pleasant, as when a book or a film makes us suffer, not life.

No. Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin…