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A review by savaging
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
5.0
I'm sitting here with this screen open because I don't know how to write my love for this book.
Is it that a book about a wife and mother in 1970s Italy feels so personally relevant? And I look at the chick-lit cover, personally chosen by this brilliant pseudonymous-anonymous author who refuses to promote her books in any way, and I know we're all feeling this. The absurd cliche: This is what it's like to be a woman. What a stupid idea, that there can be some connecting thread between all of us -- who is 'us' anyway? But when you start out from that stupidity (stupid photos of the sundress-clad, the ones staring out at the ocean, never facing a camera), look what can come from it.
Is it because the writing doesn't have any seams? I didn't realize it until I read Ferrante, but with other books I'm inadvertently making a mental checklist: here's a literary device; here's an awkwardly-worded passage; here's where the character has to be stretched for the sake of the plot... Ferrante's syntax and plotlines are both so much more natural, more inevitable than other books.
Is it that a book about a wife and mother in 1970s Italy feels so personally relevant? And I look at the chick-lit cover, personally chosen by this brilliant pseudonymous-anonymous author who refuses to promote her books in any way, and I know we're all feeling this. The absurd cliche: This is what it's like to be a woman. What a stupid idea, that there can be some connecting thread between all of us -- who is 'us' anyway? But when you start out from that stupidity (stupid photos of the sundress-clad, the ones staring out at the ocean, never facing a camera), look what can come from it.
Is it because the writing doesn't have any seams? I didn't realize it until I read Ferrante, but with other books I'm inadvertently making a mental checklist: here's a literary device; here's an awkwardly-worded passage; here's where the character has to be stretched for the sake of the plot... Ferrante's syntax and plotlines are both so much more natural, more inevitable than other books.