Book review: My Brilliant Friend (The Neapolitan Novels #1), by Elena Ferrante
[X-posted to Goodreads.]
An addictive story of friendship, family ties and the casual brutality of life in Naples of the mid-twentieth century. Ferrante (or whoever is behind it) isn't one for ornery sentences or groundbreaking writing, yet through her straightforward storytelling she achieves both an incredible sense of realism --of each and every event having been plucked from someone's life-- and of significance, of simple encounters capturing the suffocating poverty and endless cycle of revenge in her world.
"'Do you know what the plebs are?' 'Yes, Maestra.' At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us."
"'You still waste time with those things, Lenù? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you'll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."
(Final rating pending for after finishing the whole saga, temp rating: 4.5/5.)
An addictive story of friendship, family ties and the casual brutality of life in Naples of the mid-twentieth century. Ferrante (or whoever is behind it) isn't one for ornery sentences or groundbreaking writing, yet through her straightforward storytelling she achieves both an incredible sense of realism --of each and every event having been plucked from someone's life-- and of significance, of simple encounters capturing the suffocating poverty and endless cycle of revenge in her world.
"'Do you know what the plebs are?' 'Yes, Maestra.' At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us."
"'You still waste time with those things, Lenù? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you'll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."
(Final rating pending for after finishing the whole saga, temp rating: 4.5/5.)