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2015 Book Review #44: My Brilliant Friend
Title: My Brilliant Friend
Author: Elena Ferrante
Genre: Memoiresque
Thingummies: 2.5
Synopsis: Two girls grow up in post-WWII Naples.
Thoughts: It's not clear, without research, how much of this is autobiographical--the narrator shares a name with the author, but the series is marketed as novels. The fact that this was part of a series was also not clear to me on cursory inspection; it was with some irritation that I discovered that the ending is entirely unsatisfactory and clearly intended to be taken up in the next book.
I'm not quite sure why this never won me. Some of it is that, while this is set like a historical novel, the girls are so insulated and insular that I never really got that good a sense of the world around them. Some of it is the voice--Elena balances between the naivete of the period of life she's writing about and the knowledge of an older woman, and the balance was annoying. She comes across as too knowing to be making the mistakes she's making, since she can see in hindsight how terrible some of the decisions are. But she stays too closely tied to the viewpoint to give us real reflection, I guess as a way of avoiding spoilers.
So it ends up reminding me of an old pen pal of mine--someone who knows she's making bad decisions, is surrounded by a social milieu that encourages those decisions anyway, and turns into a willful, slow-moving trainwreck. To me, it felt less enlightening and more just painful. There is clearly almost nothing to hope for on behalf of most of the characters. And most of them are fairly unpleasant people to be around. While there is perhaps truth in this representation, that doesn't mean I enjoyed the experience.
Author: Elena Ferrante
Genre: Memoiresque
Thingummies: 2.5
Synopsis: Two girls grow up in post-WWII Naples.
Thoughts: It's not clear, without research, how much of this is autobiographical--the narrator shares a name with the author, but the series is marketed as novels. The fact that this was part of a series was also not clear to me on cursory inspection; it was with some irritation that I discovered that the ending is entirely unsatisfactory and clearly intended to be taken up in the next book.
I'm not quite sure why this never won me. Some of it is that, while this is set like a historical novel, the girls are so insulated and insular that I never really got that good a sense of the world around them. Some of it is the voice--Elena balances between the naivete of the period of life she's writing about and the knowledge of an older woman, and the balance was annoying. She comes across as too knowing to be making the mistakes she's making, since she can see in hindsight how terrible some of the decisions are. But she stays too closely tied to the viewpoint to give us real reflection, I guess as a way of avoiding spoilers.
So it ends up reminding me of an old pen pal of mine--someone who knows she's making bad decisions, is surrounded by a social milieu that encourages those decisions anyway, and turns into a willful, slow-moving trainwreck. To me, it felt less enlightening and more just painful. There is clearly almost nothing to hope for on behalf of most of the characters. And most of them are fairly unpleasant people to be around. While there is perhaps truth in this representation, that doesn't mean I enjoyed the experience.