tob 3/18,19 Ferrante

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March 20?

• March 20 Meg Wolitzer All the Light We Cannot See v. The Paying Guests

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March 19 Manuel Gonzales The Bone Clocks v. A Brief History of Seven Killings

AmberBug @ ShelfNotes Drew • 3 hours ago   You wouldn't be if you had to sleep next to someone who HATES any light of any kind when trying to sleep... and you love to stay up and read late. I reluctantly bought a paperwhite (no distractions with other apps, looks kinda like paper? 'hehe' and is backlit as opposed to blinding light in your retinas) and I've come to really love reading it snuggled up in bed at night.    ALL other times, it must be physical book, I even lugged Brief History in my purse and had to heat and medicate my back/shoulder because of it, haha.

ekdumas19 • 4 minutes ago    Well this judging has convinced me that I need to go back and commit and finish A Brief History. If only my reward would be to take a field trip to Jamaica afterwards!     Ding dong, the Mitchell [Bone Clocks] is dead. Sorry not sorry!



Little Life   by auth of ppl in trees




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March 18  Tayari Jones Everything I Never Told You v. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
 /already noted, where? phone notepad?//
I found myself not caring about what happened to Lydia, but why it happened. The answer involves identity, race, class, sexuality, misunderstandings, and dumb luck. The ensuing misfortune is devastating, borrowing the inevitability of a Shakespearean drama while further interrogating the “tragic mulatto” narratives already questioned by the Harlem Renaissance.

Chico McDirk JimMcC • 5 days ago
Frankly, any other explanation for the death, namely murder or suicide //so: was an accident//, would have seemed like a cop-out to me. But I didn't realize that until after the end. That's the power of Ng's characterization of Lydia, imo.


Kristin Boldon • 6 days ago
I just finished the Ng this morning. It strongly reminded me of The Lovely Bones, another flawed but popular first novel about a dead girl and how the family falls apart.  I thought about putting it down halfway through, as I did the Doerr, because, among other things, the writing nagged at me. /me too./ When the dad is reading the autopsy report, it says something like "he learned that there was delicate foam lace in her lungs" and other flowery metaphors, and he was a historian not a poet who might have come up with those on his own, and the autopsy report damn well didn't say those flowery metaphors, and it continues to bug me, as does a comparison of sunshine to butter near the end, (was there also one at the beginning?)

Karissa Chen • 5 days ago
Man. Ng's book was my favorite book I read last year. I'm surprised so many people felt it was unbelievable or that her characters were unlikable -- it felt so true to me, the way people don't communicate, how we as humans try our best to do good by the people we love but that we all have these fundamental issues and flaws that often mean we end up hurting each other. I couldn't stop thinking about the book for days after I put it down -- it was so heartbreaking to me. I know people like that in real life. Probably also being an Asian American woman, I understood so acutely the desire to want to fit in but also to be ambitious but also to please your parents and their expectations of you. I felt that I could understand every character in their family, why they were the way they were, and I couldn't judge them for their missteps, even though it all ended in tragedy.


 /already noted, where? phone notepad? *   /especially confident I noted re this, Italian in translation, prose style cf Knausgaard ...
- Caroline Pruett • 6 days ago  I haven't read the Ferrante yet but since there have been comments on the quality of the prose, I'm curious if we have any Italuan-fluent readers who can comment on the translation, how her work is viewed by Italian critics, etc.
-aliceunderskies:  I've not read the third book yet, but in the first two the prose doesn't have the flowery, romantic loveliness of (I assume from comments here) Doerr or the self-conscious showiness of Mitchell. In part that is because Ferrante's whole thing is the self-abnegation of the author;
I think I could pick her sentences out of a lineup at this point, but at the same time her personality doesn't dominate the way, say, Mitchell's does.
However, it's not what I would consider bad writing; it just has a different goal. It's less about painting glorious word-pictures on a sentence-by-sentence level than it is about building a psychological panorama of two main characters and a particular society at large.
The craft happens at a structural level, and I find it to be enormously effective at what I perceive as its goal.
It has some similarities to Knausgaard, if you've read him: unremarkable or even ugly (translated) prose, but--for me at least--a hypnotic cumulative worldbuilding and philosophy that is only gradually revealed.   <<< feeling v int in Knausgaard.  and I tht his prose as trans in Archipelago edtn A Time for Evth was excellent, lovely.  //
There has been a lot of worthwhile literary criticism about this aspect of her writing.  << int. int to read (at lst sample her bks, and read abt, maybe especially 'this aspect' =?


* yes  here: below from notepad, duplicating above but also more?
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tmn tob 3/19 ferrante v ng
// & +   Knausgaard.   St Aubyn.


-ekdumas:   I had an interesting progression with the Ferrante. I made it a mission to read all three books. I didn't like the first book at all. The machine gun writing style was really jarring and made it hard to get into the characters. The main character Elena was annoying and whiney. By Book 2, the story picked up. The girls got older, they starting having more relationships. Shit goes down. Book 3 was a little heavy on the Italian political talk but there continued to be lots of drama. That book actually felt better written to me so either I was used to the style or Ferrante just got better as she went along. I don't think this is a series for everyone. I wouldn't say it's particularly well written but I don't think that is supposed to be its strength. To me, it felt not only like a very honest look at the life of women in Naples at that time but a progression of women's lives in general and how they relate to other women. While there is a large chunk of the story related to men and affairs and children and maybe the more typical "women" things, the crux of the story remains the relationship between the two central women characters and I think that's what makes it quite good.      -If nothing else, the Ferrante books are very real and believable. Lots of "crazy" stuff happens, but I don't at all feel like that was unrealistic for the time period or for Italians. I think those books showed a really honest look at what living in Naples as a woman post WW2 was like.
--Yeah. I keep having to remind myself that the Ferrante books are not a memoir. At least I think they're not.

-Caroline Pruett:
I haven't read the Ferrante yet but since there have been comments on the quality of the prose, I'm curious if we have any Italuan-fluent readers who can comment on the translation, how her work is viewed by Italian critics, etc.

-aliceunderskies:  I've not read the third book yet, but in the first two the prose doesn't have the flowery, romantic loveliness of (I assume from comments here) Doerr or the self-conscious showiness of Mitchell. In part that is because Ferrante's whole thing is the self-abnegation of the author; I think I could pick her sentences out of a lineup at this point, but at the same time her personality doesn't dominate the way, say, Mitchell's does. However, it's not what I would consider bad writing; it just has a different goal. It's less about painting glorious word-pictures on a sentence-by-sentence level than it is about building a psychological panorama of two main characters and a particular society at large. The craft happens at a structural level, and I find it to be enormously effective at what I perceive as its goal.
It has some similarities to Knausgaard, if you've read him: unremarkable or even ugly (translated) prose, but--for me at least--a hypnotic cumulative worldbuilding and philosophy that is only gradually revealed.
There has been a lot of worthwhile literary criticism about this aspect of her writing.



-Am I the only one who read 'Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay' before reading the other books in the series? (BTW it is supposedly not the last book in a trilogy, but the 3rd book in a 4 book series, one more to come). I loved it, devoured it. I loved the style of writing, but more importantly I loved the way the author managed to capture the inner-lives of women - perhaps it is just me being narcissistic as a identified very much with Elena - and how the protagonists were so realistic. Lila is smart, and a firebrand, and obviously so capable, and in the hands of another author she would overcome everything to become a great person. Yet here she has had a hard life, not really realised her potential, and because of easily believable reasons - poverty, misogyny, just life dealing her a bad break. Sometimes I want to read fantasy and get away from real life, but sometimes an author takes us inside what feels like a real, true world that works to real-life rules and it is marvelous.    I have now started on the first book in the Ferrante series and look forward to reading the 'backstory' of Elena and Lila's lives.

-The magic of Ferrante’s Naples books for me is that they are a sustained  fascination, the object of which is Lila. That this is carried across hundreds  of pages, undiminished, deserves special mention. The Lila in Elena’s head is  the dominating feature of this work, so haunting because the full thrill of  knowing her is set alongside the toll she exacts on the woman closest to that thrill: Elena. Lila fascinates Elena in presence and absence, through actual  and imagined words, whether her talents are being deployed or left to waste.      Elena’s life is a years-long struggle with this bewitching, doomed, and consuming force that won’t ever be escaped or apprehended.


-I've started My Brilliant Friend and I'm enjoying it, but I am in no hurry. I can't imagine burning through them all quickly.

-Mr H:  I thought that way too, but as I was finishing it, I had to have the next one in my hand, so I could start it right away. I don't think I've ever had that happen to me before.   -I hv bn struggling to explain the Ferrante novels and my compulsion to keep reading them, because I have no idea what I like so much about them. They’re realistic, emotionally engaging, and hyper-focused on small moments to an extent that makes them notable, but I don’t know that the writing is consistently great, and Those Who… was my least favorite of the three, possibly because I had quite enough of boring people talking about communism when I was in a punk band. So John’s description of the books as a good but not great thing that you JUST MUST finish is perfect, and balm to my inability to describe my own feelings. And the judge’s description of the writing as “ragged as a kitchen-table haircut”
¥

-aliceunderskies:   I haven't read the third book yet, but I share this experience of Ferrante. They are a bit like being held hostage--which, yes, was my experience with St. Aubyn--but unlike the Patrick Melrose novels there's a feeling of concrete reality beyond Elena's subjectivity. It's very hard to describe! I don't recommend them to a lot of people because it's the type of thing that either resonates or doesn't.

// do look at Edw St Aubyn (author ~ On the Edge this yr re Esalen)  Patrick Melrose novels  ****

-Mr H:   I can't recall a series that's harder to describe (maybe because I still haven't gotten to the Patrick Melrose novels). My wife asked me what they were about and I had to basically speak in ellipses and questions: "Um...Naples? And...friends...in a small town there? Growing up?" I couldn't even decide whether to recommend them to her, and I know her reading tastes pretty well, what with us being married and all.

-Barniclaw;   While I don't hate this series, I'm also not falling over myself recommending them to others (like I am with ALBS...and with My Struggle, for that matter). /ah Knausgaard ********
But there's so much that kept me reading, even when I was wishing the characters would leave their childhood selves behind for good and stop making the same mistakes (or awful new ones). But that, too, is very lifelike. Sigh. I'm bummed the next one doesn't come out until November. At least I only have a few weeks more for Karl Ove's Book Four.  //

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^BarniClaw  13 days ago
http://tomandlorenzo.com/2015/03/eddie-redmayne-on-the-set-of-the-danish-girl/    -Wow, that last pic of him as Lili is stunning.    
themorningnews.org/tob/2015/the-bone-clocks-v-adam.php
-Mr Hilary: It was definitely the book where I stopped, took a step back, and said, "You know, I don't have to read all of these."
-BarniClaw  Mr. Hilary  10 days ago
Totally. Did the same with a couple more after Adam (Brave Man, Witt Jr.).
~~~~

¥ .. -Mr H:   Everything was a book I enjoyed, a mystery more about the unraveling than the solution, and by the end, I kind of had forgotten that whole framing of it. It had a Virgin Suicides vibe to it, probably just because a kid dies and my metaphors are lazy, but that’s always a good thing to me.

-Full disclosure, for me, Everything I Never Told You was the book that surprised me this year. There was nothing on the book jacket that interested me. There was nothing at all I could relate to and yet when I was reading about Marilyn's backstory, I was as riveted as any early interest I had in the whodunnit aspect of the novel. To me, this is a far more difficult thing to achieve as a writer than something with a more epic premise and adventurous plot. I'm reminded of the Luminaries, which on the surface - New Zealand Gold Rush! Murder Mystery! Love Story! - I should love everything about that and yet reading it was like eating cooked spinach. I'm sorry to see the Ng go, but glad the tournament made me read it.

-−Chico McDirk  to FictionFan
11 hours ago  -This kind of book has been done a lot //kind=?  incl Virgin Suicides?/, but it's still important to recognize when it's done this well... maybe because it's been done a lot.

-This commentary is making me realize that I don't care for omniscient narrators..
--Caroline Pruett  OutLikeALamb
a day ago  -I don't mind the technique but can see it's not that compatible with a story that turns on a mystery.

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