Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage. I don’t think I’ve felt this confused about a novel since Combray. Truly, opening the book to two full pages of a spiderweb of characters was daunting, to say the least. It reminded me of the time I atte…
Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage. I don’t think I’ve felt this confused about a novel since Combray. Truly, opening the book to two full pages of a spiderweb of characters was daunting, to say the least. It reminded me of the time I atte…
Wow. I think we can all agree that My Brilliant Friend had quite the brilliant end. If someone wrote a 100-hundred-page thesis on the significance of Marcello wearing the shoes laboured over by Lila that Stefano bought, I would read it front to back. In a way, I feel like I already did by reading […]
Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
I have some mixed feelings about this one… some parts of the book I flew through because the action was so intense, and other parts I felt like I was dragging myself along trying to keep track of what was even happening.. I still thought the story was very interesting but there are so many … Continue reading pig
I probably already mentioned this before but keeping track of all the characters is one of my absolute weaknesses while reading. To be honest, I started off pretty good for this specific text. I made notes of each new character and jotted a bit about who they are so I could refer back to it. […]
Why is this book called the lover??? I mean I get ‘why’ but I definitely don’t like why. Every instance this man had with protagonist was just uncomfortable to the highest degree. Even if I tried to situate myself with context or go with the flow of the story, I wasn’t at ease reading any […]
“Never again shall I..” “From now on I’ll…” “I shall…” “I’ll always have…” (pg. 34). I miss the childlike naivety of knowing everything. While this paragraph seems to be the narrator reflecting on her life, it can also be a manifestation of the young girl determined to be with a man who is majorly, inappropriately, […]
To be honest, I think this is one of the books so far that I actually did not particularly enjoy reading. I just could not get over the fact that the age gap between the two characters was 12 years. There was a lingering discomfort and I really could not get myself to immerse myself […]
There is much to unpack in this novella. First of all, the narrator is a spectacle; who is he? And how has he come to know the fate of Macabea? He portrays himself as a god in this universe, one that cannot exactly change the fate of his characters, but one that can control how we see it. We see…
