Month: March 2026

Categories
Ferrante

My Brilliant Friend (Yeah, She’s Pretty Great)

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 this book, ha.

What can I say, I’m pleased. Sometimes it’s really the simple things in life. Some of the books in this course had quite intriguing premises (a deadly heist, a seller of pasts, a woman speaking from death etc.). This book is just about two girls in Italy in the 1950s, living life.  Lucky me, I’m a sucker for female friendship stories. Yes, tell me about why you hate someone’s cousin’s father’s ex, and their entire family lore. Yes, tell me about every single character’s break-up, every petty grudge. Yes, tell me about every single grade you got in school. I’m not even being sarcastic. That details truly kept me going.

It was a lot of Marcello this, Nino that, but that was fine, that’s the reality of adolescence. As Elena/Lenu repeatedly tells us, Lila is the main obsession. So much so that when helping Lila get ready for her wedding, she has “the hostile thought that [she] was washing her, from her hair to the soles of her feet, early in the morning, just so that Stefano could sully her in the course of the night,” and the only remedy for this pain “was to find a corner secluded enough so that Antonio could do to me, at the same time, the exact same thing” (313). If that isn’t peak adolescence, I don’t know what is (minus the getting married part).

The last third really had me feeling for both girls. I imagine the next book section will be titled something like “adulthood,” but the girls are just barely sixteen. For Lila to basically be responsible for the fate of the family and their business, and for Lenu to get three hours of sleep to study just to feel “more strongly than ever the meaninglessness of school”… (276). (Insert sad face emoji)

My only qualms were certain characters, but that’s a sign of good writing, I guess. Donato Sarratore can die, and honestly, I don’t think the Solaras brothers are worth any attempted (but then abandoned?) redemption arcs. And you know what, he’s not his father, but I’ll say it, Nino is a jerk.

Anyways. Longest book I’ve read in a bit.

Categories
Agualusa

The Book of Chameleons (NOBODY’S GONNA KNOW)

I liked this one! I felt like I read it in mere minutes, it went by so quick. I really felt this book, felt it sweating and sweet as I read it, as our gecko narrator scurries along the wall “like a tick on its host’s skin” and describes how the sun “silenced the birds, lashed at the trees and begun to melt the asphalt” (9). There was also this recurring image of stars I found quite beautiful:

“I could easily makeout the river, the stars spinning across its back” (24).

“It was as though falling from the sky were the thick fragments of that sleepy black ocean through which the stars navigate their course” (63).

Right up there with “The Shrouded Woman” in terms of quotability.

The back of the book misled me, though I have no complaints. I was promised a “completely original murder mystery” full of intriguing characters, but while there was great no mystery in the murder, the people were full secrets. We follow Felix Ventura, a genealogist, but also “a man who dealt in memories, a man who sold the past, clandestinely, the way other people deal in cocaine” watched by a gecko named Eulálio who is a reincarnation of a human (16). The two are both artists, dreamers:

“I create plots, I invent characters, but rather than keeping them trapped in a book I give them life, launching them out into reality” Felix tells the gecko in a dream (68). And they do a lot of dreaming.

That’s where things got messy for me but also made for some good food-for-thought. Dreams start blurring into the present, fiction starts bleeding into reality, and whole identities and even histories start being fabricated. José Buchmann, an identity Felix creates for someone, becomes obsessed with finding out about the real José Buchmann and turns out Felix’s false backstory bares an uncanny resemble to the real one. Or does it? Felix seems pretty chill and normal aside from his best friend being a lizard, so who knows?

(You know that audio that’s like “Nobody’s gonna know. They’re gonna know. How would they know?” Yeah. That was me reading about Eulálio watching them make up another backstory for God knows who.)

I think that’s why I found the whole José -Buchmann-searching-for-his-fake-or-real-past-thing to be kind of confusing. But Angela was cool, though. She can identify where any photograph was taken just by the light. Now that’s the kind of oddly specific, niche skill that makes you the kind of cool I aspire to be.

Overall, this was a confusing yet compelling read. Messy but very memorable and I will be thinking about it for a while so I didn’t mind.

Sofia

Categories
Piglia

Money to Burn (Bruh)

Okay, I know this might be a controversial take, but I was bored. Up until the money-burning scene. No offense to Ricardo Piglia, but the genre just isn’t for me. I’ve never been drawn to crime or true crime stories, nor do I particularly enjoy action. They tend to make me feel dizzy and depressed. I suspect that Piglia’s novel would have had the same effect on me if it weren’t for that ending. I just wasn’t very interested in reading a book about a bunch of criminals obsessed with drugs and sex.

That is, until they started setting money on fire. That scene was genuinely the best in the book (I mean, I would hope, given the title). The line “burning innocent money is an act of cannibalism” (158)????? Insane. The outrage the public has over money being destroyed compared to the robbery and multiple murders???? Insane. It’s good social commentary I suppose. The fact that they managed to hold everything down for hours while completely coked up was honestly impressive. The fact that this was based on real events was also impressive. I suspected it might have been inspired by real events but knowing that it actually was brought it up a notch for me.

The epilogue really saved the book. Learning that Piglia just coincidentally ran into Blanca Galean, “the Girl,” as she’s called in the story, and that she casually gave him the rundown of the lore on a train to Bolivia was wild.

The thing is, the story felt familiar even before I started. Money to Burn carried a kind of Quentin Tarantino vibe with its cinematic crime scenes. It also reminded me a lot of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: the nonfiction novel format, the focus on planning, and the way the characters’ psyches are presented as fascinating, morally grey figures. Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just not my cup of tea. Also I genuinely could not keep track of who was who at any point my bad.

So yeah, it was incredibly predictable, but still well-paced enough that I made it to the end. I’m glad I pushed through though because never did I think I’d read a novel where being able to “carry a joint hidden in my balls, and to stash the wraps of dope in my arsehole” would be treated as a point of pride but here we are.Top of FormBottom of Form

Categories
Duras Uncategorized

The Lover (I Get It, I Just Don’t Like It)

Another book, another terrible love interest. Can we talk about how everyone in this narrator’s life is simply awful? To begin with, she’s fifteen and a half when she meets and begins a sexual relationship with a twenty-seven-year-old man. When her mother discovers that she’s been skipping school so he can pick her up in his limousine, the reaction is barely a reaction at all. Instead, she says “even I, her own mother, can’t do anything about it, if I want to keep her I have to let her be free,” (71). There’s no outrage, no attempt to intervene, no sense that anyone is protecting her or cares about her at all.

Her family is atrocious. When they finally meet her lover, their response is pure opportunism. They make him take them out to dinners at expensive restaurants and then proceed to ignore him. It’s an uncomfortable scene, but it also captures the layers of power at work in the novel. In the racial hierarchy of the Vietnam at the time, her white brothers are supposedly above the lover, yet economically they are entirely dependent on him in that moment. He is the millionaire paying for the lavish dinner they themselves could never afford. Meanwhile, the mother simply falls asleep after.

I do understand what the novel is trying to do. It’s clearly concerned with memory, childhood, and the distortions that occur when someone looks back on their past from a distance. The hazy quality of the writing mirrors both the unreliability of memory and the atmosphere of the setting; the heavy heat and languid days in Saigon, where everything seems to blur together. Stylistically, I appreciated the disjointed structure of the novel. Sometimes the narrator spoke in first person, sometimes she was in third and I thought that was cool.

I also understand that the narrator wants to be seen. The gold shoes she wears, the man’s fedora, it’s her form of power, and her detachment suggests that she is the one in control. Maybe that distance is to show how memory transforms something painful into something less important, but almost aesthetic. (Do you think she loved her lover the way he loved her, or was she truly detached?) I also recognize that the story is semi-autobiographical, so maybe this Marguerite processing her strange past.

Despite knowing all of this, I could not look past the fact that she was very much still minor and I hated reading it.

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