Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

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The newest novel from Elena Ferrante and a slight, but not total departure for her. This book takes places in the 1980s and 1990s and is narrated by an adolescent girl (who through the course of the novel grows into a teen girl). We begin with her living with her parents when her father makes the remark that she is very ugly. This sets her off in part for the obvious reason of how hateful and cutting and damaging such a remark would be, but […]

cbr12bingo – Fresh Start

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

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I have a confession to make: I judged this book by its cover. I remember the frenzy of press around this book, the series, and the *mysterious* author. I also remember seeing the cover and being completely uninterested. It is, in my opinion, a dreadful cover. It looks like it was cobbled together to act as a prop. It looks like a poorly thought out passion project. I still think the cover is awful, but I am glad that I changed my mind around shunning […]

My mother drowned on the night of May 23rd, my birthday, in the sea at a place called Spaccavento, a few miles from Minturno.

Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante

The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante

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Troubling Love This Elena Ferrante’s first novel and like her later novel The Lost Daughter there’s a lot here that feels very familiar if you’ve read the Neopolitan Novels. The next novel Days of Abandonment is very different. In this novel, we begin with our narrator finding out that her mother’s body has been found in the water, drowned, from an apparent suicide. She begins retracing her mother’s life in the recent years and weeks, and begins to confront the specters of her mother’s life that were […]

“Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?”

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

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I struggle with how to write this review, not wanting to spoil the three novels that preceded it (which I, incidentally, recommend higher than this last one). The Neapolitan Novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of a Lost Child) center around two girls, magnetically close friends (by which I mean they both attract and repel one another), growing up in postwar Naples. Lila (Rafaella) is an object of fascination and (in […]

Writing should in no case be postponed to an “after”

Incidental Inventions by Elena Ferrante

Whose Story is This? by Rebecca Solnit

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This latest collection of Elena Ferrante nonfiction is from a series of columns she wrote (and Ann Goldstein translated) for The Guardian in 2018 and 2019. If you didn’t happen to read the opening introduction from the collection explaining that these are ponderings of specific questions and not pitched essay topics by Ferrante they would seem trite and unimportant. And sometimes they do seem trite and unimportant. But hidden within these are some really interesting ideas about language, fame, women, and other topics of interest. […]

“Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite.” (CBR11 Bingo)

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, Ann Goldstein (Translator)

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Friends, I really tried with this one. This story should work for me. Check out this Goodreads summary: “The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise […]



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