Tag: elena ferrante

What I Read: October & November 2016

by zoelance, posted in What I Read

To help me stay on track in my 2016 goals, I’m documenting the books I read all year. I liked the three-sentence reviews I wrote for August and September, so I’m going to do that again. Here’s what I read in October and November:

Joan Didion’s Where I Was From.

Every time I read a Joan Didion book, I’m blown away by her genius and skill. In this nonfiction essay collection about California, Didion works through the disconnect between the myths of California’s beginnings and its present-day reality, and how that has affected the perception of California and its people. It’s the perfect example of writing that centers on something extremely personal and contributes to a bigger picture in a measured and articulate way.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is my new favorite author, and I highly recommend her work. Americanah is a beautiful love story, but it’s also about a woman finding her identity and voice — all while painting a rich portrait of Africa you don’t see very often. This novel will make for an incredible movie, if done carefully and right.

Francesca Block’s Weetzie Bat.

This is a delightful young adult novel about a woman living in a Shangri-La version of Los Angeles, and I wish I would have discovered when I was a teenager. It’s whimsical and mystical in that you have to suspend your disbelief on some plot elements, but it’s extremely serious and honest in its themes, especially sexuality. Would recommend to a precocious teenage girl who loves LA.

Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child.

The Story of the Lost Child is an incredible end to an incredible series about two women from Naples and how their lives intersect and diverge. Believe all of the hype you’ve ever seen or heard about Elena Ferrante or the Neapolitan Novels. This series is one of my favorites, and I’m so glad I spread the four-book series out over the year — it was much more satisfying that way.

John Steinbeck’s The Harvest Gypsies.

This collection of newspaper articles describing California migrant camp life in the 1930s expanded my tiny bit of knowledge about the Dust Bowl. It adds some dimension to Steinbeck in that you can recognize inspiration for his novels, but it’s not necessary Steinbeck reading. If you really want to read Steinbeck, you’re better off reading or rereading The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden or Of Mice and Men.

Martha Gellhorn’s Travels with Myself and Another.

Okay, so — I picked up this book because I wanted to learn more about Martha Gellhorn and who she was as a war journalist. But the more I read, the more uncomfortable I was with the racist and classist language she uses to describe the people she meets and the places she goes in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. I finished the book, but I would not recommend it.

Kevin Starr’s California: A History.

I’m embarking on a California reading project (more on that later), and this was the first history book I picked up — I found it on several must-reads-about-California lists. California provides a really good overview of state’s history from the European exploration efforts to the Schwarzenegger era, but I will say it moves extremely fast. It’s a good starter book, and it’s definitely inspired me to read more about my state’s incredible history and culture.

What have you read lately? Tell me about it in the comments.

Link Party: 10/29-11/20

by zoelance, posted in Link Party
My favorite daily reminder.
My favorite daily reminder.

There hasn’t been much Link Partying around here lately. I need to fix that, and I promise to be more consistent in the last few weeks of 2016 and into 2017.

Here’s a party to last you all week. Take your pick:

1. An interview with Frank Ocean.

2. Zadie Smith on the dancers that inspire her. (I can’t wait to read Swing Time.)

3. An American journalist spends 10 years abroad and comes back to his homeland.

4. Hillary Clinton and the glass ceiling.

5. Hamilton Leithauser and Rostam‘s collaboration.

6. The barnacle queens of Galicia.

7. Instagram geotagging is ruining nature.

8. Yet another brilliant conversation with Elena Ferrante.

9. The wave of all-women art exhibitions.

10. The preserved shipwrecks in the Black Sea.

11. President Obama on his legacy and America’s future.

12. Behind the scenes at the Butterball turkey hotline.

Have a great week.

Link Party: 10/3-10/7

by zoelance, posted in Link Party
Fridaze.
Fridaze.

Here’s what I read this week:

1. Ruth Bader Ginsburg gives the best advice.

2. Barack Obama on five days that shaped his presidency.

3. A letter of complaint for Cards Against Humanity.

4. Elena Ferrante and the myth that female artists owe us something more than just their work.

5. An excerpt from a book about haunted places in America, which I’m planning to pick up.

And a bonus: Bruce Springsteen on NPR’s Fresh Air.

Enjoy your weekend.

What I Read: June 2016

by zoelance, posted in What I Read

To help me stay on track in my 2016 goals, I’m documenting the books I read all year. Here’s what I read in June:

David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

I bought this 23-story fiction collection at The Last Bookstore approximately 1 million years ago, and finally pulled it out of my bookshelf at the beginning of the month. The only other DFW book I’ve read is Infinite Jest (which I need to reread soon), and I wanted to try some of his other fiction.

I expected Brief Interviews to be really good, but this book’s style and DFW’s command of the English language blew me away. I especially enjoyed reading the story series that the collection derives its name from, where an unnamed author interviews men with seriously warped minds  — but you don’t know what questions are being asked, which makes you reevaluate your expectations of the literature you read. The other short stories I thought were exceptional are “Adult World” and “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs a Boon.” I know a lot of people either adore or despise DFW, but you can’t deny that his work makes you think. I have yet to find another writer in the same vein of originality. I am also probably the only person in the world that enjoys doing this, but I like having to pause and look up a word that I don’t know. If you’re into experimental fiction or just want an intense brain exercise, this book is for you. 

V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas.

I was surfing the Internet one day and stumbled across a Brain Pickings article that detailed Joan Didion’s list of favorite books. I’d already read A Farewell to Arms and loved it, so I was pretty confident in how much I would like her list. I ordered Joseph Conrad’s Victory (more on that book in July) and Guerrillas, since I had read elsewhere (it might have been another one of her interviews but I can’t remember) that Guerrillas drew on Victory.

The story centers on an English woman named Jane, who comes to a Caribbean island to visit her South African boyfriend Peter. Peter works with Jimmy Ahmed, who is the leader of an agricultural commune Peter is sort of but not really helping to establish. The story doesn’t really follow a traditional narrative, but culminates in the island’s violent political upheaval. The ending of this novel is graphic and violent and I’m not going to discuss it here, but if the premise sounded interesting I’d advise against reading Guerrillas if sexual violence triggers you. 

My main takeaway from Guerrillas was that it’s a commentary on the emptiness of liberal values and the lasting effects of colonialism. Jane thinks she is intellectual and understands the island’s political situation clearly, but finds out throughout the course of the novel that she really understands nothing. You can have a lot of well-intentioned ideas about race and politics, but understanding the reality of a grim situation and the social forces at play are a completely different thing. The paradise isn’t real.

This book is also a testament to how important multicultural voices are, and that we can’t rely on the white canon to tell the stories we need to hear.  I would not count this as one of my favorite novels, but it helped to round out a genre I don’t usually read. If you’re looking for other books about postcolonialism, I would also suggest Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother.

 

Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays.

In a complete reversal of my David Foster Wallace experience, I’ve always loved Joan Didion’s essays but never read her fiction. Play It As It Lays is her second novel, and one that she’s brought up in her later nonfiction and interviews.

The novel centers on a young actress named Maria Wyeth, who is recovering from a nervous breakdown in a California psychiatric hospital. With the exception of a few chapters from the perspectives of her friend and ex-husband, Maria recounts what has brought her to the hospital — a toxic marriage, a haunting abortion and an alleged participation in her friend’s suicide. Maria is marooned from a world that was supposed to bring her success and happiness, and instead spends her days driving all across Southern California and up to Las Vegas.

 

I was unsurprised by the book’s premise, because Didion’s work often deals in themes of anxiety, unfulfilled potential and disconnect from reality. For someone who was deep in the Hollywood way of life and made a living from it, she has always been highly critical of what it can do to an outsider. I didn’t read a lot of criticism on Play It As It Lays, but I can imagine that Didion drew from her own experiences and the stories of the people around her. But as always, I am in awe of Didion’s prose and how she can say volumes in just a few words. If you read this and like it, read her nonfiction collections The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

 

Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.

If you’ve been reading my monthly recaps, you know that I’ve been working through the Neapolitan novel cycle for a few months. The further I progress, the more this series lives up to the hype that initially drew me in. I was thinking about this book the other day, and realized that I probably haven’t committed to a series like this since middle school. That’s how good it is.

Save for a very quick flash-forward to the last time Elena Greco sees Lila Cerullo, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay picks up right where The Story of a New Name left off. This novel mostly focuses on Elena’s marriage and family life, with a few sidebars on Lila’s life after she leaves her husband. While Ferrante has woven several major themes throughout the series, this installation seems to pause on class structure and gender equality. It is so hard for these women to achieve any kind of success and enjoy it, because of the traditional gender roles they’re forced to conform to and the violence and political tension happening around them. Their friendship dramatically suffers because of their fragile personal lives, and in their selfishness Elena and Lila don’t seem to grasp that they’re dealing with some of the same issues. I’m interested to see how it plays out in the final book. 

I predict that in the next few decades, Ferrante’s work will be at the center of incredibly smart academic analysis about literature and gender studies, as well as popular culture. I wish that there were more Ferrantes in the world — or maybe I just haven’t discovered them yet. This series is so good that I haven’t intentionally looked up spoilers, because I want to be surprised at how it ends. If you still haven’t started My Brilliant Friend, get on it.

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is another book I’ve had kicking around in my bookcase. I bought it in high school before I had access to Amazon, so all of my classic books came from the Barnes and Noble reprinted classics carousel. I’ve tried to read it a few times before, but got distracted by other books every time.

 

In Victorian-era England, Dorian Gray is a wealthy and beautiful young man. He’s also the muse of an artist, who paints Dorian’s portrait. Under the influence of another wealthy guy, Dorian finds himself worried about losing his youth. In a supernatural experience, he trades his soul so that he’ll stay the same but the portrait will age. After a tragic romance, Dorian indulges in every hedonistic vice he can find, including brothels and opium dens. Spoiler alert — in the end, the portrait can’t save him from dying.

I was extremely disappointed with this novel, so much so that I chided past-Zoë for spending $5 of her babysitting money on it. I read Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in high school and liked it, but didn’t find this novel particularly amusing. Dorian has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, so I didn’t find any room to sympathize with his benders. I knew going into reading The Picture of Dorian Gray that it’s supposed to be a philosophical discussion on the purpose of art, but I didn’t find it riveting.  I found myself flipping through pages wholly uninterested, because I don’t really care what a white British dude — however subversive he was — thinks about art. 

Have you read anything good lately? Tell me about it in the comments.

What I Read: May 2016

by zoelance, posted in What I Read

To help me stay on track in my 2016 goals, I’m documenting the books I read all year. Here’s what I read in May:

Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things.

I bought this book a few years ago for a class where it ended up getting replaced on the syllabus, but I figured I would read it eventually and stuck it in my bookshelf. While waiting for my next Amazon order to come, I plucked it out to tide me over. I didn’t know anything about it other than that it was postmodern literature. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it.

In The Country of Last Things is a quick read, clocking in a few pages shy of 200. The story revolves around a young woman named Anna Blume, who travels to an unnamed city to find her missing brother William, and tells her story through letters she writes to someone back home. There seems to have been some kind of political upheaval or natural disaster, and the entire culture has descended into chaos and violence. Anna is able to survive by looking through the garbage for stuff to sell to a system of dealers, which is extremely corrupt. In some ways, it reminded me of Invisible Man in that every good thing that happens to Anna is accompanied by an equally horrible thing, but that the people she meets along the way buoy her optimism towards finding her brother and getting out of the city.

Auster builds this narrative on the idea that one day our society will get to a place where we can’t make anything anymore, and that we’ll walk around as former ghosts of ourselves. Everyone in the novel lives in a constant state of precarity, with no protection from a government or any kind of social structure. It’s scary how real this situation could be. The novel also includes an interesting commentary about death and suicide — in the novel, there are two acceptable ways to kill yourself — as well as reproductivity, all with biopolitical underpinnings. You probably won’t like In The Country of Last Things unless you’re already into postmodern literature — it makes Orwellian and Huxley dystopias look like funhouses.  I’m not sure I’ll seek out any other Auster novels, but I’m glad I decided to finally read it.

Lauren Groff’s The Monsters of Templeton.

I have read two, now three of Lauren Groff’s novels, and count her as one of my favorite fiction writers. She has a knack for dreaming up fascinating universes within her novels, and creating compelling female characters that don’t take anybody’s shit. The Monsters of Templeton is no exception.

Groff found her inspiration in her hometown of Cooperstown, which you should read about. The story centers around a young woman named Willie, who comes home to Templeton in a crisis. When she arrives, she finds out from her mother that her father, who Willie thought was a freewheeling no-named hippie, is actually still living in Templeton and someone Willie knows. The town is also having its own crisis — Templeton’s version of the Loch Ness monster has turned up dead.

Although I liked Lauren Groff’s other novels better, The Monsters of Templeton is an engrossing and highly enjoyable read. Groff weaves Willie’s story and her geneological research with letters, testimonies and documents that concern both Willie’s family and the town’s history. The revelation of who Willie’s father is kind of weird, but the book isn’t really about that — it’s about Willie finding herself and accepting that her small town and its magic is part of who she is, which is something I can relate to. On another level, this novel is about how we make martyrs out of our historical figures, who were really people like us that make mistakes.

If you love ~~Victorian scandal~~, you will love this book. Once you read The Monsters of Templeton, get to reading Arcadia and Fates and Furies ASAP.

Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name. 

After reading My Brilliant Friend in March, I bought myself a first-class ticket on the Elena Ferrante train. Even though I thought My Brilliant Friend was great, The Story of a New Name, the second novel in the Neapolitan novel cycle, blew me even further away.

The Story of a New Name picks up right where My Brilliant Friend leaves off. Elena and Lila, who are still close friends, deviate even further in their paths — Elena becomes the first in her family to go to college, while Lila gets married as a teenager. Along the way they both experience betrayal, romance and the plights of growing up. The Napoli neighborhood and Italy they live in are swirling with violence and political strife, which nearly parallels what’s going on in their personal lives. Ferrante is so eloquent and writes with such intensity that it’s easy to get sucked into the story, even if it is just about two women.

The cover art suggests that this is a fluffy romance novel, but it’s anything but that. What I enjoy most about reading these books is that Ferrante explores the complexities of female friendship in a compelling way. Elena and Lila are inseparable in spirit but struggle to find separate identities that can coexist, something I came to understand the more I read. The person you love the most is also the one who can hurt you the most, and that idea comes up over and over again throughout the novel. The empathy you feel for both characters is very real, at least in my experience — these women are stuck within traditional gender roles, and trying to deviate from them has real consequences. I already bought the third novel, and can’t wait to crack it open.

Don DeLillo’s Zero K. 

I found out about Don DeLillo in college, where I ended up reading White Noise and Underworld on my own time.  Part of what brought me to reading Zero K was the awesome opportunity to see DeLillo at a publicity event for the novel earlier in the month. In the conversation part of the event, he talked about death as a cultural artifact, a suggestion that stuck in my brain the whole time I was reading Zero K.

The novel is focalized through a man named Jeffrey Lockhart, who lives a pretty directionless life. His billionaire father Ross invests in a movement called the Convergence, which promises to control death. Jeffrey’s stepmother Artis, who is dying from illness, elects to undergo a procedure that would preserve her body until biotechnology is able to come up with more effective treatments, and Ross invites Jeffrey to the remote compound to say goodbye to both him and Artis, and also to convince Jeffrey to take over his businesses. Throughout the novel, Jeffrey tries to grasp a better understanding of  what it means to be dead, and how death figures into the meaning of life. Zero K is simultaneously cold and hilarious at many moments, which is frightening but also very DeLillo-esque. 

The Convergence is creepy and cultish, and what makes it even more creepy and cultish is that it seems like something that could actually happen. This seems like something today’s billionaires would do instead of funneling their money into larger social issues, in defense of innovation and the temptation to let technology take over. Because of DeLillo’s comment at the event, this book made me think about the social construction of death and how we have a preoccupation with being able to cheat it. We come up with all of these rituals surrounding death, and the way we handle it contains multitudes about our values and belief systems. The death-as-artifact thing is also a class issue: the Convergence is seemingly only accessible to someone who is able to subsidize its mission, and that opens up other problems about who has the right to choose their own death. DeLillo is an incredible writer, and Zero K was nothing short of incredible.

Have you read anything good lately? Tell me about it in the comments.

Link Party: 4/11-4/15

by zoelance, posted in Link Party
I missed this. I missed this a lot.
I missed this. I missed this a lot.

I had a great week, and I hope you did too. Here’s what I read:

1. This is a fascinating read on Minecraft and the kids that play it.

2. Instagram is ruining vacation.

3. What working at Sephora is like.

4. The miniskirt‘s unabashedly feminist history.

5. A conversation with Elena Ferrante.

And a bonus: An awesome newsletter named “A Woman to Know.”

Have a great weekend.

 

What I Read: March 2016

by zoelance, posted in What I Read

To help me stay on track in my 2016 goals, I’m documenting the books I read all year. Here’s what I read in March:

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller: I hadn’t read this book in high school or college, so while filling a ThriftBooks binge I decided to give Catch-22 a go. I knew that it was a novel about World War II and that it’s often referenced alongside Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which I read one summer in high school and didn’t entirely understand.

Catch-22 is based on Heller’s actual experiences in the war, but it’s a satirical piece of fiction about an Air Force squadron based on an island off the Italian coast. The novel pulls different perspectives from different members of the squadron, but it’s focalized through one pilot named Yossarian. Yossarian and his fellow soldiers continually find themselves in incredibly dangerous missions that they are required to execute, and the number of missions they have to fly continues to rise and rise because of bureaucratic tension and power trips. Yossarian soon finds himself in what the military calls a Catch-22. (Now that I’ve read the book, I feel like the cultural usage of catch-22 means that most people who use the term either haven’t read the book or missed the point.)

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he would have to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.

“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.

As you can see by the passage above, this book also employs incredibly dark humor as a way of de-romanticizing war and dying for one’s country. At many moments, the dark humor intensifies the horror of men dying, men profiting from war, the body politics and emotional emptiness. In some ways it reminded me of the humor of Good Omens, and the premise and the soldiers’ collective experiences reminded me of this past season of the Serial podcast. While I’m glad I read Catch-22 and appreciated Heller’s choices in structure and language, reading it made me sad that someone could come up with a satire that doesn’t seem to be really all that far from the truth.

All The Single Ladies, by Rebecca Traister: I found out about this book when I went to a live recording of Call Your Girlfriend, a podcast I listen to, and was so excited to read it I went home and immediately ordered it on Amazon. I devoured it in about four days over the course of my trip to Seattle. I’m so glad I bought a copy for myself, because it is a book I can feel myself returning to.

Throughout the book, Traister traces the history of the American single woman. In today’s culture, more and more women are waiting to get married or just not getting married at all. That has extensive social and political ramifications, and also says a lot about the social structures that make up our culture. However, this isn’t the first time that the American single woman has wielded this power. For the first part of the book, Traister explains how historically women could do other things besides marriage, and that resulted in incredible social change for abolition, education and more. This book is not screwing around — it has first-person accounts from women across all walks of life, extensive statistics and deeply reported historical background. One of my favorite parts was a quote at the end of the book:

But the growth of a massive population of women who are living outside those dependent circumstances puts new pressures on the government: to remake conditions in a way that will be more hospitable to female independence, to a citizenry now made up of plenty of women living economically, professionally, sexually, and socially liberated lives.

We have to rebuild not just our internalized assumptions about individual freedoms and life paths; we also must revise our social and economic structures to account for, acknowledge, and support women in the same way in which we have supported men for centuries.

I feel like I’ve finally found a book that has articulated and validated everything I feel about being a single woman in the United States, which is a powerful feeling. Traister has written a classic, and I highly, highly recommend this book to anyone who is even remotely interested in social politics, history and feminism.

My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante: All I have ever heard or read about Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novel cycle is that it is too good to put down, and that you’ll want to buy all four books at once. After reading the first book in the series, My Brilliant Friend, I can confirm that both of those things are 1000 percent true.

The entire series is about two women from Naples, named Elena and Lila, in the decades after World War II. My Brilliant Friend‘s timeline begins when they are both young girls, and ends when they are teenagers. They are best friends who repeatedly find their lives both intertwined and converging as they grow up in a poor neighborhood, and both look for ways to create identities outside their bubble. Elena narrates the first book as an older woman looking back at the past, giving the audience direct access to her private thoughts about her own youth as well as her perspective of Lila’s life.

What I loved about this book was how rich the story and characters are, in terms of detail and emotional depth. While there are moments that fall to the tropes of a romance novel, it passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. Both Elena and Lila are beautiful but deeply flawed characters, and Ferrante has given them rich personalities that make you simultaneously love and disdain both women. While it’s a book about friendship and growing up, it’s also a novel about love, violence, gender and class set during a time of incredible social change. It’s a contemporary cousin to something like Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights, which is also probably why I liked it.

I’m the kind of person who looks up the summary of the movie before she’s about to see it, and I refrained from looking anything up about this series because I wanted to see if it lived up to the hype. It does — the last half of My Brilliant Friend is dynamite, and I gasped at the ending. I have a few other books to read, but the next novel in this series is high on my to-read list.

What have you been reading lately? Let’s talk about it in the comments.