My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante is one of the publishing world’s biggest mysteries of the moment.  Despite her great sales and critical success, no one seems to know who the woman (if she really is a woman) is.  There is even speculation that her four-book Neapolitan series is more of a memoir than a novel serialization.  And there is little doubt that all of the mystery surrounding Ferrante and her books has increased the attention they are getting.  All that said, if the first book in the Neapolitan series, 2012’s My Brilliant Friend, is any indication, the series is indeed a strong one, and the books are capable of standing on their own.

My Brilliant Friend introduces two little girls who first meet in the early 1950s in a poor neighborhood just outside Naples.  Elena (the book’s first person narrator) and Lila are two of the brightest students in their neighborhood school and, being top candidates for the school’s highest honors, their relationship soon becomes more a friendly rivalry than a friendship.  Elena, though, is a bit intimidated by the ease with which Lila seems to acquire and display her knowledge.  After a while, Elena is content to be number two to Lila’s number one and that is the only achievement she really strives for.

The novel actually opens in the present, with both women now in their sixties and still friends of a sort.  It seems that Lila has disappeared without a trace and that her son, after waiting two full weeks, has decided finally to call Elena to see if she knows where Lila could be.  Ferrante uses this opening segment to segue neatly into how the women first met and how their decades-long relationship slowly evolved over time.  My Brilliant Friend is, in fact, a coming-of-age narrative for both our narrator and for her supposed closest friend, Lila.

Author Elena Ferrante

Elena and Lila live in a very self-contained little neighborhood in which everyone knows and tracks the intimacies of everyone else.  Certain families, it seems, made their fortunes during and just following World War II, a period that left Italy in the kind of chaos in which huge profits could be made from a thriving black-market.  Those families are still the most powerful ones in the neighborhood – and they are not to be crossed.  As the girls make their way through childhood and adolescence, they experience the usual emotions and pains of those phases of life.  Sometimes they are intimate friends, but at other times they barely speak for weeks, or even months.  They and their friends have good times, but life is easy for none of them.

Ferrante has created a wide cast of well developed characters in My Brilliant Friend that will serve her well for the next three books in the series.  Speculation as to whether or not the books are based on Ferrante’s own life and memories offers a little twist to reading her, but that doesn’t really matter.  What counts most is that she is one heck of a storyteller.  This is literary fiction at its best.

Post #2,600

Sally Has a Library Card - and Life Is Good

Sometimes life's simplest pleasure are its best pleasures.  Remember to enjoy the simple things that give you pleasure for a lifetime if you let them.

Post #2,599

Joyce Carol Oates Tweet

1. Joyce Carol Oates ‏@JoyceCarolOates  40m40 minutes ago

   Expecting students to be "open-minded" about opinions contrary to their own may be unrealistic when many/most adults are close-minded.

   24 retweets43 favorites

   
   
2. Joyce Carol Oates ‏@JoyceCarolOates  31m31 minutes ago

   @JoyceCarolOates For example, not one person of my acquaintance is going to "seriously consider" GOP candidates let alone anti-feminism.

   
   

I pulled this rather horrible attempt at a screen shot from my Twitter feed a few minutes ago.  As bad as it looks, I want to share it this morning because Joyce Carol Oates, one of my favorite authors in the world, is making a very good point here.  Ms. Oates has made some mystifying tweets in recent months that have thrown many  people for a loop, so after reading the first tweet shown above, I was afraid that she might be demonstrating a lack of self-awareness on her own part (because I know a bit about her politics and can't imagine her ever voting for a Republican).  But thankfully, she followed up nine minutes later with the second tweet.

And that got me to thinking about my own circles.  With one or two exceptions, no one that I personally know in my "real world" is going to "seriously consider" voting for a Democrat.  I do know a lot of people who would never vote for a Republican, but they are not people that I see and talk with every day and, for the most part, they live in other parts of the state or country.  The point is that we largely self-segregate ourselves among people who believe the same things we believe, people who look and think like us.  Our friends and neighbors generally support the beliefs we already have - and that makes us all lazy and unwilling to modify our beliefs. 

And that, as Ms. Oates is pointing out here, is our own fault.  Thankfully, I have friends on the internet who share articles, thoughts, and insights on the issues of the day with me.  I do the same for them...and guess what?  Most all of us have tended to move toward the middle of the political spectrum even to the point that we can honestly call ourselves moderates now.  Sadly enough, however,  because both major political parties in this country are dominated by extremists, we end up with no candidate to call our own.  But our eyes are open wide and we can, and will, make the best choice possible.

I hope Ms. Oates and her friends try to do the same instead of voting the same old way they and everyone they know alway have. I wish all of us would do that.


(May 2019 Edit:  Boy, was I wrong about Oates. She lost her mind.)

Barnes & Noble Really Regrets Driving All Those Independent Bookstores Out of Business and Now Wants to Re-create That Experience Via an E-Reader? Gimme a Break

For obvious reasons, Barnes & Nobles is probably considerably more understanding today about how it feels to be forced to close down bookstores than the chain was back in the nineties when it was rather gleefully causing independent bookstores around the country to fall like a chain of dominoes.  "What goes around, comes around" is a cliché that became a cliché for good reason, but the gods of Barnes & Noble management certainly never expected something like an Amazon to come along to so quickly to knock them off the lofty perch they had assumed would be theirs for a while.

Galen Moore over at the website BostInno has an interesting take on precisely that bit of bookstore history:

Now, indie bookstores are back stronger than ever. Borders is gone and Barnes & Noble's future is uncertain. Now the big-box bookstore chain wants to bring back the experience of browsing books in a bookstore with a knowledgeable staff to help with good picks. Except they're bringing it back on an e-reader. 

So Barnes & Nobles wants to bring back that old independent bookstore experience for its customers - even though so many of its bookstore employees don't seem to know squat about books - but they want to do it on their proprietary e-reader, the Nook.  Give me a break, B&N.

Here's my favorite part of Mr. Moore's article:

 Sales of their Nook e-reader keep falling. If current trends persist, at some point there will be more indie bookstores in business than there are Barnes & Noble e-readers in use.

Somewhere way down deep inside me, I would hate to see Barnes & Noble fail to the point where it had to shutdown all of its brick & mortar stores, but it is really, really hard for me to feel sorry for these guys.  Really hard.

Movies for Readers: Pride & Prejudice & Zombies

I'm starting a new series of posts today to highlight "Movies for Readers."  This may seem like a strange choice to begin the series with, but I listened to the audio version of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies a year or two ago and had great fun with it.  And from the looks of this trailer, this movie version of the book is going to be even more fun.

The movie is due in theaters in February 2016.  It will be interesting to see what kind of audience it draws and what age groups that audience comes from.  Too, I wonder if a few young viewers might end up actually reading some of Jane Austen's classic novels as a result of movies like this one.  Probably wishful thinking on my part, I know.  But I can dream, right?

Post #2,596

It IS About Islam (Warning: Neither this book nor this review are Politically Correct)

Glenn Beck is making a point in It IS About Islam that is so obvious that only willful deniers are likely to disagree with it: radical Islam is at the root of the terrorism, barbarism, and genocide that plagues the world today.  For political reasons, many of the world leaders do not want to admit this very real truth, perhaps fearing that aggressive language on their part will bring them exactly the unwanted attention from Islamist terrorists that they want so badly to avoid.  But it is time to face the fact that in the absence of this particular religious doctrine from the eighth century, the world would be a better and safer place for all of us, including today’s Muslims.

As Beck points out, this is not a new problem.  It IS About Islam begins with a brief history of President Thomas Jefferson’s study of the Quran and his battle to control the Barbary (North African) States that were kidnapping and enslaving American sailors because they believed that the Quran gave them exactly that right – and duty.  Muslim negotiators of the period, in fact, justified their actions by using the same passages from the Quran that are used by today’s terrorists to justify their own murderous intents.

It IS About Islam is divided into three parts: “Islam 101” (a relatively detailed explanation of what is in the Quran and of the religion’s history); “Thirteen Deadly Lies” ( a rebuttal of the myths about Islam that Islamist apologists and too many our own politicians would have us believe); and “What Can Be Done” (a short discussion of several changes to our approach that would increase our chances of defeating those who want to destroy us and our world).

As Beck puts it in the book’s introduction: “The lies include the oft-heard claims that Islam is a religion of peace, that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, that Islam respects the rights of women and Christians, and that sharia law is a myth made up by Islamophobes.” 

And as he damningly and clearly states on page 204 of the book:

            “Jihad’s cost to civilization is incalculable.  Over the centuries, Muslim armies have burned libraries, razed cities, and conquered large swaths of the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Europe.  The have enslaved, starved, and massacred millions of men, women, and children – all in the name of Islam.

…the jihadists are not distorting their religion.  They believe they’re acting in accordance with their faith and they can cite chapter and verse to justify every beheading, crucifixion, act of vandalism, and degradation of the ‘infidels’ who happen to get in their way.”

Almost all of the world’s major religions have evolved over the centuries to the point where they reject the barbarism preached every Friday in so many of the world’s mosques.  Only one religion is allowing itself to remain stuck in the Dark Ages, and it is long past time that the governments of the world admit the extent of the threat that all non-Muslim governments (and even some Muslim ones) are facing from Islamism.  I do not agree with everything that Beck says in this book (for example, making the fight one of directly pitting the rest of the world’s religions against Islam), but his message needs to be heard.

And Beck and his people made the decision to publish It IS About Islam only in paperback so that more people can afford to get their hands on it and share it with others.  Please read this book before you condemn it because you dislike its author. 

It, and you, are better than that.

Post #2,595