My Brilliant Friend
This is the book I was reading when my husband was admitted to the hospital a month ago. Which is how I managed to fall so far behind on this blog. (And I was doing well, too!) But I'm catching up now and hoping I remember enough about these books to write coherent things about them. I've been half meaning to read My Brilliant Friend since the HBO series came out. It helped that I saw it at the library book sale shortly thereafter. And I guess I don't entirely know what I expected from it, but it wasn't really what I got. There are some amazing quotes in here. The language is incredible, distilling motives and emotions in that way that the best writers have. I imagine that this is even more true in the original Italian - you always lose a little something in translation. That said, the book also meanders all over the place. I had a hard time keeping the characters straight, even with the handy cheat sheet in the front of the book. The author goes off on tangents ...