Book Notes, Fiction # My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (2011) ★★☆☆☆ I have either read a poor English translation or it's the actual original writing style that seemed unpleasant to me. I haven't liked much about this book, nothing struck me as particularly interesting or beautiful or ugly (apart from the writing itself).  Reading it was like looking at a poorly taken photograph of what might be an interesting subject. The poor quality of the picture prevented me from appreciating the thing it tried to capture.  I liked the glimpses I got into the world of 1950s Naples, into the lives of the children growing up in the poverty and the violence of the Italian city's outskirts. But they were faint and distant glimpses. This lack of depth and this distance - all the more surprising from a book written in first person. ### Quotes I liked "We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it."  -- "When you haven’t been in the world long, it’s hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don’t even feel the need to. Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don’t want to think about the rest. Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this is the night." -- =="There are no gestures, words, or sighs that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that human beings have committed and commit."== -- "Increasingly intent, increasingly obsessed, probably overcome herself by an urgent need to find a solid vision, without cracks, she complicated his meager information with some book she got from the library. So she gave concrete motives, ordinary faces to the air of abstract apprehension that as children we had breathed in the neighbourhood. " -- "We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you will never have enough tears."  -- =="Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father."==