In Search of Lost Time: Volume 2: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (Marcel Proust)

Marcel Proust)
In Search of Lost Time: Volume 2: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

I bought this whilst in France having ditched The Rainbow and went to the local booksellers. The only French novel in English that I hadn't read was this so that fact and that it's apparently a must read I bought it. It's slow going with a lot about his teenage love for a girl and his emotions for her whilst she seems to be into him and after. A lot is about notable French people at the time so much of it I don't really understand, or care about, and a lot about the customs and foibles of that time. Again, not so interesting. The musings are interesting but become repetitive and he goes down so many avenues about feelings of love, and being out of love, with ifs and buts that any romance and emotion is destroyed by analysis. I read that Proust was a man about town when young then spent years as a virtual recluse. It sort of shows in this. I acknowledge that I critiquing a book that the French see as sacrosanct and that many others would have made a much better analysis of. I did try my best and got past 200 pages although not quite as far as him going to Normandy which I was looking forward to.

My Brilliant Friend (Elena Ferrante)

Elena Ferrante
My Brilliant Friend

An excellent and very readable book which I bought for my daughter's birthday as we're going to Rome and turns out that she had just about finished reading it already. So I read it whilst in Rome. It's a four part story and this takes us from childhood into adolescence. Set in a gritty housing area on the outskirts of Naples in the late 1950s. It describes the harsh conditions and violence of the area whilst two close friends struggle to make a life for themselves. One, the narrator, is very intelligent but always feels in awe of her best friend who seems different from others that they know. They have various scrapes and troubles with one going a full on academic route and the other seemingly chasing the comfortable life of marriage to a well off local boy. The other local characters are described and overall you get a very good idea of the lives in the small community. As the girls are young they don't really see beyond their community or how they see their parents within that but as they get older they see Naples, and beyond, just, and how others live, especially the rich in the centre of Naples, and see that the narrator's father is more than she thought when outside the community in his job at city hall. Looking forward to the next installment, when Maya has finished it.