My Brilliant Friend

What an ending! A cliffhanger for the next installment, without being too dramatic or cheesy.

I liked this book more and more as it went on, but I still had trouble understanding why it got the praise that it did. The writing was so clinical and detached, I felt almost nothing while reading and I thought the translation was awkward and poor. Secondary and tertiary characters failed to become real to me, they were all just a procession of names, very few who retained any uniqueness to their personalities in my mind. The lack of large-scale structure to the book made it feel like it was just the same story over and over, conflict, then reuniting, and the different scenes all blended together.

I think I liked the last 100 pages or so because the plot (if you could call it that) became more linear, but also because it was so easy to identify the flawed adolescent reasoning behind many of Elena's bad decisions, whereas I found it tougher to understand and criticize the narrator's younger self, as it was more abstract to me.

I also wonder how much of this I didn't identify with because I'm a man? Wish I had gotten to go to the book club for this to hear everyone's thoughts :/