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I struggled with this book, which had been recommended by a friend. It was far too wordy and drawn out and I couldn't engage with any of the many, many characters. A few chapters in, I started to skip pages of (for me) excess description and ploughed my way to the end. The thought of starting the second book (I'd bought three of the four as holiday reading) filled me with despair...

2 persone l'hanno trovato utile

davide

bellissimo

Recensito in Italia il 17 settembre 2020

la versione inglese è veramente ben fatta.

il libro poi, è una delle più belle sorprese del periodo recente.

Recensito in Italia il 2 dicembre 2016

Bellissimo! Da leggere. Inizio difficile, tanti personaggi...un po' come i romanzi russi....una saga familiare. Ma dopo qualche decina di pagine si è completamente catturati e allora bisogna leggerli tutti! Scritto molto bene. La storia di un'amicizia femminile che attraversa un pezzo di storia italiana.

Una persona l'ha trovato utile

sandra

Ferrante 10 e lode

Recensito in Italia il 14 maggio 2019

Ho amato questo libro è l’ho voluto far leggere a mia figlia in inglese

Recensito in Italia il 29 ottobre 2019

Comprato per un amico

Recensito in Italia il 10 agosto 2019

Ho letto tutti e quattro i libri in un fiato, mi sono piaciuti così tanto che ne ho preso la versione inglese per una mia carissima amica americana!

Recensito in Italia il 9 luglio 2015

I have enjoyed this book tremendously.It helped me see the way life was in that part of Italy back then,understand a little the culture,the Italian character...I love Elena's writing style...I opened the book and sat there till I finished it....I am already starting on her next book :)

Una persona l'ha trovato utile

leopoldo fasolato

ottimo

Recensito in Italia il 13 novembre 2016

esattante quello richiesto non ho altro da dire perchè è un libro che letto e gustato. non c'è altro da dire

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Le recensioni migliori da altri paesi

Jeremy Walton

Brilliant indeed

Recensito nel Regno Unito il 13 giugno 2018

I bought this book for my wife a couple of years ago, and picked it up to read on a recent trip to Italy. My initial impressions weren't encouraging: it's a story about two girls growing up in poverty-stricken, violent Naples in the 1950s, and the book opens with a cast of characters which, although essential for navigating the story, look bewildering - for example, the two girls each have two nicknames, and two other characters have been given the same name. But I found I was gripped by the tale as soon as I got past the beginning: their foreign world is delineated so precisely, in a style which appears so effortless, that I found myself thinking like a poor five-year-old Italian girl and the sheer effort required to survive in a tough world of family, school, boys and opportunities which are - to say the least - constrained by gender.

One of the things that helps the girls to do this is their friendship, which evolves through several phases, many marked with ambiguity (including the intriguing question of which is the brilliant one). Later on, there are relationships with boys to complicate matters (at one point, I realised I was thoroughly confused as to the identity of the narrator's current boyfriend - which is perhaps the effect that the writer intended). I greatly enjoyed the story, finishing it in a rush, and look forward to the next volume in the series.

70 persone l'hanno trovato utile

JS

Shockingly mediocre.

Recensito nel Regno Unito il 23 maggio 2020

Wow. Just shockingly bad. Who are these literary critics (NYT, LA Times, Sunday Times, NewYorker etc) singing praises about this? It makes me awfully worried about the future of literature. The characters are boring (a bunch of youth in the hood, either punching each other to bleed or flirting like mad. *yawn*) and the story is full of cliches and trivia. It reads as if it was written by a talented 5th grader. The main female characters' friendship is not convincing at all and the prose is embarrassingly juvenile and unsophisticated. I’m half-way through the first book and I know that I’m wasting my time for not quitting right now but this obstinate habit of mine that doesn’t let me stop until I reach the last page, will force me to finish reading it. Do not waste your time reading this piece of garbage if what you're interested in is proper literature. Even if you want to take a break from heavy classics and go for some "light reading" materials, they don't have to be trashy like this. Daphne du Maurier's "Don't look now and other short stories", Evelyn Waugh's "The Loved One", or books by Dorothy Whipple published by Persephone Books are light enough but still gripping.

25 persone l'hanno trovato utile

Ralph Blumenau

Too many names, relationships, mood swings

Recensito nel Regno Unito il 31 maggio 2018

At the beginning of the book there is a really off-putting cast list of nine families, and of altogether no fewer than forty-seven names. I constantly had to refer to that list, although the book focusses on two of these people: the narrator Elena (also known as Leni) and her friend Rafaelli (also known as Lina or Lila), both born in 1944, through their childhood and adolescence. There are two parts to this volume: “Childhood” and “Adolescence”.

The two have been friends since their childhood in a dense working-class neighbourhood of Naples, where most families were poor and envious and resentful of those who were better off in their own small district, let alone of those in the prosperous parts of Naples. Lina is the dominant of the two: a rebel at school and the leader in daredevil exploits. During their childhood Leni, though often fearful, copies her in almost everything.

There was much violence in the neighbourhood (in one case murderous), and fierce feuds, both among adults and among the children at school – but never between Leni and Lila: Leni had come to accept that Lina would always be first and she second. Lila also had a cruel streak, but Leni never asserted herself for fear of losing Lila’s friendship.

There is much about the relationships between the children at the elementary school and between them and their teachers. Lila was never popular at school – she was too clever, too aggressive, and was skinny and dirty. Leni, on the other hand, was much in demand. She filled out and reached puberty long before Lila did.

Both girls were recommended to take the test for going on to middle school. Lila’s parents refused to pay for the extra preparatory lessons and she could not take the test; but Leni did well in it. Lila did not take it well. She quarrelled violently with her family until her father literally threw her out of a window and she broke her arm.

The dominance of Lila continues in the second part, “Adolescence”. Of course adolescence is a turbulent and confusing period, with frequent changes of mood and of boyfriends. In this book, I found them quite bewildering, especially as two of Leni’s three boy friends were, I thought, distinguishable only by their names. Leni is still dependent on Lila, though Leni has gone on to high school while Lila worked in her father’s shoe-repair shop with her elder brother Rino, who turned from being a rather gentle person into one who was often physically violent towards her. (The shoes they make play a big part in the story.)

When she knew that Leni was studying first Latin, then Greek and then English, Lila taught herself those, too, and was quicker at them than Leni was. Leni did exceptionally well at school by her own efforts - it is never quite clear which of the two of them is the “brilliant friend” - but, whenever Lila was not the spur, Leni attached little value to her own achievements.

We follow their ever-shifting relationships with each other and with various young men. Though Lila had developed physically later than Leni, when Lila did catch up, she became more attractive to the young men than Leni was, and created enormous tensions between her admirers. (At that stage, the girls are only fourteen. The two of them also discuss Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.) From one of these admirers, a communist, Lila learnt how practically everyone in the neighbourhood had been, in one way or another, compromised during the fascist period. But she yields to none of the young men, and is positively hostile to one of them who, better off than the others, is something of a cock of the walk in the neighbourhood and whose advances to her are favoured by her parents, impressed by the gifts he brought on every visit.

On the rebound from the cock of the walk, Lila became friendly with one of his rivals, who ran a grocery shop but had also inherited a lot of wealth from his late father who had been a black-marketeer during the war. In the end, Lila became engaged to him. She became transformed into a fashionable young woman, living in a different world from Leni or indeed from that of her family and neighbours. She ceased to be interested in discussing Leni’s academic work with her. She dismisses Leni’s worries about theology with remarks that are astonishingly precocious for a girl of then fifteen. Leni felt that her academic achievements were worthless.

But Leni became deeply involved, at Lila’s request, in preparation for the wedding, at the same time as she felt, agonisingly, that the wedding would finally separate the two of them. The novel ends with the wedding and the celebratory meal in a restaurant. It is a whirlwind of all the names in the book. Leni feels distant from them all, from the entire society in which she has grown up.

There is a Prologue, in which Lila’s 40 year old son contacts Leni to tell her that his mother had disappeared. Nowhere in the book is there any link to this Prologue. Perhaps the later volumes in the Tetralogy will relate to it – but I have no wish to read them. I cannot share the enthusiasm of so many readers.

37 persone l'hanno trovato utile

Judy Thompson

See Naples and die?

Recensito nel Regno Unito il 25 agosto 2017

Totally engrossing. A passing remark in my library said this was worth reading. I was hooked from the beginning and didn't want it to end except that there are three other books to continue the story of the lifelong friendship of the two central characters. The prose is wonderful, the description of the neighbourhood the girls live in and the revealing of the lifestyle of the era into which they were born.

20 persone l'hanno trovato utile

Scribe Dublin

This didn't grab me...

Recensito nel Regno Unito il 24 luglio 2017

This didn't grab me as I had hoped, yet for some inexplicable reason I kept wanting to know what was going to happen and looked forward to getting back to it. There's an awful lot of description and a lack of plot in the joyless lives therein. Did I like it? I suppose I did. Would I recommend it? I honestly don't know...

21 persone l'hanno trovato utile