I had been conditioned by my education, which had shaped my mind, my voice. To what secret pacts with myself had I consented, just to excel. And now, after the hard work of learning, what must I unlearn.
- Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (The Neapolitan Quartet)
[text ID: Maybe at that moment something in my body broke, maybe that’s where I should locate the end of my childhood. I felt as if I were a container of granules that were imperceptibly leaking out of me through a tiny crack.]
hieu minh nguyen this way to the sugar (via@luthienne) \ via@zuvson\ natalie diaz postcolonial love poem: “postcolonial love poem” (via@beingharsh) \ salman toor the star (2019) \ elena ferrante the story of a new name \ adonis selected poems (tr. khaled mattawa)
I had been conditioned by my education, which had shaped my mind, my voice. To what secret pacts with myself had I consented, just to excel. And now, after the hard work of learning, what must I unlearn.
- Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (The Neapolitan Quartet)
[text ID: I am what I am and I have to accept myself; I was born like this, in this city, with this dialect, without money; I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured.]
“Writers should be concerned only with narrating as well as possible what they know and feel, the beautiful and the ugly and the contradictory, without obeying any prescription, not even a prescription that comes from the side you’re on. Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.”
“There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.”
I am late to Elena Ferrante. Very late. Boy did I miss out.
My Brilliant Friend is the story of Elena and Lila, two best friends in Naples in the 1950s. Lila is fiercely intelligent and vivacious while Elena is quiet, thoughtful and full of self doubt. They meet one day and immediately bounce off one another. As children their relationship is complicated, often hurtful and doubtful but also comforting. Both girls hail from a poor neighbourhood in Naples but while Elena’s family allow her to pursue her education, Lila’s holds her back. This is a beautiful story about about expectations and self doubt, about finding your place in the world. It is a wonderful tale of female friendship in all its complexity. Ferrante’s prose is so beautiful and jarring because of its honesty and clarity. A wonderful read.
“Sentii per la prima volta l'urto del tempo, la forza che mi stava sospingendo verso i quaranta, la velocità con cui la vita si consumava, la concretezza dell'esposizione alla morte: se sta succedendo a lei, pensavo, non c'è scampo, succederà anche a me.”
