Books 3 and 4 in the Neapolitan series.

 

I finally finished books 3 and 4 of Elena Ferrante's series last week and I have been a bit slack about writing them up. To be honest I really enjoyed Book 1 and 2 the most. As the women got older their lives just began to rush by and Elena made more and more errors of judgement and it became clear what a selfish woman she was. Her lover and her book launches meant far more to her than her own children. But hey, I'm being a bit unfair, male authors would definitely get away with behaving like her. I just found reading about her behaviour quite difficult to take in.  Having invested quite a few weeks reading about her and her grafting to get out of her difficult life in the Napalese gutter it was hard to witness her mistakes as she got older.  

Things never really picked up to be honest and the last book was pretty depressing for me.  The real author of this book,  Ferrante, is amazing though; I really believe that she has captured what life is about, a great belief in yourself and your talents when you are young and then as you get older life just whizzes by and nothing really lives up to your expectations.  You just keep on making mistakes and your kids don't appreciate your efforts. All very true I think for the majority of people. but I have to admit, pretty depressing to read  about in a book. I want to read more uplifting stuff really or something with an under current of black humour, which this series definitely didn't have!  

Having invested over 2000 pages of reading effort into these 4 books I'm glad I didn't buy them and just got them out the library. I think Ferrante writes beautifully and some of her descriptions just seemed so honest.  especially when people were having personal breakdowns but for me there are too many little things that annoyed me.  The beginning ( as you never find out about the opening scene until near the end of book 4, which cleverly locks you into having to read them all.) and the ending.  The ending is clever but far too ambiguous and that just annoyed me. 

I think slogging through these has put me into a reading slump now and I am just gonna focus on watching The Olympics.