L'amica geniale - E. Ferrante

This is one book that has been divided into four parts, immagino per maggiore fruibilità. Il racconto procede da un libro all’altro senza soluzione di continuità.

I do not have many notes about the book. It is a pleasant read. It is also one more book that I read where the life of the protagonist is told from childhood on and the protagonist becomes a novelist - I guess it really is a subgenre.

After all I suppose that if you are a writer and want to write about something, maybe it comes easier if you write about something you know. You can write about somebody becoming a plumber, but then you have to do research about how that happens and, I don’t know, maybe interview somebody to actually do something more than rewriting together the sources romanzandole (unless you’re also a plumber or somebody in your family is o cose del genere). Or you can write about somebody who becomes a writer and that’s kind of ok, because you know all about it, and you can make it realistic, and this kind of fiction, unlike reality, needs to be realistic.

What I’m getting at is that a book where the protagonist is a writer is bound to be in qualche misura autobiographic. And if we assume this about this book, then I think we can find some good reasons about why the author wants to stay anonymous; if I were the author, I would not want a journalist looking up in my life for traces dell’ambiente o degli eventi del libro.

I saved this line where Lila talks about what goes on in her head:

L’unico problema è sempre stato l’agitazione della testa. Non la posso fermare, devo sempre fare, rifare, coprire, scoprire, rinforzare, e poi all’improvviso disfare, spaccare.