Tag: fiction
-
‘We Were Girls Together’; A Review of My Brilliant Friend
Welcome to the last book review of the semester! This week I read My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, and I am so happy this was the last book. It is a coming-of-age book (so on brand for this class) about two girls in a poor neighbourhood in Naples. The story starts with an older…
-
12 Years Isn’t That Bad, Right? – The Lover
By far the shortest and most uncomfortable read at this point in the semester, The Lover by Marguerite Duras is a novel about the clandestine relationship between a 27-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl. The prose in this book is beautifully written, as an autobiography with Duras recalling her time in Saigon. She captures the…
-
Suffering and Emotion in Time of the Doves
Hello everyone! Hopefully, you all had a great reading week and enjoyed reading The Time of the Doves by Mercè Rodoreda. This novel is a story full of emotion and hurt detailing the protagonist Natalia’s life through the Spanish civil war. The novel is written in a way that folds the emotion into the words…
-
What it Means to Have Nada
Nada, or Nothing when translated from Spanish, is a heart-wrenching, dramatic novel by Carmen Laforet that details a family’s life in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Laforet details the class divide, what it means to go hungry, and different kinds of love. We follow Andrea, a student, navigating her strange family and different…
-
Family Drama and Relationships: The Shrouded Woman
What may come across as a mysterious book, told from the perspective of a ghost, is a beautiful exploration of a woman’s life and her relationships told in a very interesting way. The Shrouded Woman by Maria-Luisa Bombal is a modernist text that seeks to push the boundaries of what a novel is and who…
-
Combray: The Over-explained Little French Town
Hello! I just finished Marcel Proust’s Combray and boy oh boy do I have some thoughts. I adore reading but this book seemed like a chore while I was reading it. This may have to do with the fact I (admittedly foolishly) decided to read it all in one day. However, there is no plot…
Len's Library 