Alexandra > Recent Status Updates

The twist has happened…

As I have told many people, including a professor whose admission “oh no, I’ve never read that one” made me feel somehow embarrassed, reading this book feels like standing close to an older woman wearing too much perfume. Stuffy WASPs. Yet for some reason I can’t stop reading because I am waiting for something ~scary~ to happen. (Also, if this app is any indication, I clearly have an issue with reading atm.)

Volume II begins with Waterloo, a magnificently operatic portrait of one of literature’s finest battle scenes. Fantastic. Victor Hugo is a master of form. Now I meet Cosette as an adolescent. Salut!

Re-reading this for the first time since my early teens and completely baffled at the widespread romanticism of this novel. The story is even more brutal than I remembered; I wince to read this physical and emotional violence. Catherine has absolutely no spine, a constant betrayer of her childhood’s companion and wilderness; Hindley is just awful; and Heathcliff, for all the injustice he faces, is still mean.

A kind of crash course in the contemporary photographers of the moment. Bengal writes of her subjects with a keen sense of familiarity; those essays directly related to her personal experiences shine with a genuine curiosity to understand the art that captivates her imagination.

infinitely inspiring

Brilliant and invigorating, even more so than the first book. Ferrante’s precise portrayals of the fissures in a friendship, caused by class differences, patriarchal oppression, and poverty, are perfectly juxtaposed against Elena’s poised adolescent perspective, which is at turns cautious and naive, intelligent and brutal, sibilant and entirely, captivatingly, curious.