RaveThe Globe and Mail (CA)Every expectation established both by and for its protagonist, the journalist-in-exile Erasmo Aragon, is not just undermined, but abandoned . ... It\'s tempting to read into this a common narrative of exile – the manic, nostalgic pining for home – and to conflate that experience with Moya\'s own personal history ... The Dream of My Return is thrillingly labyrinthine in its manoeuvres between and away from accepted narratives, ratcheting into something like a pot-boiling mystery abandoned before its resolution – perhaps even before its climax ... It\'s invigorating to encounter a novel that, in both form and content, resists both the facile categorizations of the market and the formulaic obedience of more simplistic books
Elena Ferrante
RaveSlateIn Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the work of the novelist—especially l’écriture féminine—is dismissed as frivolous and bourgeois, at least compared to the activism and agitation of 1970s Italy … The title suggests absolutes—Those Who Leave (Elena) and Those Who Stay (Lila)—but the subtitle, ‘Middle Time,’ hints at something else. Like its narrator, the novel is less interested in obvious binaries—of language (Neapolitan/Italian), social geography (South/North), ideology (communist/fascist), gender, faith, and class—than in the mucky territory between.
