It's hard to write about each of these books individually, because they're one continuous story. This book had some of my favorite moments and lines of the entire series so far, but it is also the book where I kept thinking that I still don't know if I actually like any of the characters. Elena, the narrator, publishes her first book, and her response to that and how people review it and discuss it feels so real and so recognizable, and her marriage and children feel like such a defeat, and then the parallel life that Lila is living is its own pain and suffering. There's a line that Lila says to Elena:
"Each of us narrates our life as it suits us."
She says that after Elena has described her early marriage and the birth of her first daughter in glowing terms. And it's a line that has just stuck with me, and these books are so deliberately narrated; the reader never forgets either the framing of the missing Lila, or the fact that this story is being told by the older version of the young woman Elena was.
The structure of the books builds to the inevitable; when Nino once again resurfaces, and this time he and Elena finally become lovers and eventually leave their families for each other, it feels like the only thing that could have possibly happened, even if it also feels extraordinarily violent. I don't know what I hope for them, but I also feel like any hope is irrelevant, because this isn't the sort of narrative that gives you that kind of satisfying ending.
Elena at one point does contemplate whether, if it had been possible, she could have loved Lila in the way she loves Nino. Whether there could have been space for their intellectual and emotional growth together, so that she didn't always exist in a vacuum. I would like to be able to read the story of that life, in some other world.
Grade: B
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