Based on a True Story

I'm not sure what I was hoping for with this book. The premise was intriguing, I love foreign literature, and maybe secretly dreaming about the feeling I got after reading Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante when I stumbled upon it many moons ago in a bookstore and read the thing in one sitting. Maybe it was the translation, maybe the characters, maybe the writing style. I make it a point to finish a book I start, but after restarting it literally at least 12 times, and growing bored and frustrated each time, I've decided to concede. This book has beat me. The level of foreshadowing almost at the end of every other paragraph, the ruminative nature of the narrator, who is so self-deprecating, so very uncertain of her own voice and existence that it stretched the powers of my imagination, and the character of L., who should have been beguiling, but was interesting only by default because she was at least sure of who she was. I did like what de Vigan attempted to do here, playing with the truth and testing the boundaries between truth and fiction. That is compelling. I just wish the execution matched the stellar concept.