The Lying Life of Adults
Elena Ferrante
The Lying Life of Adults
Elena Ferrante
Giovanna’s pretty face has changed: it’s turning into the face of an ugly, spiteful adolescent. But is she seeing things as they really are? Where must she look to find her true reflection and a life she can claim as her own?
Giovanna’s search leads her to two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: the Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and the Naples of the depths, a place of excess and vulgarity. Adrift, she vacillates between these two cities, falling into one then climbing back to the other.
This powerful new novel set in a divided Naples by bestselling author Elena Ferrante is a singular portrayal of the transition from childhood to adolescence to adulthood.
Review
Joanna Di Mattia
Last year, when I heard that a new Elena Ferrante novel was imminent, I experienced palpable waves of excitement through my body. That’s the kind of writer Ferrante is – she inspires feverish devotion. Like many of my colleagues, I worship her Neapolitan Novels, the quartet set in postwar Naples centred on brilliant friends Lenù (also known as Elena) and Lila. It secured Ferrante’s place as one of the most perceptive writers of women’s psyches, and especially of the highly flammable territory of adolescence. Her first novel in five years, The Lying Life of Adults (with translation again by Ann Goldstein), justifies this belief.
With The Lying Life of Adults, Ferrante returns to the city she knows best. But rather than the impoverished neighbourhood of the quartet, here we start up high, in the Vomero, among the educated middle classes in the early 1990s. Giovanna – shy and twelve when we meet her, provocative at sixteen when we depart – has her world unstitched when she overhears her parents compare her to her estranged Aunt Vittoria. Disillusioned, Giovanna descends into the other Naples – poorer, coarser, and more explosive – seeking the truth about her aunt and a mirror in which she might see herself more clearly.
The Lying Life of Adults reads like a raw confession. Ferrante excavates her protagonist’s turbulent inner life with unvarnished prose. Amidst routine adolescent pains, Giovanna also learns that everybody lies, and takes pleasure in the lies she tells; in their power to transform and punish. Ferrante portrays Giovanna’s changing body and mind with a ferocious volatility – her feelings of indignation and shame are rendered so intensely they are practically stifling.
The question persists: how much of Ferrante’s writing is autobiographical? Is The Lying Life of Adults a portrait of the artist as a young rebel or a work of pure imagination? Ferrante sees writing as the communication of truth, but also perhaps the definitive deception. Lies are stories; they give Giovanna’s life shape and order. That’s an intriguing conundrum. The Lying Life of Adults is a book I will return to again and again. It’s a vivid, volcanic masterpiece.
Joanna Di Mattia works as a bookseller at Readings Carlton.
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