Soon to be a NETFLIX Original Series.
A POWERFUL NEW NOVEL set in a divided Naples by ELENA FERRANTE, the New York Times best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lost Daughter.
“There’s no doubt [the publication of The Lying Life of Adults] will be the literary event of the year.”—ELLE Magazine
Giovanna’s pretty face is changing, turning ugly, at least so her father thinks. Giovanna, … year.”—ELLE Magazine
Giovanna’s pretty face is changing, turning ugly, at least so her father thinks. Giovanna, he says, looks more like her Aunt Vittoria every day. But can it be true? Is she really changing? Is she turning into her Aunt Vittoria, a woman she hardly knows but whom her mother and father clearly despise? Surely there is a mirror somewhere in which she can see herself as she truly is.
Giovanna is searching for her reflection in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and Naples of the depths, a place of excess and vulgarity. She moves from one to the other in search of the truth, but neither city seems to offer answers or escape.
Named one of 2016’s most influential people by TIME Magazine and frequently touted as a future Nobel Prize-winner, Elena Ferrante has become one of the world’s most read and beloved writers. With this new novel about the transition from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, Ferrante proves once again that she deserves her many accolades. In The Lying Life of Adults, readers will discover another gripping, highly addictive, and totally unforgettable Neapolitan story.
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2020
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Ferrante has the uncanny ability to turn cities into people, in this case the city of Naples becomes Aunt Victoria, and our heroine negotiates her feelings of having kinship with such a passionate person, even as she re-examines her feelings for her father, who has rejected all that in favor of a cool, logical approach to life. For shaping a story and falling deeply into a narrative, Ferrante has no equal.
FICTION: An Italian teenager’s life is upended when she meets an aunt she never knew.
By Jenny Shank Special to the Star Tribune AUGUST 28, 2020
Once beliefs are established, presenting people with contradicting facts does little to dislodge them — opinions are rooted less in evidence than in emotion and the views of one’s social group. However, people are particularly open to new ideas during the turbulent years of adolescence and early adulthood. This is the time of life that Italian novelist Elena Ferrante specializes in excavating, in the globally bestselling “Neapolitan quartet” and now in her new novel, “The Lying Life of Adults,” translated once again by Ann Goldstein.
Giovanna is a young teenager, the beloved only child of two studious academics who live in the respectable part of Naples, high in the hills. Giovanna’s father was born into poverty in one of Naples’ low-lying, rough neighborhoods, familiar to readers of “My Brilliant Friend,” but he has cut family ties and erased his past.
Ferrante begins Giovanna’s story at the moment when the web of illusions, lies and euphemisms her parents have woven is blown away. Giovanna begins to struggle in school and feel uncomfortable in her own body, and she overhears her parents criticizing her academic performance, which her mother attributes to the pitfalls of adolescence. “Adolescence has nothing to do with it,” her father says, “she’s getting the face of Vittoria.”
Vittoria is Giovanna’s father’s much-hated sister. “My father always talked about his sister obscurely,” Ferrante writes, “as if she practiced shameful rites that defiled her, defiling those around her.”
Ferrante conjures the raw emotions of adolescence, when an overheard, offhand remark can sear like a branding iron. Giovanna searches for a picture of the maligned Vittoria — but finds that her image has been excised from all old photos.
Giovanna begs to visit Vittoria and see her face for herself. When she first sets out to meet her aunt, Giovanna says, “My father seemed to me an extraordinary man, my mother a really nice woman, and the two of them were the only clear figures in a world that was otherwise confused.”
But Giovanna’s notions of right and wrong are overturned as she meets the forceful, unforgettable Vittoria, a housecleaner with a fifth-grade education who remains always in the grip of her passions and resentments. In her blunt way, Vittoria reveals to Giovanna a new perspective about her father’s past.
Vittoria’s revelations set Giovanna on a journey of self-discovery, full of turmoil, teenage petulance, doomed crushes and bad sex, but they ultimately provide her with the foundation to evolve from a cosseted daughter into an independent young woman with ideas of her own.
“The Lying Life of Adults” suggests that as people ascend in society, they may gain outward mastery over their emotions, but in doing so they must lie and deny that they have the same strong urges and impulses as less-educated people.
Giovanna’s coming-of-age story is gripping, but what makes this novel indelible is Ferrante’s voice. As in her other novels, she convinces the reader to feel she’s the only person to ever reveal the complete truth. “The Lying Life of Adults” reads like an intimate confession or urgent confidence, and it will leave the reader as shaken and invigorated as it does its young protagonist.
Jenny Shank’s short story collection, “Mixed Company,” won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and will be published by Texas Review Press in October 2021. Her novel, “The Ringer,” won the High Plains Book Award. She teaches in the Mile High MFA Program and her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, the Washington Post and the Atlantic.
My first novel by Elena Ferrante and I loved it. It’s edgy and unsettling and very detailed in a fascinating way. She has a wonderful way of writing characters that makes them believable and three-dimensional, and yet they are all ever so slightly surreal. The first person narration works really well, especially coming from a child/teenager which means the reader has to fill in the gaps between what is really happening and what the narrator thinks is happening. A very rich book.
I did not really enjoy this book, but I wanted to finish to see how the story ended. I found the writing tedious.
Ferrante is a wonderful writer, and very capable of creating a picture in words of life in a middle-class neighbourhood of Naples. However, this book didn’t draw me in. Maybe I’ve just had to deal with teen-aged angst for too many years, but I got fed up with the protagonist, a 13 year old girl from Naples. She has that adolescent way of seeing all events through her own wants and needs – fine for her, but an overload for this reader.
Book Review: The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante (2020) (Fiction) 4 Stars ****
When we first meet Giovanna, she’s happy, confident, studious, calm, and secure in her family, school, and neighborhood. Most of her self-esteem comes from the admiration she believes is reflected in her father’s eyes until Giovanna overhears a negative remark made to his wife, saying Giovanna looks like his estranged sister—ugly on the outside and the inside. Everything falls apart. “Maybe at that moment something somewhere in my body broke, maybe that’s where I should locate the end of my childhood. I felt as if I were a container of granules that were inperceptibly leaking out of me through a tiny cracks.”
Giovanna goes on a crusade to meet her much-aligned Aunt Vittoria to discover the truth for herself. This is the beginning of Giovanna’s end. Loud, ill-mannered, brash, Vittoria is the antithesis of Giovanna’s educated, well-mannered, soft-spoken parents. What do they have in common? They’re liars. All of them.
Set in Naples, Italy, in the 1990s, the story takes us through Giovanna’s young teenage years from twelve to sixteen, filled with angst, insecurities, manipulations, and lies. It’s almost like reading her diary filled with secrets and contradictions by all the adults around her, as well as by her friends. While Giovanna hates the lies used to cover up, further their ends, protect their reputations, and jockey their postions to come out on top, she is a quick study. As much as Giovanna detests these practices, she recognizes the expediency of such behavior and employs it successfully to insure success in her ever-changing machinations. Gone is the innocent, happy girl we once knew.
In addition to Aunt Vittoria and Giovanna’s parents, her best friends, sisters Angela and Ida and their parents, play integral roles in the drama that is Giovanna’s life. Despite the main character’s young age, this is not a kid’s book. Character development is intense. The adult dramas are played out in full. The teenage characters imitate negative adult behavior. All characters are flawed contradictions of themselves and of the expectations of others. Nothing is as it seems.
Elena Ferrante is a renowned Italian writer, best known for The Neapolitan Novels, a series of four books beginning with My Brilliant Friend which begins the acclaimed HBO ongoing mini-series.
Though this novel treads some of the same territory as the magnificent Neapolitan Quartet, and you might not get “quite” as knocked off your feet, stay with it. Its charms are deep. The subjects are familiar: class, education, talismans (a bracelet vs a doll), adolescence, loud voices, coarse arguments, casual brutality. Above all, how characters are shaped by the tough Neapolitan world, this time of the 1990’s.
No writer does the first-person in-her-head, judgmental and ‘put upon” young girl’s voice with such ferocious indignation. It was a revelation in the Quartet, but this novel show’s us there is room for more exploration.
Giovanna sees the hypocrisy of lies everywhere she turns as her family disintegrates after she overhears a denigrating comment from her father about her own similarity to a member of the “wrong” side of her family. She must find out if it’s true. The story traces her coming-of-age in terms of how more and more lies are revealed to her, how she copes, and how she steps into adulthood armed with this knowledge. Pay particular attention to Ferrente’s writing in the scene where Giovanna falls in love at first sight. It will take your breath away. For a special treat, listen to this novel via audiobook. Marisa Tomei’s rendition of the singular voice of the story is not to be missed.
Interesting characters. Weak, rambling plot.
Ferrante continues to be one of our most challenging and mysterious writers. In this book she creates one of the most interesting and dysfunctional families in modern literature. I couldn’t put it down. Velocity, complexity and ferocity.
Brilliant.
Astute, honest, and sophisticated!
In this latest novel by Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults, she transports us to the streets of Naples, Italy and into the life of Giovanna, a young girl who after overhearing a harsh comment made by her father embarks on a journey to discover the extended family she has previously been sheltered and protected from resulting in unexpectedly enlightening consequences.
The prose is emotive and precise. The characters are complex, guileless, and impulsive. And the plot is a compelling, coming-of-age tale of life, love, deception, friendship, familial drama, manipulation, jealousy, emerging sexuality, abuse, and self-reflection.
Overall, The Lying Life of Adults is a raw, perceptive, heartfelt, domestic drama that does an exceptional job of reminding us that reality is often a disillusioned version of the life we conjure with the fantasies and lies we choose to believe, especially in young adulthood.