The Lying Life of Adults
Elena Ferrante, 2019 (2020, U.S.)
Europa Editions
324 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781609455910
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)
The Lying Life of Adults is set to become a Netflix series.
Author Bio
Elena Ferrante is the pen-name of an Italian novelist whose true identity is not publicly known. Though heralded as the most important Italian novelist of her generation, she has kept her identity secret since the publication of her first novel in 1992.
Works
Ferrante is the author of a half dozen novels, the most well-known of which is Days of Abandonment. Her four "Neapolitan Novels" revolve around two perceptive and intelligent girls from Naples who try to create lives for themselves within a violent and stultifying culture. The series consists of four novels: My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015), which was nominated for the Strega Prize, an Italian literary award.
Two of Ferrante's novels have been turned into films by Italian filmmakers. Troubling Love became the 1995 feature film Nasty Love, and The Days of Abandonment became a 2005 film of the same title.
Her nonfiction book Fragments (2003) discussion her experiences as a writer.
Identity
In a January 21, 2013, article in The New Yorker, James Woods wrote that Ferrante has said, "books, once they are written, have no need of their authors." Perhaps that is one reason for her pen-name.
Speculation about Ferrante's identity is rife. In the same New Yorker article, Woods also wrote:
In the past twenty years or so, though, she has provided written answers to journalists’ questions, and a number of her letters have been collected and published. From them, we learn that she grew up in Naples, and has lived for periods outside Italy. She has a classics degree; she has referred to being a mother. One could also infer from her fiction and from her interviews that she is not now married. (“Over the years, I’ve moved often, in general unwillingly, out of necessity.… I’m no longer dependent on the movements of others, only on my own” is her encryption.) In addition to writing, “I study, I translate, I teach. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/11/2015.)
Book Reviews
[S]uspenseful and propulsive.… [It is] the story of the evolution of a young woman, so brash and sensibly secretive, allergic to banality, prone to fabrication but honest with herself about her desires. Ferrante leaves many threads dangling; we’re left to wonder at the… enigmatic, oddly heroic conclusion.
Parul Sehgal - New York Times
Yes, this book lives up to its author’s reputation, and then some. In focusing on Giovanna and her journey, The Lying Life of Adults achieves an energy and warmth sometimes missing in the narratives about Lila and Lenu in the Quartet.… Giovanna’s fate, containing elements both expected and unexpected, makes her one of this year’s most memorable heroines.
Bethanne Patrrick - Boston Globe
Ferrante… shows again how she is unbeatable at pulling you inside the mind of a teenage girl, making you see how everything that looks irrational from the outside—the moods, the silences, the jealousy, fears, tears and resentments—are utterly logical and reasonable…. The book does sag in the middle.… However, the pace picks up in the final third.… [and shows] that five years on Elena Ferrante can still deliver.
Tom Kington - Guardian (UK)
[T]he overwrought language of [Ferrante's] new book doesn’t illuminate the anguish that it seeks to plumb.... [T]he Lying Life has passages of electric dialogue and acute perception. But its crude hinting and telegraphing suggest an author who distrusts her reader’s discernment, and they made me wonder if Ferrante hadn’t drafted the story as a much younger writer, still honing her craft.
New Yorker
Giovanna’s coming-of-age trials… buttress the gripping, plot-heavy tale. While this feels minor in comparison to Ferrante’s previous work, Giovanna is the kind of winning character readers wouldn’t mind seeing more of.
Publishers Weekly
[A] powerful coming-of-age story…. Ferrante’s ability to draw in her reader remains unparalleled.… The novel simmers with overt rage toward parental deception, teachers’ expectations and society’s impossible ideals of beauty and behavior.
BookPage
(Starred review) Fans of Ferrante’s first two Neopolitan novels, My Brilliant Friend (2012) and The Story of a New Name (2013), will especially revel in Giovanna’s confessional, perceptive, gut-wrenching, and often funny narration of what she calls her "arduous approach to the adult world."
Booklist
Ferrante’s legion of devoted readers will be encouraged by another equivocal ending, permitting the hope of further exploration of Giovanna’s journey in future volumes. A girl, a city, an inhospitable society: Ferrante’s formula works again!
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS, then take off on your own:
1. What would your reaction have been as a child to have heard a parent say you were "ugly"? What effect would such a remark have had on you?
2. For most of us going through adolescence, we view our families through a different lens than we did in childhood. How does Giovanna come to questions her family and the "lies" that were once accepted as truths?
3. (Follow-up to Question 2) How similar to Giovanna's was your own passage from childhood to young adulthood? Consider the ideals of love, marriage, faith, and sex. How did your own understanding of them change?
4. As in her other works, Ferrante focuses on class. Start by talking about the childhood household of Giovanna and her parents. How does it differ from the Naples in which her aunt Vittoria lives. What effect does this new environment have on Giovanna? Why is she intent on casting off her privileged upbringing?
5. How would you describe Vittoria? What is Giovanni's reaction to meeting Vittoria? How does the relationship change Giovanni? In what way do her familial alliances change?
6. Giovanni wonders, "What happened in the world of adults, in the heads of very reasonable people, in their bodies loaded with knowledge? What reduced them to the most untrustworthy animals, worse than reptiles?" How would you answer that question? How does Giovanni come to answer that question?
7. Giovanna's sexual experiences are dark? Why does she pursue young men to whom she has no attraction? What drives her?
8. What is the significance of the bracelet, symbolically?
9. What is the meaning of Ferrante's title for this novel?
10. At the end of The Lying Life of Adults, Giovanna and a friend promise each other to "become adults like no one else has before." What do they mean? Does the ending suggest the possibility of additional Giovanni novels?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)