Scan barcode
A review by editrix
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
LOVE. This was just what I hoped it would be. I don't know how true it is to the actual experience of being a self-loathing, self-destructive teenage girl, but it sure felt real, and Ferrante gave me a good idea of the internal and external hows and whys of it. She could have written twice as many pages about these characters and I'd be all over it. (Dare I hope this could be the start of another series?)
This story felt so similar in a lot of ways to what I've read of the author's Neapolitan Novels (which start in the 1950s) that I had to keep reminding myself that this newest book was contemporary to my own life (the narrator is only a few months older than I), but instead of that feeling problematic, I found that it highlighted the timelessness of the issues in a way that worked brilliantly. It magically feels like a book about the Large Questions of Life even while dealing exclusively with the small details of one small person’s limited inner life. As relayed through the perspective of the teenage narrator, this is perfect: everything that happens is small, personal, internal, but it feels like the whole world depends on it. If that's not the teenage experience, what is?
This is a coming-of-age story written for adults, and reading it felt a bit like watching “My So-Called Life” for the first time as an adult and being able to feel both the righteous angst of the teenager as well as the justified anguish of the parents forced to sit in the front row and watch the uncomfortable theater of a young person's life happen while having very little power to direct the action. I loved the complexity of the characters and how people were allowed to change, even quite dramatically, even from minute to minute, and how they were always granted the true-to-life power to be multiple things at once—beloved yet selfish, wise yet cruel, inwardly ashamed yet outwardly unapologetic. Through Giovanna's imperfect understanding of her world, we see how love and hate and both good intentions and bad deeds swirl together in the muddle that characterizes the difference between the bright color-blocked scenes of childhood and the subtle gray landscape of adulthood.
"'Maybe everything would be less complicated if you told the truth.'
She said haltingly: 'The truth is difficult, growing up you'll understand that, novels aren't sufficient for it.'...
Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many."
This story felt so similar in a lot of ways to what I've read of the author's Neapolitan Novels (which start in the 1950s) that I had to keep reminding myself that this newest book was contemporary to my own life (the narrator is only a few months older than I), but instead of that feeling problematic, I found that it highlighted the timelessness of the issues in a way that worked brilliantly. It magically feels like a book about the Large Questions of Life even while dealing exclusively with the small details of one small person’s limited inner life. As relayed through the perspective of the teenage narrator, this is perfect: everything that happens is small, personal, internal, but it feels like the whole world depends on it. If that's not the teenage experience, what is?
This is a coming-of-age story written for adults, and reading it felt a bit like watching “My So-Called Life” for the first time as an adult and being able to feel both the righteous angst of the teenager as well as the justified anguish of the parents forced to sit in the front row and watch the uncomfortable theater of a young person's life happen while having very little power to direct the action. I loved the complexity of the characters and how people were allowed to change, even quite dramatically, even from minute to minute, and how they were always granted the true-to-life power to be multiple things at once—beloved yet selfish, wise yet cruel, inwardly ashamed yet outwardly unapologetic. Through Giovanna's imperfect understanding of her world, we see how love and hate and both good intentions and bad deeds swirl together in the muddle that characterizes the difference between the bright color-blocked scenes of childhood and the subtle gray landscape of adulthood.
"'Maybe everything would be less complicated if you told the truth.'
She said haltingly: 'The truth is difficult, growing up you'll understand that, novels aren't sufficient for it.'...
Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many."