The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante, Ann Goldstein (Translator)

Overview

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Washington Post • O, The Oprah Magazine • TIME Magazine • NPR • Financial Times • New York Post • Kirkus Reviews • Harper’s Bazaar

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER

In this powerful novel set in a divided Naples by Elena Ferrante, the New York Times best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend, fourteen-year-old Giovanna is searching for her reflection in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: Naples of the heights, which wears a mask of refinement, and Naples of the depths, a place of excess and vulgarity, where her guide is the unforgettable Aunt Vittoria.

With this new novel about the passage from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, Ferrante gives her readers another gripping, highly addictive, Neapolitan story.

“Another spellbinding coming-of-age tale from a master.”—People Magazine

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609457150
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/21/2021
Pages:	328
Sales rank:	201,043
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 6.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), which was made into a film directed by Roberto Faenza, Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), adapted by Mario Martone, and The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), soon to be a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. She is also the author of Incidental Inventions (Europa, 2019), illustrated by Andrea Ucini, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (Europa, 2016) and a children’s picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night (Europa, 2016). The four volumes known as the “Neapolitan quartet” (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child) were published by Europa Editions in English between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018.

Ann Goldstein has translated into English all of Elena Ferrante’s books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Story of the Lost Child, which was shortlisted for the MAN Booker International Prize. She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award. She lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

What a relief it is when an author who has written a masterpiece returns to prove the gift intact.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Reads like a distillation of adolescence itself.”—Vogue

“Suspenseful and propulsive…Explores some of the writer’s touchiest preoccupations.”—The New York Times

“Ferrante once again, with undiminished skill and audacity, creates an emotional force field that has at its heart a young girl on the brink of womanhood.”—Wall Street Journal

“Giovanna’s fate, containing elements both expected and unexpected, makes her one of this year’s most memorable heroines.”—The Boston Globe

“Will leave the reader as shaken and invigorated as it does its young protagonist.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“This is classic Ferrante, better than ever [...] Great stuff.”—The Toronto Star

“The Lying Life of Adults affirms that Ferrante is an oracle among authors, writing literary epics as illuminating as origin myths, explaining us to ourselves.”—O, The Oprah Magazine

“A marvelously disconcerting novel of disillusionment.”—The Atlantic

“A glorious story about the liminal space between childhood and adulthood…A study of the meaning of refinement, beauty and what truth even means.”—Good Housekeeping

“This transportive new book is a must read.”—Condé Nast Traveler

“A bracing reminder of the complexity of class and of the variegated ways in which human beings process what they lack and decide to fill that void.”—The Nation

“At times hilarious and gut-wrenching, Ferrante’s novel breaks down society’s impossible ideals of beauty and behavior.”—Today.com

“A clear-eyed, evocative reminder that the terrain of adulthood is as fraught as the darkest corners of Naples.”—Seattle Book Review

“As slinky and scowling as a Neapolitan cat.”—Annalisa Quinn, NPR

“Ferrante returns to the splendid squalor of Naples in this cutting and cunning bildungsroman.”—O, The Oprah Magazine

“[Ferrante’s]characters have wide-spanned souls and so does Naples, exuding the smells of the sea and gasoline and baking crust.”—Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

What a relief it is when an author who has written a masterpiece returns to prove the gift intact…Adolescence remains rich territory for Ferrante. Here as in her past work, she captures the interior states of young people with an unflinching psychological honesty that is striking in its vividness and depth. We share in Giovanna's embarrassments, the tortured logic of her self-soothing, her temptations and decisions that accrete into something like experience. How easy it is, in retrospect, to have belittled those years of our lives—how much harder to recall, with the full strength of the limbic system, the feelings of privation and loss that attended our departures from childhood. Ferrante's genius is to stay with the discomfort. With the same propulsive, episodic style she perfected in the Neapolitan quartet, she traces how it is that the consciousness of a girl at 12 becomes that of a young woman at 16.

The New York Times Book Review - Dayna Tortorici

[The Lying Life of Adults] is suspenseful and propulsive; in style and theme, a sibling to her previous books. But it's also a more vulnerable performance, less tightly woven and deliberately plotted, even turning uncharacteristically jagged at points as it explores some of the writer's touchiest preoccupations.

The New York Times - Parul Sehgal

08/31/2020

A single comment can change a life, or for Giovanna, the adolescent only child of a middle-class Neapolitan couple in the early 1990s and narrator of Ferrante’s sumptuous latest (after The Story of the Lost Child), it can set it in motion. “She’s getting the face of Vittoria,” Giovanna’s father, Andrea, says about her, referring to Giovanna’s estranged aunt Vittoria, whom Andrea disdains and calls ugly. The comment provokes Giovanna into seeking out Vittoria on the other side of Naples, where she finds a beautiful, fiery woman, consumed by bitterness over a lover’s death and resentful of Andrea’s arrogance at having climbed the social ladder. Andrea can’t save Giovanna from Vittoria’s influence, and their relationship will affect those closest to Giovanna as family secrets unravel and disrupt the harmony of her quiet life. Giovanna’s parents’ devastating marital collapse, meanwhile, causes her to be distracted at school and held back a year, and prompts Giovanna into a steely self-awareness as she has her first sexual experiences along a bumpy ride toward adulthood. Themes of class disparity and women’s coming-of-age are at play much as they were in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, but the depictions of inequality serve primarily as a backdrop to Giovanna’s coming-of-age trials that 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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

10/01/2020

Recalling Ferrante's acclaimed "Neapolitan Quartet" in its keen investigation of female coming of age, Ferrante's new novel features inquiring young Giovanna, shocked at age 13 to overhear her father, Andrea, derisively describe her as starting to look like his sister, Vittoria. The cultured Andrea and Vittoria, brash and challenging, have been estranged since Andrea abandoned their lower-class roots and broke up Vittoria's passionate affair with a married policeman. Giovanna doesn't even know Vittoria but finagles a meeting and succumbs to her dark charm, even as Vittoria preaches virulently against Giovanna's parents and pulls Giovanna into her unexpectedly close relationship with the wife and children of her now-dead lover. Giovanna soon begins feeling alienated from her own parents, but to her credit (and Ferrante's) she doesn't allow this tension to become an either/or situation, eventually questioning Vittoria's pronouncements and finding her own way to adulthood. VERDICT While Ferrante sometimes draws out what she's made obvious, her spot-on delineation of Giovanna's struggle will delight her many fans.

Library Journal

Actress Marisa Tomei’s dramatic reading takes the listener inside the mind of a teenage girl struggling to understand who she is. Giovanna has had a sheltered upbringing by her well-educated parents in an upper-class section of Naples, Italy. But when she overhears her father say she is becoming ugly, like her Aunt Vittoria, she insists on meeting the conniving, vulgar aunt her father despises. Tomei, in her first solo audiobook narration, brings depth to Giovanna as she privately expresses her innermost thoughts but speaks to her family with a sullen teenage attitude. Tomei’s portrayal of Vittoria, with her crudeness and explosive moods, is raspy and guttural. One can even hear a trace of Neapolitan dialect. The listener will feel for Giovanna in this heartrending novel. J.E.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2021 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2020 - AudioFile

★ 2020-08-10
An overheard remark prompts an adolescent girl to uncover the truth about her relatives (and herself) in Ferrante’s precise dissection of one family’s life in Naples.

Upon hearing her father refer to her, disparagingly, as having the same face as a despised and estranged relative, 12-year-old Giovanna, previously a good student and affectionate daughter, embarks on an odyssey of detection and discovery through areas of Naples from which her educated and progressive parents have shielded her. Desperate to determine whether she, indeed, resembles the abhorred Aunt Vittoria, Giovanna seeks out her father’s sister and develops a fraught relationship with the troubled woman. The process of untangling generations of internecine deceit and rivalry—including the provenance of a peripatetic heirloom bracelet—leads Giovanna to truths about the conventional lies told by her parents and to decisions about how she wishes to conduct her own, not-yet-adult, life. (The bracelet appears to have mutable properties and serves as either charm or handcuff, just another thing to ask the enigmatic author about over coffee.) Ferrante revisits previously explored themes—violence against women, female friendships, the corrosive effects of class disparities—albeit in a more rarified sector of Naples (the privileged “upper” neighborhood of Rione Alto) than in her earlier Neapolitan Quartet. Giovanna’s nascent sexuality is more frankly explored than that of previous Ferrante protagonists, permitting the author to highlight two sides of teen sexuality: agency and abuse. Goldstein’s fluid translation once again allows readers into the head of a young woman recalling with precision and emotion a series of events which lead to a point of confession. 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