The New York Times Book Review - Dayna Tortorici
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 - Parul Sehgal
[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.
Publishers Weekly
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.)
From the Publisher
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
Library Journal - Audio
★ 12/01/2020
In her first solo audiobook narration, Academy Award winner Marisa Tomei delivers Ferrante's ("The Neapolitan Novels") coming-of-age story with warmth and empathy—qualities desperately sought by intellectually curious 12-year-old Giovanna, whose viewpoint Ferrante crafts as both unsparingly observant and winning. Formerly a model daughter but now in the throes of puberty and too distracted to study, Giovanna earns such disappointing grades that her despairing father mutters: "She is getting the face of Vittoria." Overhearing this invocation of Aunt Vittoria—reviled, seen in family photos as inked-out black rectangles—Giovanna perceives both her fall from grace and the loss of faith in her parents' credibility. Given that they no longer take her seriously, who can reliably offer "a gaze to evaluate me"? Beginning with visits to Vittoria and her curiously extended family, Giovanna ventures into the Naples beyond the scope of her cultured, erudite parents, collecting acquaintances, experiences, and backstories about her father and a disputed family heirloom. With privileged, articulate Giovanna; brash, unfiltered housemaid Vittoria; and an array of acquaintances, Tomei voices characters from different social strata and linguistic styles vividly yet compassionately. VERDICT Ferrante's latest sojourn in Naples is a treat for her fans, literary fiction readers, and public library fiction collections.—Linda Sappenfield, Round Rock P.L., TX
Library Journal
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.
AUGUST 2020 - AudioFile
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
Kirkus Reviews
★ 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!
