Ferrante’s new novel doesn’t disappoint

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This article was published 12/09/2020 (2149 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Italian author Elena Ferrante’s four-book series, starting with My Brilliant Friend in 2011, transformed her into a bona fide literary sensation. Selling 11 million copies worldwide, the books (dubbed the Neopolitan quartet) made Ferrante a household name.

Ferrante has been writing under a pseudonym since 1992, and literary critics have devoted much energy to trying to guess her real name, even as she has stated that remaining anonymous is a pre-condition to her writing.

Critics have viewed Ferrante with suspicion and even hostility in her home country. As author Nicola Langioia notes, “In Italy, if there’s one thing that’s unforgivable, it’s success.”

What is most remarkable about Ferrante’s bestselling My Brilliant Friend is that it so specifically charts the intense friendship between two Italian girls in post-Second World War Naples while simultaneously striking such a universal chord.

The Lying Life of Adults is Ferrante’s first book in six years, one of the literary events of 2020. Released in Europe last November, the North American release was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic from June to September.

While each of her books is unique in several ways, Ferrante keeps coming back to certain themes in all of her work: education as a way to transcend class, the thin line between beauty and vulgarity and, above all, the importance of female bonds. The author remains uniquely gifted at capturing the desires and anxieties experienced by adolescent girls as they come face to face with impending adulthood.

Withdrawn 12-year-old Giovanna comes from a middle class upbringing, the polar opposite of the families in My Brilliant Friend. Giovanna’s dad is an aspiring Marxist high school teacher, handsome and courteous, whom she worships. One day, Giovanna overhears him remark that she is no longer pretty and has begun to resemble her estranged Aunt Vittoria, “in whom, ugliness and spite were combined to perfection.”

The girl is naturally horrified and wants to meet Vittoria at once. Giovanna’s family lives in Vomero, the loftiest neighborhood in Naples. In order to see her aunt, Giovanna has to take “a journey so long it seemed to me that we and my father’s relatives lived in two different cities.” Despite her parent’s warnings, she makes the epic descent into the industrial part of Naples.

Giovanna discovers an aunt who is nothing like the one her father has described. Vittoria introduces the girl to a world of carnal pleasures, in particular as she explains how her fate has been sealed by a doomed affair with a married man named Enzo.

This new chapter in Giovanna’s life also unearths a wealth of family secrets, and, eventually, leads to the truth about her parent’s dysfunctional marriage. During a dinner party, Giovanna lies on the floor and spies under the table her mother’s ankle wrapped around a man who is their closest family friend. “Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many,” she thinks, lamenting the lack of truth in her bourgeois upbringing.

Ferrante revels in playing with the schizophrenia of Naples, contrasting the refinement of Giovanna’s neighbourhood with the vulgarity and excess found in Vittoria’s. The young girl bounces back and forth between the two worlds, never truly belonging in either.

As always with Ferrante, the port city of Naples takes on its own life. “We went to sit on a white step, facing a Naples that seemed beautiful under a transparent dome, outside was the blue sky and inside were vapors, as if all the stones in the city were breathing.”

Vittoria introduces Giovanna to Roberto, another classic Ferrante male love interest. Like Nino in her previous books, curly haired Roberto is well-spoken and handsome. He is also devout, and a scholar of religion. Sadly, even when we meet him, we understand that he will not live up to his own ideals.

The Lying Life of Adults is not a typical coming-of-age story. Giovanna grows up by losing faith in those around her, and this disillusionment leads to a kind of truth and freedom. The novel ends with Giovanna and her friend Ada heading off for Venice and promising “each other to become adults as no one ever had before.”

There is an undeniable pleasure in experiencing the world through Ferrante’s lens. Her characters have a physical quality that is difficult to quantify. The Lying Life of Adults will definitely satisfy hardcore fans as well as win her new ones.

Winnipeg writer Greg Klassen will be setting his PVR for season three of the HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, whenever it is released.