The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
The thing that interested me most about Elena Ferrante’s work is the way that she way she tells a story. She deals with issues that literature is focusing on for the past two centuries such as, families, especially broken families and friendships, love and passion, but she does so with a storytelling technique that is completely new and innovative. I am really drawn by her novels and I take immense pleasure reading them.
Ferrante's books are also about determination and submission, male domination and female domination or submission, about power, the power of the body and the family dynamics of power. But what interests me more is the power of mind. Most of Ferrante’s female characters are taken in with the possibilities of education, of educating themselves to better themselves. It seems to me that she is passing a message in a sense to women that they are not only bodies, they are not what society pushes them to believe they are, it’s a message of individuation.
In The Lying Life of Adults, the narrator, Giovanna, navigates the first years of adolescence in the 1990s Naples. While she is trying to understand what means to grow into a body that feels unfamiliar and -at times repulsive—she also finds out the lies that her parents have told her.
“Two years before leaving home, my father said to my mother that I was very ugly,” the novel starts. In this powerful phrase lies an opening up of a web of tangled relationships weaved in and around families and friends traumatised by abandonment, violence, oppression and betrayals. But also, about the struggle that a young woman has to endure in order to become herself, in a divided city prone to violence, regardless of her economic or social background.