BOOKS FROM ITALYThe Lying Life of Adults
Tags:
Set in Italy
Female author
Description:
A powerful new novel set in a divided Naples by Elena Ferrante, the beloved best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend. Giovanna's pretty face has changed: it's turning into the face of an ugly, spiteful adolescent. But is she seeing things as they really are? Into which mirror must she look to find herself and save herself? She is searching for a new face in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: the Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and the Naples of the depths, which professes to be a place of excess and vulgarity. She moves between these two cities, disoriented by the fact that, whether high or low, the city seems to offer no answer and no escape.
Reviews:
(2 months ago) |
19 Aug, 2025
I really enjoyed Ferrante’s angry novel about teenage turmoil and growing up. Some readers were put-off, finding it overly melodramatic: Adolescent angst and mercurial moods. Lots of lying and deceit. Obsessive and anguished love. Envy and malice. Family feuds and dysfunction. Uncontrollable passions and furies…
In the hands of a different author such excess would probably cause me to quit reading in frustration and disgust, but Ferrante miraculously makes her characters both volatile and realistic.
translated by Ann Goldstein
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