RavePublic Books... the larger questions and concerns of Elena Ferrante’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults : on the one hand, erasure; on the other, the efforts of women to uncover and rewrite the past, expropriating the tools that have subjugated them—the literal phallus and its symbolic equivalent, the pen ... And then, in a metanarrative gesture, she references the lines she is writing, which fail to give her a definite form. Giovanna is a tangle of family words, stories, and identities. Like all of Ferrante’s narrators, she writes to conjure up her past self, using narration as a tool for self-analysis, as a textual frame to fix the borders of a splintered self. Like all of Ferrante’s narrators, Giovanna suffers from frantumaglia, a sense of psychical or corporeal fragmentation; and smarginatura, an experience of dissolving physical boundaries ... it charts a reverse journey through social and spatial identities, by tracking Giovanna’s return to her paternal origins, embrace of her father’s old Pascone neighborhood, adoption of Vittoria as a role model, and aspiration to speak in dialect ... The Lying Life of Adults is an exploration of the effects of paternal and patriarchal legacies on the formation of Giovanna’s identity.
Giacomo Sartori
PositiveReading in TranslationHumorous, provocative, and perspicacious ... Frederika Randall, the novel’s translator from Italian, performs a phenomenal feat in capturing God’s vertiginous linguistic and stylistic oscillations revealing him as a capricious, indecisive, bawdy voyeur ... an entertaining, delightful, and timely account of our civilization’s status quo, as well as an irreverent but nonetheless serious warning about our future.
