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By Dayna Tortorici
THE LIFE OF ADULTS MENSONGE By Elena Ferrante
What a relief when one who has written a masterpiece returns and discovers that the gift is intact.Has Elena Ferrante, the Italian pseudonym, ever been mentioned whose four-volume novel known as The Napolitano Quartet has made her one of the top famous writers in the world?Maybe not, but good fortune has a way of ruining things.Since the 2002 publication of “The Days of Abandonment” (translated into English through Ann Goldstein in 2005), Ferrante has been known for her portraits of intense and intelligent women as they look at the ugly aspect of the female experience: infidelity, reluctant motherhood and the coming and going of competitive friendship.
In 2012, the first Neapolitan novel, “My Brilliant Friend”, made Ferrante a well-known name.The series tells the story of two women, Lila and Len, intellectually equivalent but divided into circumstances.Raised in the 1950s in the same deficient neighborhood.On the outskirts of Naples, the women are located early, when Len is allowed to go to school after fourth grade and Lila is not.in a factory and lives in the old quarter; She went to college, married well and has become a successful feminist author, believing that Lila, not her, was the “brilliant”.The books were a literary achievement and a foreign sensation, translated into dozens of languages.The condition of the choice they, like all of Ferrante’s novels, was the intimacy he presented through his pseudonym.
In the case of the English publication of the last e-book of the series, “The Story of the Lost Child”, in 2015, Ferrante told Vanity Fair that, thanks to his pseudonym, “I have gained a single area of my own, a loose area, where I feel active and present.Leaving him would be very painful. She has not renounced this freedom, but the authorities beyond five have put her to the test.An adaptation of “My Brilliant Friend” for HBO amplified Ferrante’s fame; in 2016, a journalist, tracking her publisher’s finances, claimed to unmask her identity.
Since then, he has published three e-books: an e-book for children entitled “The Beach at Night” and two in the past published nonfiction collections, “Frantumaglia” and “Incidental Inventions”, which seemed minor compared to his less difficult novels.It was painful to believe the cause, had fame ruined the fiction writing for Ferrante, could we blame him if that were the case?
“The Fake Life of Adults,” Ferrante’s first novel in five years, puts an end to those concerns.The story, once translated by the agile and attentive Goldstein, begins in the early 1990s with Giovanna Trada, the 12-year-old girl.The daughter of two middle-class Neapolitans who behaved well, dismayed to settle down changed.Where she was once beautiful, quick and adored by her father, she is now deformed, slow and, a serious fate for a teacher’s daughter, in trouble at school.One night, he discovers his parents talking about her. Her mother attributes her poor grades to “early adolescence changes,” but her father interrupts her.”Adolescence has nothing to do with it,” he says in dialect, “she has Vittoria’s face.”
[Read our profile of Ann Goldstein, Ferrante’s English translator.]
With those words, a heavy curtain falls on the idyll of Giovanna’s formative years. Giovanna’s ex-aunt Vittoria, like Don Aquiles in “My Brilliant Friend”, is less of a user than a “scarecrow from the formative years, a slim, demonic figure.” Giovanna has never met her; The woman’s face has been blackened with a marker on each and every old photo of the house. The only thing Giovanna knows about her aunt is what her parents have suggested to her: that she is a woman in whom “ugliness and resentment have been perfectly combined”, that her mother hates “as you hate a running lizard. on your bare leg. ” To have Vittoria’s face, you understand, is to be ugly beyond redemption. Her parents check her to assure her that the comparison is harmless, a playful phrase from the circle of relatives, but Giovanna is not convinced. The only thing that will comfort her is meeting her. her own aunt, in this poor and unknown community in Naples where her father grew up. To her surprise, he allows it. He only asks her not to pay attention to her aunt – to “wax my ears like Ulysses” – since Vittoria will see that she is opposed to him.
Vittoria is also warned: rude, bitter, larger than life, an immature woguy with low limits who is willing to corrupt her niece and earn her loyalty. She is also strangely charming and warm, and the only adult in Giovanna’s life who speaks frankly. She blames Giovanna’s father, mocks the woguy for the way she is dressed (“Look how ridiculous you are, all in pink, pink shoes, pink jacket, pink slash”) and recalls her affair with a married man: the crack origin. circle of relatives – with an exhilarating frankness. “Oh, what a story,” thinks Giovanna, “oh, learn to talk like that, in the open air of all the conventions of my house.” They bond over and Vittoria asks her to watch her parents closely. Giovanna is watching. Vittoria said to take a closer look: “She said she had blinders like a horse, I looked but didn’t see anything that bothered me. Look, look, look, it hit me. As she looks at her parents with more concentration and intensity than ever, her marriage begins to collapse.
[This ebook is one of our highest expected titles in September.See the full list.]
The following years tell the story of Giovanna’s attempt to find meaning in herself as a result.With the new, unpleasant body that came to his power, he moves between his parents’ Naples and that of his aunt, abandoned, dressed in black (” “my eyes were black, my lips, each and every garment were black”), and the best is this posture of superiority and boredom that American parents call “an attitude.”Uncontrollable evil turns out to grow in it. She cares about the fate of her soul.How mutable is the character?She asked her parents for advice, but they’re more lost than she is.He looks at his mistakes, his constant crying and seeks “meanings to overcome this feeling of lack of intelligence in other people who had so many.”He concludes that the framework, “agitated by life that wrings inside, consumes it, does stupid things that it deserves not to do”.
Adolescence remains a territory for Ferrante, here, as in his beyond work, he captures the inner states of other young people with infallible mental honesty that moves with his vivacity and depth.Percentage of Giovanna’s shame, the tortured logic of his self-appeasement, his temptations and decisions that grow in something resembling experience.How simple it is, in retrospect, to have belittled the years of our lives; how much harder to remember, with all the strength of the limbic system, the emotions of deprivation and loss.who accompanied our outings from childhood. Ferrante’s genius is to keep the discomfort.With the same propellant and episodic taste she perfected in the Neapolitan quartet, she traces how a woman’s consciousness at 12 becomes that of a young woman at 16.
Ferrante’s faithful readers will recognize elements of previous novels: mirrors, dolls, sensitivity to smells, dialect as remnant of repressed class, schooling as a means of social mobility, university convention as a place of infidelity, woman who threatens to stab and does so.- everything reappears in “The Lying Life of Adults”. The same goes for the frame narrative of a woman who writes, who wonders if her story is by no means a tale or “simply a thunderous confusion of suffering, without redemption.”The replacement of the era makes all the difference. Preparing for Giovanna’s coming of age in the early 1990s, Ferrante slyly questions how decades of feminism and reaction have replaced the global since the teenage years of the Neapolitan novels Lila and Len.
For Giovanna and her colleagues, there is less physical violence and more freedom of movement, less homophobia and a more negative frame image. (This is the era of “Reviving Ophelia”). More humor can also be found, at least in Gen X Giovanna’s best dead ending. But the deep design of psychic life is the same: love is more than it deserves to be in the midst of women’s lives; ambition is entangled in sex; preference does not blind the characters so much as to divert their force of judgment and place them at their service. Giovanna marvels at “the strength of men, even the most modest, even brave and violent women like my aunt.” His mother would likely be an instructor who married in a cream-colored suit instead of a white coat, but she still works on the romance novel plots that she rereads with more determination than the company requires. When Giovanna affirms, in the perhaps too abrupt ending of the novel, that she will be an adult “like no one has ever done it before,” we painfully feel that she will be more like her mother than she doesn’t know.
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