This novel has such an ingenious yet simple premise and it's a lot more topical than most reviewers have given it credit for. You sense Ferrante never dates the novel's events for this reason. Essentially, it dramatizes through a single family the conflict between the liberal well-educated elite and the poorly educated outcasts of social change. And fake news, of the family mythology variety, plays a big part. The narrator, an adolescent girl, Giovanna, is the daughter of two intellectuals. On t...

I finished this book, skimmed the last part but did not dnf it because it was Esils , Angela's and my buddy read. I am, however, going to leave it unrated because I disliked this book immensely. These people are seriously strange, not a likable character among them. It is overdramatic, full of introspective teenage angst, and people who acted in ways I didn't understand. This is when you can say, come on Diane, tell us how you really feel. Sometimes books just rub us the wrong way. This one did....

RECENSIONE ITALIANA IN FONDO😉I have just closed the book and I feel inside a whirlwind of feelings and emotions...... unfortunately not all positive, in fact, what predominates most here, is this sense of toxicity. The relationships we will find here narrated, are blindfolded by this sense of suffocation and poison. Giovanna is growing up in this ambiguous, disguised and intoxicated family of fiction, untruth and tenderness... but where can she find herself if all that her heart seeks is only sa...

If this is your first experience of Elena Ferrante, welcome, and I certainly hope it will not be your last. The Neapolitan Quartet, of which My Brillant Friend (2012) is the first novel, rises like Mt Vesuvius itself as a highlight from the last decade or more of my reading. I would encourage readers new to Ferrante to start here and maybe followup with the excellent TV series. Much of the joy of Ferrante comes from being plunged so immersively into Neopolitan culture ( Ferrante's longtime trans...

This novel propelled me directly inside Gianni's head, with such an immediacy that I remembered myself vividly as a young teen. And yes, adults are horribly duplicitous! Gianni's journey is confusing, jarring and frustrating. So I can't say I enjoyed every page or bonded with it as I did the Neapolitan novels. Yet, a superb novel. (I started with the print book and switched to audio which was unusually dramatized by Marisa Tomei but I thought worked well)

It’s good that you’re spending time with people who are better than you, it’s the only way to go up not down.The identity of the “neighbourhood” in Elena Ferrante’s epic Neopolitan Quartet was not explicitly mentioned in the novels but those who knew the city soon recognised the setting as the Rione Luzzatti district, even pinpointing the tunnel that plays a key role in the first part as Lila and Lenù attempt to escape the neighbourhood to the sea to one on the Via Emanuele Gianturco:Ferrante’s

NO SPOILERSAudiobook....narrated by Marissa Tomei (Marissa was a ‘great’...reading this book). One audiobook reviewer said they thought Tomei ‘over-acted’ her reading. For me she enhanced the storytelling. Sooooooo.....???....A fan of the Neapolitan 4 book series? (Book 1, was my least favorite- by far— but the next 3 books were so darn juicy good- I wanted more).Overall, I loved the series. ....Enjoyed a few other stand alone Ferrante novels - but not all equally? That’s how it’s been for me. ....

I generally despise coming-of-age stories. Too much happiness. But not with Elena Ferrante. No matter how happy her characters are, you know that in time their joy will be annihilated by self-hatred and personal failings.

“Maybe everything would be less complicated if you told the truth.” I’ll try to make my review less complicated with my honest thoughts. I’ve come across my fair share of dysfunctional families in many of the novels I’ve read, but this one - well dysfunctional is putting it mildly. I didn’t understand this family, their relationships with one another and with other characters. I definitely had a hard time getting into the melodramatic world of teenage Giovanna, even though she gets it right with...

Ferrante never fails. The Lying Life of Adults is her first standalone (and first work of published fiction) since her mega-hit Neapolitan Quartet. It's hard to follow-up such a critically acclaimed series but she's done it with a tightly crafted and gripping story in this new novel.Giovanna's father calls her ugly. But not only ugly—that her face is like that of his sister, Vittoria. That comparison, to a woman whom Giovanna knows her parents are less than fond of, in fact have nearly completel...

When an author becomes one of your favorites, any new novel is an exercise in both excitement and anxiety. Will it be as good as the rest? Will your expectations be too high? I was nervous, I admit, especially since as years pass the Neapolitan Quartet has only become more beloved and singular in my mind. But I found relief very quickly, within just a few pages I was back with that unique, blunt prose of Ferrante's (with Ann Goldstein's translation), and back in the mind of a complicated female

The Hell That Is PubertyThis is the story of Giovanna, an adolescent middle-class girl living in Naples. Her father had worked to climb the social ladder and has been successful at it, her mother has maintained her social position and it is expected that Giovanna will make her life decisions cautious not to "go down". Giovanna becomes acquainted with her Aunt Vittoria who lives in the poorer neighbourhoods of Naples and who forces her to really look at the prim and proper structure filled with c...

Full Review: If The Lying Life of Adults, the marvelous new novel by the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante, doesn’t reach the soaring heights of her masterpiece, The Story of a New Name, that is mainly an issue of the Ferrantean accumulation—deep networks of supporting characters, all with rich inner lives—being limited by the confines of a mere 320 pages. With Ferrante, as with Tolstoy, there is always the implication of a few dozen extra chapters, known only to her...Continue Reading on Guernica Mag...

I'm disappointed. This isn't the kind of book I normally read, but I picked it up because I saw it in a literary magazine and I figured it would be okay. I had expectations that were not met. This book is about a girl named Giovanna who overheard her parents comparing her looks to her Aunt Vittoria. She has never met Vittoria, but she assumes that her aunt is ugly because her parents hate her so much. She goes on a journey to find her reflection, which takes her to her aunt and beyond. The main

The Lying Life of Adults was my most anticipated book of the year. I added it to my TBR a year ago, it didn't even have a cover at the time. For me, there is no other writer like Ferrante. I've read many books about adolescents, most of them tend to be on the cutesy, sentimental, even purist side, especially if the main character is female. Ferrante's teenage girls are raw, contrary, angsty, challenging and not necessarily sweet. They're complex and complicated, good and bad.Twelve-year-old Giov...

Four well deserved stars for the writing, and for getting inside a teenage girl's mind between the ages of 12 and 16. Since I was a teenage girl long ago, and since I raised a teenage girl not so long ago, I can attest to a lot of the insecurities and strange behaviors that are exhibited by Giovanna. In the first sentence, she overhears her adored father telling her mother that Giovanna is getting ugly. This sets off a chain of events that creates upheaval for several families, strains loyalties...

2.5 rounded downClassic Ferrante writing, but the problem is there’s no plot... and what does happen doesn’t appear to be building to anything bigger. Tedious stuff.I got to 40-something percent and realised reading further was not going to increase my enjoyment of this novel. A real shame, as this was one of my most anticipated reads of the year, but there’s no point slogging through something I’m not getting anything out of.

I think it’s safe to say that Ferrante is being marketed as “woman’s literature”. I mean, just look at the cover. Or worse, look at the cover of My Brilliant Friend. Dreadful, isn’t it? But understandable, I guess, especially if we think that her stories revolve about marriage and family dynamics and the majority of readers are women. So here’s my advice to you, my friends, don’t let yourself be misled by these terrible marketing choices (unless you like fluffy reads) because Elena Ferrante is n...

| | blog | tumblr | ko-fi | |(mini-Italian review at the end) “L'amore è opaco come i vetri delle finestre dei cessi.”(I'm no Ann Goldstein but the above quote can be roughly translated to: “Love is as opaque as the windows of a shit-house”).In this latest novel by Elena Ferrante, La Vita Bugiarda degli Adulti (or The Lying Life of Adults in its English translation) we are confronted with a narrative that challenges the myth of happy family (in altre parole il mito della 'famiglia del mulino b...

For those readers for whom Elena Ferrante is a familiar author – and anyone who has completed her tetralogy – this book will not surprise them. Either for those who enjoyed her saga as well as for those who weren’t convinced.The style is similar, the setting is similar, the structure is similar. This, however, is a standalone novel which makes it more compact. In L’amica genial I found the fourth, and possibly the third volumes somewhat contrived. In those books, the plot had to keep moving at t...