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“Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly. The sentence was uttered under his breath, in the apartment that my parents, newly married, had bought in Rione Alto, at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri. Everything—the spaces of Naples, the blue light of a very cold February, those words—remained fixed. But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story, while in fact I am nothing, nothing of my own, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even the one who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.”
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0"Part of me really wished, at that point, to discuss with him the bad that while you seem to be good, gradually or suddenly spreads through your mind, your stomach, your whole body. Where does it come from Papa - I wanetd to say to him - how do you control it and why does it not sweep away the good, but rather, co-exist with it."
Ferrante has this true knack of perfectly exemplifying the teenage psyche; one off-handed comment throwing off the whole trajectory of a teenage girl's life seems correct. Her ability to write with a pointed stream of consciousness, unraveling the thoughts and feelings of a young girl growing up, leads to such well-established characterisation that propels her stories forward. The Lying Life of Adults centers on Giovanna, but the surrounding cast of characters within her periphery are also strongly developed, that you love them when Giovanna loves them, and you hate them when she hates them. It's incredibly poignant in it's commentary on the disconnect between teenage-hood and adulthood, reaching maturity and understanding your parents better as you also grow older. Ferrante's prose is spiraling, drawing you into the Neopolitan culture and neighborhoods, so that no chapter seems too long, no paragraph nullified. Every piece of writing has its place in setting the scene, the tone, and the pace of the novel. You could tell this story in much less words, but you'd lose the distinct essence of Ferrante's writing by doing so, and more often than not, that is what makes her novels so special.
0I really really enjoyed this. I swore off coming of age novels a while ago because I was annoyed of the same themes and conflicts coming up, but I cannot resist Elena Ferrante. I loved following the main character as she jumped to conclusions, self analyzed, misunderstood, and correctly characterized the actions and events of her family and relatives.
The writing flowed like water. In that it was refreshing and sweet and didn’t need to be chewed on. IT HYDRATED ME. The drama was so. satisfying. I don’t know why. But the way that family secrets and desires unfurled in casual afterthought sentences at the end of chapters really kept me reading. despite all the drama, there was no villain, no one unredeemable. Every character grew somewhat and made themselves susceptible to change.
Also the Roberto /intellectuals vs non intellectuals dimension was so casually suspenseful.
One of my fave books of the year! Effortlessly a lovely novel.
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