By: Alexi Ralston
Traveling uphill to the Rione Alto, in a small apartment on Via San Giacomo dei Capri, we meet Giovanna, who has always aimed to please her parents and honor their expectations of her. One day, at the age of twelve, Giovanna hears her father, Andrea, compare his daughter’s features to those of her estranged Aunt Vittoria. This unflattering comparison worries Giovanna, who has been kept away from her aunt for nearly her entire life: “In my house the name Vittoria was like the name of a monstrous being who taints and infects anyone who touches her”. Giovanna has always known that Vittoria was ugly on the inside, having turned her brother into an outcast and forcing him out of the family, but she cannot put her worries to rest that she might resemble a woman who is ugly on the outside as well. Giovanna wants to obey her parents and stay away from her aunt, but she decides that she must journey outside her familiar streets of Naples to meet Vittoria; that way, Giovanna can decide for herself if she truly is becoming a replica of the family villain.
The Lying Life of Adults is Elena Ferrante’s most recent novel, following the success of her wildly popular Neapolitan Novels. The four-book series, published annually between 2011 and 2014, follows the lives of two friends, Elena and Rafaella, who grew up in a poor neighborhood outside of Naples. In The Lying Life of Adults, Ferrante brings her readers straight into the heart of the city, marking Giovanna’s transition from a girl to a young woman as she comes to terms with her obsession with beauty and being loved, all while learning how to leave her parents’ hometown of Naples and find a piece of the city to claim as her own.
Ferrante paints a complex picture of Naples as Giovanna becomes a part of Vittoria's life in the run-down part of the city, far away from the beautiful streets in the hilltops where Giovanna grew up. The dual nature of Naples soon extends beyond its geography, which Giovanna discovers in her aunt’s surprisingly transparent lifestyle that differs greatly from the reserved nature of her parents. Vittoria’s honesty appeals to Giovanna, and the young teenager embraces the freedom to be herself as Vittoria’s niece: “She treated me like an adult, and I was glad that from the start she had abandoned the proper way to speak to a girl of thirteen.” As Giovanna forms a close relationship with her aunt, we see how Giovanna begins to associate her childhood with the dishonesty of her parents, whereas her adolescence marks a transition to understanding the truth of reality, which her parents are no longer capable of hiding from her.
Giovanna wonders whether her aunt is such an evil woman after all, but she soon learns that her father was right about one thing: Vittoria will do whatever she can to destroy her brother’s life. As Giovanna watches her parents make mistakes and learns more about her family history, Giovanna begins to see through her family’s facade of perfection. When Giovanna learns that Vittoria’s actions are actually in retaliation against her brother’s manipulation in her marriage, Giovanna feels torn between her parents’ life of comfortable lies and Vittoria’s world of liberating honesty. Slowly, Giovanna begins to reject facades of false happiness, striving to match Vittoria’s honest lifestyle. At the same time, however, Giovanna begins to tell lies, revealing the part of herself that is still tied to the life of her parents.
Ferrante takes Giovanna on her journey of self discovery as if she is exploring her own personal Naples, navigating ups and downs that lead to unexpected difficulties in reaching her destination. Both Giovanna’s parents and Vittoria claim that the growing girl has the right to do whatever she wants, while simultaneously pushing her to make the decision that they think is right. Giovanna’s mother has no qualms with telling her daughter what she expects of her—proving this by saying, “Quiet, you want what we want”—but Giovanna begins to question the judgment of people that she used to trust. She wonders how men like her father, who appear to be kind and loving, can get away with hurting the people he loves, and how even the gentlest of boys like Vittoria’s godson Tonino can become angry, lose control, and hit their girlfriends, when they “really can’t see straight anymore”. The one thing she can be certain of, however, is that no matter how much a person tries to suppress their feelings, their true identity always reveals itself. By being radically honest, Giovanna allows herself to finally admit what she wants for her own life: to be bound to herself and her own standards of beauty, free from choosing sides in her divided family.
Giovanna’s search for herself, however, is often misplaced in means of jewelry, love, and sex, which she believes defines her self worth. Her journey of self-discovery can be likened to the hills of Naples as she searches for answers that will lead her out of the maze. The bracelet that Vittoria gives to Giovanna represents an aspect of Giovanna’s constant reevaluation of the truth; she fixates on the bracelet as a means of replicating a sense of beauty that she lacks on her own. However, the bracelet, which has passed through many hands, effectively threading several families together, serves as a physical manifestation of the family ties that can never be truly broken, whether or not family members still actively love each other: "Neither Vittoria nor my father nor I could cut out our common roots, and so, depending on the situation, it was always ourselves we ended up loving or hating". For every semblance of truth that Giovanna believes, a new discovery about the adults in her life ends up challenging her world view, reminding the reader that adolescence does not end with a sense of finality, but that life is a constant journey through hills, a search for valleys where we can temporarily land.
Ferrante plays with the relationship between honesty and language in the novel, as Giovanna learns to distinguish the meanings of the different voices and dialects she hears spoken throughout Naples. From a young age, Giovanna notices how her father speaks in different voices to people other than her, concerned when he strays away from “his usual self, the one with the gentle and affectionate tones.” Giovanna is able to speak in dialect, a more casual, intimate version of formal Italian language, with Vittoria’s godchildren and their friends, whereas dialect “was completely banned in [their] house” as Andre demanded a high standard of intelligence and respect from his daughter. For those who know nothing about Italian dialects, the nuances of Ferrante’s language for different characters can easily become lost in the English translation, but the use of multiple dialects shows Giovanna’s struggle to navigate the different types of communication that she is expected to know as she becomes involved in more mature discussions. Ferrante speaks of her own rocky relationship with the dialect of Naples when she was Giovanna’s age, noting how dialect affects the way that she writes today: “As a child, as an adolescent, the dialect of my city frightened me. I prefer to let it echo for a moment in the Italian, as if threatening it”.
While Giovanna comes to terms with forming her own voice throughout the novel, Ferrante keeps her personal voice separate from the novel, maintaining the pseudonym of which devout Ferrante fans are well aware. In a letter to her publishers written in 1991, Ferrante tells how remaining anonymous allows for her books to be read in the language of her characters, not her personal voice: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers”. Ann Goldstein translated The Lying Life of Adults from Ferrante’s Italian to English, which also plays a role in obscuring Ferrante’s voice. In an interview with Asymptote, Goldstein spoke on the challenges of translating Ferrante’s Italian into English: “It’s hard to make her writing come out in English and not only make sense but also be grammatical”. Despite the difficulty of making Ferrante’s language accessible to English readers, Goldstein feels a connection to Ferrante, despite not knowing her identity; “With Ferrante, the emotion is more on the surface but there’s also a kind of control… At this point I feel that the Ferrante I know from her books, from all of them—I guess I have an idea of the person who’s writing these books”.
The Lying Life of Adults leaves us with the image of a girl who is not yet grown up, but has decided that she must grow up differently than anyone else in order to be her own creation. Based on what we know about Giovanna, her ambitious attitude of defying traditional adulthood will likely be challenged by the discovery of new truths, reaffirming the idea that life is a constant journey of uncovering what lies behind the surface of the world around us. Giovanna’s character is often frustrating, making decisions that the reader knows will result in more trouble for her, but her character highlights the defiance that lives inside anyone who has ever felt defeated by their inability to understand the world around them. We might shake our heads at Giovanna’s decision to tell blatant lies, but we can see how her lies have the power to create their own beauty, covering up the ugly truth that she might not be as beautiful as she once was.