“Elena Ferrante’s New Novel Is a Suspenseful Story About the Sins of Parents,” says NYTimes’ Parul Sehgal of Ferrante’s “The Lying Life of Adults”

I have discussed Elena Ferrante in past posts as a novelist who publishes under a pseudonym and who probably has multiple personality. I will quote from Parul Sehgal’s review, where it seems (see boldface), inadvertently, to relate to that issue:

“Ferrante’s fiction has become a global phenomenon. ‘A cold surface and, visible underneath it, a magma of unbearable heat,’ she has described her style, brought smoothly into English by her translator Ann Goldstein. Her quartet of Neapolitan novels, following a pair of rivalrous friends in postwar Italy, has sold more than 11 million copies worldwide, and was made into an HBO series. ‘The Lying Life of Adults’ will be adapted by Netflix” (1).

“The story begins in typical Ferrante fashion. A woman sits at her desk recalling a moment of painful disillusionment in her youth. Giovanna seems to combine the personalities of the two friends in the Neapolitan novels — Lila’s fire along with milder Lenù’s deliberation. But she has grown up middle-class and in the present day; the world has been gentler to her. Still, the idyll of her childhood was shattered at age 12, when she overheard her father calling her ugly” (1).

“…As a young woman the writer kept a diary, striving to record her life with absolute honesty. When she became terrified it would be discovered, she planted her “most unutterable truths” in fiction. It’s a move that seems to presage the adoption of her pseudonym and the artistic freedom afforded by anonymity.

“Ferrante’s women go so spectacularly to pieces that it is easy to forget that the vast majority of her novels have, if not happy endings, then notes of reconciliation. Her women come through the fire because they are writers; the act of narration becomes an act of mending. Not of truth necessarily; as Lila says in “My Brilliant Friend”: “Each of us narrates our life as it suits us” (1).

1. Parul Sehgal. “Elena Ferrante’s New Novel Is a Suspenseful Story About the Sins of Parents.” New York Times, August 25, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/books/review-lying-life-of-adults-elena-ferrante.html

2. Elena Ferrante. The Lying Life of Adults. Translated by Ann Goldstein. Europa Editions, 2020.