The Adult Life of Lies
About This Novel
"The Lie Life of Adults (2019)" is the latest work by Italian writer Elena Ferrante after the "Naples Quadrilogy". It focuses on the youth and growth of Giovanna, a girl from a middle-class family in Naples. Two years before her father left home, twelve-year-old Giovanna overheard her father telling her mother that she was ugly and more and more like her sister Victoria, whom he had always disliked. This sentence drove Giovanna to walk to downtown Naples for the first time and face the humble past that her father had left behind. Giovanna witnessed the absurd and tragic love between her aunt Victoria and Enzo in the past, and also formed strange friendships with Enzo's orphans Tonino, Curado and Juliana. That rough and reckless lower-class community gradually became a tool for Giovanna to rebel against the hypocritical life of the middle class in the upper city. She observed and imitated the lies of the adult world with a masochistic passion: her parents' hypocritical marriage, Victoria's vulgar emotional story, the truth about the bracelet her father and aunt were fighting for... One time when she went to church with her aunt, Giovanna met the pious and erudite Robert, and secretly intervened in the love affair between Juliana and Robert. After her ambiguous imagination about Robert was shattered, Giovanna ended her virginity in a neat and cruel way. On the train to Venice, sixteen-year-old Giovanna and her friends promised each other to enter adulthood in a unique way.
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