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What Brings Elena Ferrante’s Worlds to Life? | The New Yorker

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The pseudonymous Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has written profoundly about two subjects for some thirty years: the fraught bond between mothers and daughters, and the brutality of life in proletarian Naples. Her latest work of fiction, “The Lying Life of Adults” (Europa), is a surprising deviation for her. Its narrator, Giovanna Trada, is a woman on the brink of middle age who is recounting the disaffections of her privileged adolescence, some thirty years ago. The teen-ager she conjures is obsessed with her looks, about which she despairs for three hundred pages. Just as doggedly, she moons after a local heartthrob who is dating a skinny friend. Familial rancors, long simmering, lead to the revelation that her parents are flawed human beings. Ferrante has a gift, perhaps even a genius, for making great literature out of melodrama. But the overwrought language of her new book doesn’t illuminate the anguish that it seeks to plumb. Giovanna admits, in the first paragraph, that she is

Save this story Save this story The pseudonymous Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has written profoundly about two subjects for some thirty years: the fraught bond between mothers and daughters, and the brutality of life in proletarian Naples. Her latest work of fiction, “ The Lying Life of Adults ” (Europa), is a surprising deviation for her. Its narrator, Giovanna Trada, is a woman on the brink of middle age who is recounting the disaffections of her privileged adolescence, some thirty years ago. The teen-ager she conjures is obsessed with her looks, about which she despairs for three hundred

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