Francesca Carington

THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS by Elena Ferrante, tr Ann Goldstein 300PP, EUROPA, £20, EBOOK £14.99

In 2016, at the height of Elena Ferrante’s fame as the pseudonymous writer of the phenomenal Neapolitan novels, her identity was supposedly revealed, prompting fears that she might never write again. But within a year, she was back at it, with The Lying Life of Adults, a ferocious, Naples-set coming-ofage novel, now out in English.

It’s similar in theme and intensity to the Neapolitan novels, but with a crucial difference: the novel’s protagonist, Giovanna, is solidly middle class. When she is nearly 13, she overhears her father calling her ugly, comparing her to Vittoria, a wicked aunt she’s never met. She identifies that moment as the one that ends her childhood and unmoors her sense of self. She resolves to meet Vittoria, and soon is caught between the two worlds, between two versions of the falling-out between brother and sister. She starts spying on her parents for Vittoria, uncovering the tangle of deceit that holds her family together, the revelation of which causes it to fall apart.

It’s vintage Ferrante: adolescence as a scrum of self-abasement, confusion and disillusion. There’s lust, sex, religion, violence, a fixation with bodies, with beauty and ugliness and most of all disgust. Adults are “the most untrustworthy animals, worse than reptiles”, while “our body, agitated by the life that writhes within, consuming it, does stupid things that it shouldn’t do”.

The narrative is borne ahead by a propulsive unpleasantness, punctuated with exquisitely drawn-out moments of sorrow: “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…” Giovanna worries that her story is “merely a snarled confusion of suffering”; and it is. But there’s also redemption in its savage openness, unexpected joy and, perhaps, more to come.