The Lying Life of Adults

I really enjoyed Ferrante’s angry novel about teenage turmoil and growing up. Some readers were put-off, finding it overly melodramatic: Adolescent angst and mercurial moods. Lots of lying and deceit. Obsessive and anguished love. Envy and malice. Family feuds and dysfunction. Uncontrollable passions and furies… In the hands of a different author such excess would probably cause me to quit reading in frustration and disgust, but Ferrante miraculously makes her characters both volatile and realistic. translated by Ann Goldstein