'The Lying Life of Adults' by Elena Ferrante
For the past two weeks, I was reading 'The Lying Life of Adults' by Elena Ferrante. Today, I finally finished it albeit with a bewildered expression of someone who was unexpectedly hit with a rather odd cliffhanger ending. I hate cliffhangers with a passion because they imitate the reality of life a little too much. Life isn't too hell bent on perfect endings, or endings at all. And Ferrante's writing is no different. Her words and the way she weaves them together have the dangerous gift of putting the reader in a trance-like state, completely absorbed by the texture and details of the story. A good reader might argue that it is a good quality to find in a writer, and I don't disagree at all. It is a lovely thing to be completely captivated by a story to the point that you get seamlessly sucked in by its intricate narrative, and you lose sense of where you end and the character begins. A blurring of realities and the lines that separate them. Or it could also be because Ferrante is not afraid of a certain rawness that's difficult to come across. She is not afraid of baring open the internal darkness that inhabits the psyche of human beings and perhaps it is comforting for the reader to bare open and reflect on their own darkness that lurks behind the polished exterior imposed and labelled by social norms and expectations. And a display of such darkness in writing brings you to raise some crucial questions of being and becoming; the non-linear and messy layers of life that often don't get ample attention. At the core of it, is the simultaneously simple yet complex question ; "who am I." In my reading of the book, what became evident to me is the way our realities are shaped more by the external world than our own internal world. In each of the characters, whether it be Andrea, Nella, Giovanna, Vittoria, Angela, Giuliana, or anyone for that matter, this stamp of the world becomes evident with disturbing clarity. Hence, performance becomes a pre-requisite. One might assume they are performing for the world, acting out a part while their own personality is safe in the backstage, where you can slip into it as and when you please. But that's seldom the reality. The reality is that the performance takes over what we call "our" life. This was distressingly evident in the Giovanna's thoughts after Roberto told her she was beautiful, "the only person, who had given me, thanks to his enormous authority as a male, a new beauty" (Ferrante 299). The same beauty that was stolen from her by her father who declared that she's getting the face of his ugly sister, Vittoria. A proclamation that torpedoed Giovanna into an existential angst so severe and defined that her entire "coming of age" became dominated by that.