The Diary Game 28/03/2022 - The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante.

alein (70)memberin Italy • 3 years ago

The Italian writer builds miniature stories that seem to be caught in the belly of a larger narrative whale, but also its protagonists always seem to be between the worlds, in decisive biographical stages, at the level of social tectonic faults, in changing times, between a dominating and conscious past as retrograde and an effervescent, unpredictable present / future that implies a rise against the securing familiarity.

Perhaps the most enduring and subtle captivity that runs through some of Elena Ferrante's stories remains that of the assertion of the feminine in a universe primed in the background of patriarchal prejudices. The issues familiar to Elena Ferrante's readers, related to the spectral nature of femininity, psychological and gender uncertainties, the relationship with men, with parents, with society are also found in "The Lying Life of Adults", an initiatory miniature alternative to Neapolitan tetralogy.

Giovanna is a teenager living in Naples. Coming from a successful, honest family of intellectuals who care about education and its future, Giovanna has an almost idealized image of the microuniverse in which she lives: her parents still look like role models, they are people who fell in love in their youth and have worked together to last a marriage, they took care of each other and went through many trials. They both seem to maintain a tolerant and partnership with their daughter, to invite her to dialogue, to always measure her words in her presence and to give her neat and understanding answers.

The fuse of repositioning adolescence seems to be ignited by a frivolous statement (or not?) Of her father who, one day, makes an ironic prophecy about Giovanna's potential resemblance to her aunt, Vittoria, a kind of black sheep of the family.

Increasingly preoccupied with this character who is in an eternal and tireless war with her brother (Giovanna's father), through a mixture of curiosity (after all, Vittoria seems the threat from inaccessible shadow, a kind of forbidden myth) and anxiety, Giovanna he will search for and eventually meet his aunt, who will catalyze the rituals of initiation into the adult world.

Vittoria is the character that you can't comprehend, through the sum of contradictions stated nonchalantly: vulgar or just defiant? Rough and impulsive or consistently honest? Emotional and unstable but still of inexhaustible fidelity (remains loyal to the married man she loved and had a relationship with, even after his death, getting involved in raising children with his widow)?

Cunning, resentful, intuitive, but also so uncensored in the expression of judgments and moods, Vittoria will exert an effect of attraction-rejection towards Giovanna, as long as she opens not only a new universe (another Naples with which her niece is more uncommon, another family world to which he had no access) but also a different way of looking at the world.

Vittoria is, in a way, a biblical equivalent of the tree of knowledge, she is the one who will train Giovanna to look at her own universe and her own family with different eyes, to see what until then did not seem visible, to be the opener to the uncertain landscape of maturation, where the clear answers are shaken by the secret lives that begin, in time, to come to light.

Giovanna will go through all this turbulent period in a dynamic of rebellion and adaptation-acceptance: she has to get used to a new body (whose forms are subjected and invested in turn with (pre) social judgments), she has to to manage the first erotic contacts (in which curiosity and disgust mix), the first experience of falling in love.

It is no coincidence that the most challenging questions of adolescence will have a religious and amorous charge (perhaps because both involve an absolute leap, blindly?). Does faith in both man and deity make sense? How do people love and break up (if they ever break up)? These are just some of the questions that Giovanna will look for answers to, through her own experience, but also by exploring the model of strength, respectively the vulnerability of the cult of memory that she sees exercised by both her mother and Aunt Vittoria.

Giovanna's story is not just about the effort to manage the new gallop in the life of the teenager, as the contact with Aunt Vittoria opens other avenues of initiation. Giovanna is challenged, at the same time, to recalibrate her perspective on the known reality, because the happy marriage of her parents and their friends actually hides passions and secret lives, beyond the restrained tones, the hyper-correct phrases and the stability of the facade.

Adults seem to be using a tool whose utility will become increasingly relevant to Giovanna as well, namely lying, a kind of censorship essential in social navigation, a double-edged tool capable of leveling roughness, eclipsing the boundary between tolerable and intolerable, a ingredient for calibrating moderate lives, but also an instrument that opens up existential abysses and parallels that are alienating and lonely. Not even Vittoria seems to circumvent this strategy, despite her honest stubbornness and indifference to the judgment of others (except her own).

The most important lessons that Giovanna will go through, however, will go through failure. Failure remains a millennial test, essential in calibrating expectations to reality. But it is not about insurmountable failure, disappointment is followed by survival and implicitly by a cumulative experience that inaugurates the assumed adult moderation to which is attached an inevitable inherent sadness, a feeling of loss.

Understanding, approaching a balance, assuming one's own body and one's own identity, however, volatilizes a world of possibilities and expectations that crumbles, while Giovanna seems to rise above the circumstances alone, to draw a personal open path.