The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
Published 2019 · 105,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Coming-of-Age
How hard is The Lying Life of Adults to read?
The Lying Life of Adults scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 44 out of 100
- Goldstein renders Ferrante's plain, propulsive Italian in unadorned English. Neapolitan dialect is marked rather than reproduced, and the only recurring specialised register is Catholic and literary allusion in the father's speech.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Long, breathless first-person paragraphs that pile clause on clause as the narrator argues with herself, alternating with hard, short exchanges of dialogue.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- The novel thinks about class, language and self-invention through scenes rather than statements, though Giovanna's adolescent theorising about faces, beauty and truth runs continuously.
- Information density: 46 out of 100
- Naples geography and the class meaning of each neighbourhood matter a great deal and are conveyed through movement rather than explanation, but the narrative itself is uncrowded.
- Narrative indirection: 66 out of 100
- Giovanna narrates from adulthood, judging her younger self unreliably, and every adult in the book lies to her, so the facts of the family history arrive contradicted and are never fully settled.
- Symbolic density: 64 out of 100
- The bracelet passing between women, the two altitudes of the city, the cut-up photograph and the recurring question of whose face Giovanna has carry the book's argument about inheritance.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- A father who lectures on honesty while conducting a long affair, an aunt who denounces lying and lies constantly, and a narrator who condemns adult deceit while becoming expert at it.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- The novel breaks off with Giovanna and Ida on a train to Venice, the bracelet's history unresolved, Roberto's status unclear, and the promised adulthood not shown.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Linear retrospective first-person narration across four adolescent years, in two long parts, with no shifts of voice.
How The Lying Life of Adults is regarded
The Lying Life of Adults holds a literary regard score of 66 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.