Elena Ferrante disclosed in a 2005 newspaper article titled, ‘Damn Bovary was my mum,’ that she had once wondered if her mother had maybe been hidden by Flaubert’s disappointed heroine, ‘It’s weird how ugly this child is.’ This is the start of the new novel by Ferrante, The Lying Life of the Adults. Giovanna, a gentle 12-year-old who grew up in the middle class part of Naples, overhears her father comparing her to his alien sister Vittoria, who has always been portrayed by her parents as someone who’s “fitted well in hardship.” His comments precipitate a number of incidents that bring the life of Giovanna into turmoil while trying to discover the motives behind family repercussions. Published in Italy last year, the novel is covered in obscurity until the news was published in English in June of this year. There was fear that the obvious “unmasking” of the reclusive author in 2016 would prevent her from writing books, but Ferrante’s first new work is in this regard after the enormously popular Neapolitan novices. The publishing of the book met with vigils in Italy, with supporters who lingered to purchase copies at midnight. It is only a matter of time that Giovanna, San Gíacomo Dei Capri, sells panzerotti and pastascresciutas, comes to life before a Ferrante cafe emerges. Ferrante explores the life of Giovanna aged twelve to 16 years, charting her transformation from the gentle girl who loves her parents to a sulky, violent adolescent who is happy with self-care and makes her atmosphere awkward. For the poet, an expert youth chronicler and his many outrages and his unpredictable, overwhelming impulses, this is a fruitful premise. Ferrante maintains a unique capacity to convey the needs of diverse ages and shifting interests. With rash thoughts on hypocrisy and confusing motives for people to function in the manner they do she carefully depicts the way intense emotions can disfigure and transmute. Parents, like Larkin, are transferred to their offspring through their foals and unattractive habits. What separates this book instantly from its contemporaries is its emphasis in the early 1990s on the high echelons of Neapolitan society. Giovanna nurture up in a rich left family unit, where vibrant Marxist and end-of-history debates are normal; she and her friends receive an informative booklets on sex and teach them “to be good that you have been born a woman” But, when she discovers a different Naples – a lot closer to the working people in previous books, Giovanna’s quest for her mysterious aunt Vittoria leads her to cast off her privileged education in favour of unconsidered links with the elderly people and a poor, timeless Neapolitan dialect, often in a humorous way. Saint Martin’s College Sculpture certainly impresses. Giovanna is also rebellions against her humanist, progressive kin, as her once idyllic family unit begins to break apart, experiment with a belief in the supernatural and, thanks to a destiny to attend the church in Vittoria, the faith. This is where huge, studious and wavy Roberto – redolent of Nino Sarratore’s quartet – comes here and delivers a sermon on compassion. John is smitten. He’s smitten. It was because there are themes similar to the other works of Ferrante that there is a feeling that there was already here: an obsession or lack of elegance, of class and the desire to research poverty, the distinction and the connections between vulgarity and sophistication. The Days of Abandonment are the basis for families that fell apart. A dynamic, rather tedious plot thread with the bracelet of a grandma reminds us of mothers’ dress in troublesome love. However, there’s no character that serves as a direct counterpart to the protagonist, unlike most of the previous Ferrante novels. Instead, different female figures appear and disappear without ever corresponding to Giovanna’s rich development in character, from insecurity and painful auto-analysis to some sort of acceptance. In the beginning, she imbued the storey with a sensation of momentum and described her meetings with Giovanna in vivid and electrifying detail. But since her number lies on the side of the novel, the tempo improves, flowing quickly from scene to scene. As with her work before, it is better for Ferrante to examine the details of daily meetings instead of trying to provide an extensive rundown of several years and various problems. There will perhaps be space to develop and develop these characters: the final pages of the novel leave a follow-up opportunity. The book concludes with Giovanna and one of her friends leaving their problems and each other resolving to “become grown-ups when no one else has.” The writer is based in Tharparkar and can be reached at zamangrio79@gmail.com