Tag: Reviews

Books: The Lying Life of Adults. A Novel by Elena Ferrante, 2019

I have previously had mixed feelings about the writings of Elena Ferrante. My esteem of her rose after the film adaptation of “The Lost Daughter” by Maggie Gylenhaal, a truly original and thought-provoking film. My initial complaints about her fiction were related to the first part of the Neapolitan quartet – “My Brilliant Friend” which I found cliched and uninspiring, especially her very traditional class-struggles approach. In contrast – I was impressed by “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” which is an example of an in-depth look into the motherhood and womanhood themes of her previous books and a sort of more incisive continuation of “The Lost Daughter.” In the former, I enjoyed the string of character studies – contradictory and complex, the prose – dense and subtle, the non-judgemental representation of opposing kinds of “femininity,” the ambiguity of female strife for independence as a mix of libration and egotism. “We all narrate our lives as it suits us.” writes Ferrante. This is the powerful message of “Those Who Stay and Those Who Leave” – and it is the meta-revelation of the first-person narrative in that novel.

In “The Lying Life of Adults,” this principle is taken to a level of arbitrariness. An exceptionally smart girl, the author wants us to believe, is debunking the “narrative” of the adults that surround her as lies. Doing that she builds her own, supposedly innocent and honest, narrative. Not a new thing, by the way (i.e. What Maisie Knew) . The problem with the narrative of the coming-of-age girl, is that at some point the “disbelief” cannot be suspended. It becomes impossible to give credit to her unusual for her age intelligence, her interest in higher matters of politics and philosophy, the impression she creates for adults and peers, and her supposedly penetrating representations of the adults in her life. This time, Ferrante is invested too much in binary oppositions: ugly-beautiful, dreamy-cynical, rich-poor, entitled-self-made, so that instead of transforming into psychological “depth” the oppositions come across as confusing and arbitrary. In the main character’s narrative everything becomes possible and hence — not engaging.

Books: The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto, 2015

Have not had much luck with American novels recently so I decided to switch to Japanese literature…Really, everything that I started reading from Bestseller lists or Book Club lists was unimpressive as literature, “literal” or lacking in style (e.g. The Lions of Fifth Avenue”) or “checking boxes” propaganda type (e.g. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride.) American fiction is becoming more of a “socialist realism” type of fiction, propaganda over belle lettres, politics over art….

So, here it goes – a Japanese novel. It was a strange experience. It is short, compared to American novels, obviously, Japanese publishers don’t have a recommended word count for a novel…It is definitely engaging – the existence of a secret is planted at the beginning of the novel and its disclosure represents its very end. It describes the relationship of two very fragile, very strange characters with a combination of naivete and depth that strikes me as a feature of modern Japanese literature. Here, for example, is a line, that I remembered: “You never know you are happy until later”…Simplicity and depth at the same time is very appealing. At times, the simplicity starts to dominate the narrative, unfortunately, and you are left with some very banal observations. On the other hand, Yoshimoto can definitely create haunting scenes – reminiscent of Gothic literature.