You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (October 2020) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
View a machine-translated version of the German article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Das lügenhafte Leben der Erwachsenen]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Das lügenhafte Leben der Erwachsenen}} to the talk page.
In Naples in the early 1990s, twelve-year-old Giovanna Trada overhears her father Andrea disparagingly liken her appearance to that of his estranged sister Vittoria. This sends Giovanna into a search for Vittoria on another side of Naples to discover the nature of the family's fallout.
Upon release, The Lying Life of Adults was generally well-received. According to Book Marks, the book received "positive" reviews based on 51 critic reviews with 22 being "rave" and 23 being "positive" and 4 being "mixed" and 2 being "pan".[9] In Books in the Media, a site that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (4.19 out of 5) from the site which was based on 15 critic reviews. [10]
In its starred review, Kirkus Reviews praised Goldstein's "fluid" translation and wrote, "Giovanna's nascent sexuality is more frankly explored than that of previous Ferrante protagonists".[11]
Publishers Weekly called Giovanna a "winning character" but nonetheless wrote that the novel "feels minor in comparison to Ferrante's previous work".[12]
A review in The New York Times stated that the book "evokes for me all the ordinary, warring paradoxes of intimate life."[13]