Lies and Sorcery

by Elsa Morante, Jenny McPhee (Translator)

Overview

An Italian master's magnum opus about three generations of women, now in the first-ever unabridged English translation.

Elsa Morante is one of the titans of twentieth-century literature—Natalia Ginzburg said she was the writer of her own generation that she most admired—and yet her work remains little known in the United States. Written during World War II, Morante’s celebrated first novel, Lies and Sorcery, is in the grand tradition of Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Proust, spanning the lives of three generations of wildly eccentric women.

The story is set in Sicily and told by Elisa, orphaned young and raised by a “fallen woman.” For years Elisa has lived in an imaginary world of her own; now, however, her guardian has died, and the young woman feels that she must abandon her fantasy life to confront the truth of her family’s tortured and dramatic history. Elisa is a seductive, if less than reliable, spinner of stories, and the reader is drawn into a tale of secrets, intrigue, and treachery, which, as it proceeds, is increasingly revealed to be an exploration of a legacy of political and social injustice. Throughout, Morante’s elegant writing—and her drive to get at the heart of her characters’ complex relationships and all-too self-destructive behavior—holds us spellbound.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681376844
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	10/10/2023
Pages:	800
Sales rank:	43,619
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Elsa Morante (1912–1985) was an Italian novelist, poet, and translator. She was born in Rome and lived there nearly all her life. In 1941, she published her first collection of stories and married the novelist Alberto Moravia. Morante is best known for her novels Arturo’s Island and La Storia. For her work, she was awarded both the Viareggio Prize and the Strega Prize.

Jenny McPhee is a translator and the author of the novels The Center of Things, No Ordinary Matter, and A Man of No Moon. For NYRB Classics she translted Curzio Malaparte’s The Kremlin Ball and Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. She is the director for the Center of Applied Liberal Arts at New York University.

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/31/2023

This 1948 novel from Morante (1912–1985), appearing unabridged in English for the first time in a translation by McPhee, is a thrilling saga of love and madness in a southern Italian city. The narrator, a young woman whose guardian recently died, tells the tale in hopes of freeing herself from the memories of her ancestors, including dissolute nobleman Teodoro Massia, who married young governess Cesira sometime around the turn of the 20th century. When Cesira learns her husband is actually destitute, she begins to hate him, but their daughter, Anna, worships her doting, drunken father and matures into a dreamy, isolated young woman convinced of her own superiority. Encountering her wealthy, beautiful, and cruel cousin Edoardo Cerentano, son of Teodoro’s sister, Anna falls in love, and the teenage cousins embark on a passionate yet chaste affair. After a bout of illness, Edoardo abandons Anna, pushing her off on his friend, the resentful, intelligent student Francesco di Salvi, who adores Anna and breaks up with his girlfriend Rosaria, a village girl and sex worker he’d previously wanted to marry. Seduced and blackmailed by Edoardo, Rosaria eventually emerges as the most sympathetic of the four, the only one capable of sympathy and forgiveness. Maintaining an ironic distance, Morante’s lengthy but propulsive narrative describes in detail the characters’ desires, fears, and superstitions, as well as the stultifying class divisions, religiosity, and financial troubles that define their lives. It’s a tremendous accomplishment. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

[In Lies and Sorcery] I discovered that an entirely female story—entirely women’s desires and ideas and feelings— could be compelling and, at the same time, have great literary value.” —Elena Ferrante  

"Now, for the first time, Lies and Sorcery is available in full in English, in an electrifying new translation by Jenny McPhee...a  melodramatic saga of social climbing and doomed romance, is a deliberate anachronism in both its themes and its style. Its Belle Époque setting, sweeping cast of characters, frequent asides to the reader, and grandiloquence place it firmly in the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel....As Morante reminds us again and again, however, appearances are often deceiving. Despite its nineteenth-century veneer, Lies and Sorcery could have only been written in the twentieth century. The novel is animated by Morante’s hatred of the selfishness and superficiality that she saw in her countrymen. In their masochistic worship of hierarchy, tendency toward idolatry, and susceptibility to kitsch, its characters embody the traits that she believed had enabled Mussolini’s rise." —Jess Bergman, The New Yorker

“Morante’s audience had been shaped by the triple-deckers of 19th-century maestros like Dumas, Dickens, Tolstoy and Manzoni. Her novel is a savage spoof of those masterpieces, an enormous work of literary disenchantment...Lies and Sorcery is, then, a phenomenal feat of misanthropy and disillusionment.” —Sam Sacks, The Wallstreet Journal

“Set in turn-of-the-century Sicily, [Lies and Sorcery] is a social epic tinged with fabulism and written in a sensual and highly ornate prose....McPhee translates, expertly, to convey a sense of the original baroque syntax and the heightened register, without feeling fusty or overwrought....[Morante] is, it turns out, that old-fashioned thing, a writer of conscience, and of brilliance besides.”—Bailey Trela, The Washington Post

“[Lies and Sorcery] is a work of wild abundance and inexhaustible psychological depth....[it] evokes the passage from a traditional society steeped in the values of collectiveness and belonging to one obsessed with power, with the idea that an individual need only impose their will to have what they want....Elsa Morante’s is, undeniably, a grim vision of the world; yet to read Lies and Sorcery in this heroic new translation by Jenny McPhee, always admirably attentive to the original’s delicate balance between archaism and fluency, is exhilarating throughout.” —Tim Parks, TLS

“[Morante’s] signature achievement is to conjure raptures of fantasy from miseries of circumstance." —Tim Parks

"[Lies and Sorcery] is a thrilling saga of love and madness in a southern Italian city…Maintaining an ironic distance, Morante’s lengthy but propulsive narrative describes in detail the characters’ desires, fears, and superstitions, as well as the stultifying class divisions, religiosity, and financial troubles that define their lives. It’s a tremendous accomplishment." —Publishers Weekly

"Morante’s vast, sprawling epic of passion and delusion, obsession and madness, certainly contains multitudes...Morante's novel is a masterpiece, and to have it finally translated into English in unabridged form is a great gift.” —Kirkus Starred Review

From the Publisher

★ 2023-07-13
An epic tale of passion and obsession.

At the heart of this novel, first published in Italy in 1948, is a tortured pair of love triangles: When Francesco falls in love with Anna, Anna is already desperately in love with her cousin Edoardo, who loves no one but himself. In the meantime, there’s also Rosaria, a “fallen woman” Francesco loved and tried to reform before he’d ever heard of Anna. Rosaria loved Francesco, too, but—alas!—in came wealthy Edoardo with his expensive gifts to ruin everything. Morante’s vast, sprawling epic of passion and delusion, obsession and madness, certainly contains multitudes. In that sense, as the publisher has noted, the influence of old masters like Tolstoy and Stendhal can be felt, though Tolstoy’s exquisite kindness and patience for his characters isn’t exactly prevalent here. Morante’s novel is peopled with characters it can be exceedingly difficult to sympathize with: No one here is blameless except, perhaps, the self-effacing narrator. The events are described years after the fact by Elisa, the daughter of two of the major players, who, following her parents’ deaths (which are revealed in the book’s first few pages), goes to live with Rosaria. There, Elisa is so consumed by her family’s past—or what she imagines to be her family’s past; who can say what the difference might be?—that she is unable to live her own life. “If I did happen to find myself among others,” she says, “their voices reached me as echoes, their faces mere reflections, and all that was present and real appeared to be at a great distance across time and space and to have no connection to me whatsoever.” Morante’s novel is a masterpiece, and to have it finally translated into English in unabridged form is a great gift.

A masterpiece by one of Italy’s foremost modern writers.

Kirkus Reviews