[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
“Morante’s work reminds us of this: of the way in which we’re all—men and women, left and right, powerful and powerless—little fascists, exactly because we’re hungry and small. So despite the talking dogs and the fairy-tale castles, Morante’s novels are relentless in telling the truth.” —Rebecca Schultz, LARB
"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
"But what stands out most of all is Morante’s undeviating devotion to the lives of women. Real women, that is, not unbelievable paragons of virtue or grace, but, as my favourite chapter title puts it, “Dissatisfied women, malicious women, and jealous women.” The particular weight she gives to the roiling interior landscapes of her female protagonists is every bit as exhilarating to read now as it must have been radical to encounter nearly 80 years ago." — isa Scholes, The Financial Times
"With its attention to human foibles, the book is nothing short of a triumph: a fairy tale of epic proportions and a rightly rediscovered 20th-century classic." —Francesca Peacock, The Spectator (UK)
“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
"This translation of Elsa Morante’s first novel Menzogna e Sortilegio is an extraordinary achievement, not only because of the daunting amount of words that constitute the book, but mostly because of the unpredictable and complex ways in which Morante uses words to represent an insidious reality permeated with deception and self-deception. This often requires the translator to unravel phrases and sentences and to write them again for her audience, something that Jenny McPhee is doing generously and indefatigably throughout the book. Time and again, she travels to the heart of the text and emerges from its depths holding the translation as a gift for the contemporary readers." —Sandra Silipo
“[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
“Lies and Sorcery is a wild, digressive epic … the engines of so many domestic novels — poverty, marital dysfunction, breakdowns — are there, but the mundane dramas of survival are secondary to the drama of the story and the characters’ self-regard.” —Cora Currier, Lux
★ 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.
