The whole point here is to gather reliable proof of my family’s long-bred insanity,” writes the narrator, Elisa, in the opening pages of this fantastical epic novel. “You’ve already met the sickest character of all – me,” she admits. But she wants the reader to understand why she is like this. “Lying’s poisonous evil slithers among the branches of my family tree… but you mustn’t hold this against me or my story.”
Orphaned as a child, for years Elisa has existed in a state of semi-madness, listening to the whispers of her ancestors’ ghosts telling her their life stories. She is now in her mid-twenties and, following the death of her adoptive mother, decides it is time to explain to the reader how she has found herself in this situation. Her story and tales of her grandparents and parents fill this rich, engrossing multi-generational saga.
Elsa Morante, the author of Lies and Sorcery, was born in Rome in 1912. Her upbringing may have provided inspiration for the family dramas that would later appear in her fiction: as a teenager she discovered that her biological father was in fact not Augusto, her mother Irma’s husband, but a neighbour, Francesco Lo Monaco.
During her lifetime, Morante became renowned in Italy as a novelist, poet, translator and children’s author. Lies and Sorcery (Menzogna e sortilegio), her debut novel, was first published in Italian in 1948 when it won the Viareggio Prize. Her 1957 work L’isola di Arturo (Arturo’s Island) won the Strega Prize – considered one of Italy’s most prestigious literary awards – and her 1974 book La Storia (History: A Novel), which tells of a young half-Jewish Italian schoolteacher who is raped by a German soldier during the Second World War, was a bestseller, selling 800,000 copies in Italy in its first year. But soon Morante became increasingly reclusive, writing only sporadically and destroying much of her work. She attempted suicide in 1983, and died in Rome of a heart attack two years later.
Lies and Sorcery is Morante’s master work, more than double the length of her later novels and an ambitious early attempt at exploring the major themes – generational trauma, sexual promiscuity, how political pressures weigh on ordinary people – that would continue through her oeuvre. It wasn’t a great commercial success in Italy, though Morante hoped it would find an international audience when it was published in the United States as House of Liars in 1951. Yet she failed to notice that the fine print of the contract allowed for cuts, and found the translation, at 200 pages shorter than her original, a “mutilation”.
This new edition, in Jenny McPhee’s enchanting translation, is the first full English version of the novel. McPhee, writing in the introduction, gives the writer Elena Ferrante credit for spearheading a revival of the authors most influential to her, particularly women whom the publishing world – both in Italy and internationally – has tended to forget. The republication of Lies and Sorcery comes as part of a renaissance of Italian women writers, which includes Alba de Céspedes and Natalia Ginzburg, who was the editor of Morante’s novel at the publishing house Einaudi. McPhee even goes so far as to reference the rhythmic alignment of the names Elsa Morante and Elena Ferrante, suggesting that Ferrante (not her real name) has more than just a passing interest in the earlier writer. Indeed, Ferrante has spoken of the effect Lies and Sorcery had on her when she first read it, aged 16. “There I discovered what literature can be,” she said in a 2014 interview.
Morante and her husband, the novelist and critic Alberto Moravia, were both half-Jewish, and spent part of the Second World War fleeing the Fascists and the Nazis. Morante wrote much of the novelwhile hiding in the countryside during the Nazi occupation of Italy – a parallel with De Céspedes, who hid in the woods outside Rome in 1943. But these similar circumstances did not lead to similar work. De Céspedes was a more overtly anti-fascist writer than Morante, and Lies and Sorcery, which takes place during the Belle Époque in Sicily, is not so interested in organised political movements as in the plight of one family. What’s more, De Céspedes and Ginzburg wrote in the spare, neorealist style fashionable in the postwar period; Morante’s novel, at 800 pages and with a web of interconnected characters and frequently hyperbolic flourishes, feels old fashioned in comparison.
In the words of Elisa, it is “a rather grim and mercurial story”. Her meta-narrative runs throughout, with lines such as, “Let’s return now after this rather meandering, inflated and inane digression.” Morante combines this tone of charming frivolity with ornamented images: “Surely my readers will feel cheated if all I offer them is this silliness and don’t warn them that, indeed, it’s on this apparently trivial foundation that my protagonist’s gloomy castle is built; and so it happens that a gurgling little stream becomes a torrent, or a playful, limpid allegro at the symphony sometimes follows an austere and mysterious andante.”
Elisa charts her ancestors’ misfortunes. Her maternal grandfather, Teodoro, hails from a noble family but is drunk, in debt, and estranged. He despises his wife, Cesira, and she despises him, thanks to the poverty into which he has led the family. The only light in Teodoro’s life is his daughter, Anna. He tells her about her aunt Concetta and cousin Edoardo, who live in a palazzo in the same city. Anna was “born a lady”, Teodoro says, and when she marries Edoardo, she will be restored to her rightful position in the world.
Teodoro dies when Anna is still a girl. Unlikely as it is, she becomes romantically involved with Edoardo, who is vain, selfish and obsessed with his higher status. He leads her on, playing cruel tricks on her: “He yearned for Anna to mentally absorb her lowliness, so that he could see that proud person submissive and quivering before him.”
Concurrently, Edoardo befriends Francesco, a university student in the city who was raised a peasant but, we learn, actually descends from higher rank thanks to his mother’s adultery. He is involved with Rosaria, a sex worker, and believes that by marrying her he could save her from a life of sin. In a Shakespearean manner, the four engage in lies and acts of infidelity, the two couples intertwining.
The tale that follows is exuberantly plotted. At every turn, Morante is obsessed with wealth, its power, and its ability to change a person’s relationships. Rosaria, once poor, returns as a well-to-do woman with whom Elisa is entranced. Meanwhile Anna’s aunt Concetta, a noblewoman, walks the streets dressed as a pauper in an act of religious penance. Morante frequently blurs the line between deception and delusion, a technique that reaches its high point with a series of fake love letters that Anna writes to herself “from” Edoardo.
What a thrill that this wild, evocative, compelling novel is at long last fully available in English. Its vivid depictions of how class both imprisons and distorts a person’s sense of self is powerful – so much so that, despite Elisa’s frequent references to myths and legends, Lies and Sorcery is a fairy tale with no need for fairies or magic. After all, Elsa Morante knows that humans are all a writer needs to reveal the gnarliest parts of our world.
Lies and Sorcery
Elsa Morante, translated by Jenny McPhee
Penguin Classics, 800pp, £18
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This article appears in the 08 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Power Gap