LIES AND SORCERY, by Elsa Morante. Translated by Jenny McPhee.
Elsa Morante published “Lies and Sorcery,” a nearly 800-page novel that combines mythic storytelling with Depression-era realism, in 1948, just when postwar literary Italy was embracing the modernist voices of writers like Natalia Ginzburg, Italo Calvino and Morante’s own husband, Alberto Moravia. Nonetheless, it received serious reviews and was a success across Europe. Although an abridged version appeared in America under the title “House of Liars,” the saga was never available in its entirety in English until now, courtesy of New York Review Books, in an inspired translation by Jenny McPhee.
The time is the mid-1940s, the place Sicily, the first-person narrator a young woman named Elisa who — emerging from a yearslong isolation in the home of her guardian, Rosaria, a prostitute who had loved her father — now feels an urgent need to write about the lives of her mother and grandmother.
Raised in rural poverty, Cesira, the grandmother, longs from earliest youth for a larger life than the one into which she was born. She makes her way to the city where she meets Teodoro Massia, the dissolute younger son of a decaying aristocratic family. Only after she marries him does Cesira discover that Teodoro has been disinherited; whereupon she flies into a state of near-demented disappointment that makes her revile her husband for the rest of their lives, tormented with longings. When she ends up talking to herself in the street, Morante tells us that “these were the last cries of a spirit still grappling with hopes and desires, not yet ready to give up.”
Out of the union of Cesira and Teodoro comes the beautiful Anna. One day in her teens Anna meets her cousin, Edoardo, the handsome, evil-tempered son of Teodoro’s rich sister, Concetta. As in a fairy tale, Edoardo impels Anna to fall passionately in love with him; and then, again as in a fairy tale, to fall victim to his seemingly inborn need to betray and abandon all whom he seduces. (Eager to give every one of her characters his or her due, Morante suggests that perhaps Edoardo, suffering from an inexplicable despair of his own, is one of those “citizens of Earthly Paradise who are not yet used to their exile,” an explanation of misanthropic behavior Freud would have appreciated.)
