LIES AND SORCERY

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.