Lies and Sorcery

I loved it and it had been a long time since I had read anything that gave me such life and joy... It was an extraordinaryadventure for me to discover, among those chapter titles that felt so nineteenth-century, that the novel was actually describing our own time and place, our own daily existence with lacerating and painfulintensity -- Natalia Ginzburg
[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
Each plot development is surrounded by acres of commentary whose richness and intensity — deep, dense, psychologically penetrating — provides the story with transformative values, converts melodrama into metaphor * The New York Times *
[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 *
A social epic tinged with fabulism and written in a sensual and highly ornate prose . . . a writer of conscience, and of brilliance besides -- Bailey Trela * The Washington Post *
The finest Italian novel of modern times -- György Lukács
Glittering ironies and brilliant, devastating turns of phrase . . . 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. . . a deliciously ornate translation by Jenny McPhee -- Sam Sacks * Wall Street Journal *
Slippery, feverish, dreamlike . . . an enveloping tumult of a book . . . an invitation to contemplate stories (fictions? lies?) at the heart of a life . . . sorcery is everywhere, in certain objects, in memories, in the power of love or need or shame, and—most importantly—in the alchemy involved in conjuring something that ought to be true out of the shabby and unsatisfactory materials at hand . . . a potent enchantment prevailed, and for me, the book’s impassioned insistence became an unassailable and transporting reality -- Deborah Eisenberg * New York Review of Books *
Worth the wait: This multigenerational Sicilian family saga may run to nearly 800 pages in Jenny McPhee’s fantastic new translation, but it’s so pleasurable that you’ll welcome the scope * New York Times Editor’s Choice *
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 * New Yorker *