Review: Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante

Lies and Sorcery [1948/2023] – ★★★★

“Look in my face; my name is Might-have been;/I am also call’d No-more, Too-late, Farewell;/Unto thine ear I hold the dead-sea shell/Cast up thy Life’s foam-fretted feet between;/…“The House of Life: A Superscription by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The first lines of this famous poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti may be best in capturing the rich and sensuous spirit of Elsa Morante’s debut – novel Lies & Sorcery, first published in Italian in 1948. It is a highly ambitious coming-of-age/multi-generational family saga at the core of which are such themes as love and abandonment, romantic longing and self-deception, parental attachment that verges on obsessive devotion and the ultimate disillusionment. The main, larger-than-life characters are shy Anna, capricious Edoardo, downtrodden Francesco and voluptuous Rosaria, while Anna’s parents Cesira and Teodoro also figure in this story. The narrative is from Anna’s daughter Elisa, who, in her confessional tone, weaves a story-tapestry on which her relatives are forced to repeat the same mistakes from one generation to the next due to their inability to learn, adapt and make peace with the past. The result is ambitions gone astray, opportunities squandered, and life and love being constantly replaced by unreachable dreams, illusions and elaborate fantasies.

“Perhaps by reconstructing my family’s story, I will finally be able to solve the mystery of my childhood, as well as discover the truth behind all the other family myths” [Morante/McPhee, NYRB Classics, 1948/2023: 24], says Elisa, our narrator. Starting with her grandmother, ex-schoolteacher Cesira, and once wealthy grandfather Teodoro, she details to us the events of her family’s past and the one “curse” that constantly threatens her family’s happiness – the propensity of her relatives to fashion their lives out of fabrication, led on by blind hope, replacing reality with make-believe. Cesira’s daughter Anna is from a poor family and becomes infatuated with her distant cousin Edoardo, who is a spoiled and selfish son of the wealthy Cerentano family. They have a chance to meet and “fall in love” at one point, but Edoardo’s love for Anna is tainted with egoism and self-interest, and Anna’s love is blinded by her self-deception and her admiration of her cousin’s visible attributes and appearances of beauty, wealth and success. “Although his instinct to dominate often led him to love those lower than himself, he never had the intention or even the thought of elevating the person he loved to his own rank”, our narrator tells us about Edoardo [Morante/McPhee, NYRB Classics, 1948/2023: 159].

In a city “stuck in time”, on the scene then comes Francesco, the son of a poor farmer, and makes fast friends with Edoardo. Francesco, an aspiring law student, also has a mistress, Rosaria, a “fallen woman”, whom Francesco hopes to marry one day. But, when Francesco sees Anna through the eyes of dashing Edoardo, he starts to idolise her innocence and purity, and, in turn, Rosaria grows close to Edoardo. The fact is that no character sees others in their true light, and all are essentially ignorant with regards to each other’s true personality, taken in by each other’s visible appearances of dignity, charm and kindness. Francesco sees Anna through the prism of many praises sung to him by Edoardo, and Rosaria sees Francesco as a “Baron” that he proclaims he still is. Morante’s story becomes a curious tale of mistaken perceptions, as it begins to flow around the blind idolatry of others, and what sorrow may come from this. Love is blind and ignorance is bliss, right? But, what price a person ultimately pays for having their head constantly in the clouds?

Morante wrote her story during the World War II, and, thus, it is only natural that the preoccupation would be loss, rejection and abandonment. Children in her story are trying to overcome their trauma or emotional pain by escaping into the realms of fantasy, a theme which Morante would also later explore in her novel Arturo’s Island. Whether to escape the parents’ death (Elisa), maternal rejection (Anna) or their own feelings of inadequacy (Francesco), the children, teenagers and then young people all build their castles in the sky made of hopes, dreams and fantasies.

In fact, maternal love or the lack of it dictates Morante’s prose. The male characters are lavished with maternal love, including Francesco and Edoardo, while female characters are perpetually in need of it, but both sets still come to harm. Francesco, Edoardo and Nicola (the Cerentano family’s administrator) are from different social backgrounds, but they portray or try to portray themselves as charismatic and successful young men (delusions of grandeur), and lack self-control and discipline to achieve anything in life or realise their true ambitions. “Rather than making the effort to become one, Nicola preferred to imagine the great men he could have been. For the slightest immediate pleasure, he would sacrifice all future happiness” [Morante/McPhee, NYRB Classics, 1948/2023: 79]. Similarly, the female characters are proud of their beauty, but are too caught up in their romantic ideals and hopes to see their lives and future clearly, and act upon the true information: “the most pernicious and aberrant effect of…(a) fantasy life was that, like a drug, (it deprives one) of any ability to act, throwing (one) into an ecstatic stupor in which time and nature laws no longer existed” [Morante/McPhee, NYRB Classics, 1948/2023: 18].

More than a touch self-indulgent in its emphasis on miniature descriptions and detailed digressions, Lies and Sorcery is also not without its melodramatic embellishments, but, still, through her sprawling prose, Morante is adamant to convey deep psychological portraits. There are highly sensitive children in her story who resort to passive-avoidant behaviour due to the trauma and feelings of either motherly rejection (largely girls in the story) or motherly pressure to succeed (largely boys in the story). So, attachment issues echo throughout the story as its characters try and try again to align their hopes, longings and unreachable aspirations with the brutal reality. For a tender heart, there will be many sorrows…

🌈Elsa Morante’s Scheherazade-level ambition does pay off in this novel, which was also inspired by traditional Italian story-telling, including Ariosto’s poem Orlando Furioso, and it also seems like the author tried to wed Dickensian themes of wronged, misunderstood childhood with a multigenerational melodrama worthy of a Balzacian pathos. In that way, Lies and Sorcery can be said to be a novel of both “Great Expectations” and “Lost Illusions”, whose narrative grips thanks to the author’s descriptive force and her carefully constructed, psychologically-interesting character portrayals.

<< Lies and Sorcery is now available from NYRB Classics in an entirely new and flowing translation (by Jenny McPhee), and I would like to thank New York Review Books for a gift copy of this book in exchange for an honest review >>