Lies and Sorcery
A nearly 800-page novel that combines mythic storytelling with Depression-era realism ... An inspired translation ... What made this door-stopper of an Italian soap opera feel like great literature to large numbers of sophisticated readers 75 years ago? The same thing that makes it wonderful today. The writing, pure and simple. 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 ... At the heart of the book lies Morante’s stunning grasp of the damage done by commonplace emotional deprivation, the kind experienced when those relations that have historically promised to relieve the human heart of its native isolation fail to do so. For Morante the consequences of such damage are of mythic proportions, deranging at best, murderous at worst ... Morante knows that the loneliness, grounded in our one and only life, is self-created. But for her the wildness of its despair feels biblical. In our time, the time of the therapeutic culture, the shame of loneliness is much reduced — but so is the drama.
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A social epic tinged with fabulism and written in a sensual and highly ornate prose. Its style, content and setting are a stark contrast with the predominant strain of immediate postwar Italian writing, which is typified by the socially minded and stylistically simple neorealism of writers such as Natalia Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese ... All fairly complicated and goes some way toward explaining the imposing length of the novel. The family histories of each key player in the love triangle are offered with rich details, the tangled skeins of their various and conflicting passions laid out with exhaustive clarity ... McPhee translates, expertly, to convey a sense of the original baroque syntax and the heightened register, without feeling fusty or overwrought ... There remains something stirring in the raw emotions that power her writings, and in the moral air they give off simple convictions passionately held. She is, it turns out, that old-fashioned thing, a writer of conscience, and of brilliance besides.
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An electrifying new translation ... In many ways neorealism’s inverse. The novel, 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. It is not concerned with truth but with lies: glittering surfaces, concealed identities, and foolish pretension.
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