and Elsa and I are doing a little jig for joy!

If you are in New York City on November 9 at 6:30, please join me at NYU’s Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò for a presentation of the book with Ann Goldstein and Franco Baldasso.

From Vivan Gornick in The New York Times:

Ferrante Before Ferrante

Elsa Morante’s propulsive 1940s saga of women’s lives, “Lies and Sorcery,” brings its penetrating insight to a new generation.

“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.”

From Tim Parks in The Times Literary Supplement:

The scars of love

Elsa Morante’s urgent, exhilarating novel of falsehood and secrecy

“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. ‘I can’t say that I clearly understood [the novel’s] importance and greatness,’ recalled Natalia Ginzburg after putting down the manuscript. ‘I knew only that I loved it and it had been a long time since I had read anything that gave me such life and joy.'”

From Bailey Trela in The Washington Post:

A classic Italian novel finally gets the translation it deserves

‘Lies and Sorcery’ from Elsa Morante is an ornate epic about family life in Sicily

“McPhee translates, expertly, to convey a sense of the original baroque syntax and the heightened register, without feeling fusty or overwrought…

“That ‘Lies and Sorcery’ revels in its Gothic mise-en-scène, that its plot makes use of antiquated fictional gambits and flirts with an operatic fabulism, seems to have obscured the fact that the novel is, at its core, deeply interested in class and the injustices wrought by rigid social forms. 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.”

From Deborah Eisenberg in The New York Review of Books:

Virtuosos of Self-Deception

Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery, originally published in 1948, is a slippery, feverish, dreamlike book that refuses to adapt to the conventions of what a novel ought to be.

“It’s as if Morante were writing with both a scalpel and a blunt hatchet. The meticulous detail and emphatic, repetitive characterization plus the holes the writer has punched into the novel’s pointedly elevated style (surely a workout for the translator) can give the reader an impression of not quite seeing straight, of not being securely situated within the book’s rules and principles—the feeling of struggling to get a peek at something that’s concealed. The story seems to have escaped from its container and to be swerving around instead of sitting comfortably on its pages.

Initially it all seemed too declarative to me, too heightened, too hectic to credit. There were moments when I felt as though I were locked in the spin cycle of a washing machine with a very high, OCD octopus. But each time I put the book down, with the intention of never picking it up again, a tentacle would reach out, seize me, and drop me right back in my chair, reading. At some point, a potent enchantment prevailed, and for me, the book’s impassioned insistence became an unassailable and transporting reality.”

And the novel made:

EDITORS’ CHOICE

9 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

LIES AND SORCERY
Elsa Morante

Morante’s novel was written in 1948, but until now it has never been published in English in its entirety. It was 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.

“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.” -Vivian Gornick

And to put some icing on the cake, Lies and Sorcery is on the Center for Fiction’s bestseller list this week!