# Read the first page of Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante & Jenny McPhee Read the opening of Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante & Jenny McPhee free, no signup. An orphaned woman uncovers her family’s secrets, betrayals, and injustice. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/lies-and-sorcery-elsa-morante-and-jenny-mcphee - Genre: Literary fiction - Year: 2023 - ISBN: 9781802066852 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781802066852&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781802066852 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781802066852 ## The opening @@CHAP@@ Introduction when Natalia Ginzburg, then a young editor at the publishing house Einaudi, received a letter from Elsa Morante, whom she’d met briefly once, asking her if she would consider reading the manuscript of her first novel, Menzogna e sortilegio (Lies and Sorcery), Ginzburg was deeply flattered and accepted immediately. She already sensed that Morante was going to be “the greatest writer of the century.” When the manuscript arrived, Ginzburg recalled during a 1985 interview, she read the eight hundred pages “in one sitting and I loved it immensely; but I don’t know if I clearly understood its importance and greatness at the time. I only knew that I loved it and that it had been a long time since I’d read anything that filled me with such vitality and joy. It was an extraordinary adventure 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 painful intensity.” Italo Calvino’s response was equally enthusiastic: “While at first Lies and Sorcery appears to be an elaborate game of fairy tales, it is actually a serious novel, full of living human beings, and though not obviously a social polemic, the narrative desperately and successfully penetrates to the bone, exposing the painful condition of humanity and its class structures, never forgetting for an instant our present-day situation.” Morante’s husband, the novelist Alberto Moravia, with whom she had a complicated but devoted relationship, called the book “genius.” Set vaguely during the belle epoque, Lies and Sorcery chronicles the trials and tribulations of three generations of Sicilian women. The story is narrated by the youngest, Elisa, a recluse whose self-isolation often lures her into a state of semi-madness. In her delirium, she evokes ghosts from the past, all insistent on telling her their often fantastical stories, full of striving self-aggrandizement and petty melodramas. What emerges from these tales of woe is a searing dissection of the vanity of aspirational existence in a stratified society, and a brutal illustration of how desire, disappointment, and trauma are passed down through familial relationships and reinforced by social structures. The characters Elisa draws for us do not evolve or change; their stories allow for no progress or possibility. The novel is a stunning depiction of humanity’s eternal stagnation. If there is a glimmer of hope, it lies in the act of writing. Morante began Lies and Sorcery during World War II, part of which Morante and Moravia, both half Jewish, had spent fleeing the Fascists and the Nazis. Though in many significant ways the novel is autobiographical, recalling Morante’s own childhood and family history (Elisa an obvious alter ego of Elsa), the writing style rigorously rejects the spare neorealist sensibility that was prevalent in postwar Italy. Morante claimed that there was nothing real about realism; rather, it promoted a dishonest detachment. Though Fascism is nowhere overtly considered in the novel, Morante’s narrative is, as the critic Sharon Wood writes, very much about “the moral and intellectual squalor of the petite bourgeoisie, the very class that decades later was to provide a bedrock of support for Fascism.” Describing her exile and flight during the German occupation of Rome, Morante observed, “The people we had to be afraid of were the middle classes, teachers, civil servants—the prejudice was with them, they would have reported us to the Gestapo.” Lies and Sorcery explores how class-based, patriarchal social, political, and cultural structures—including literary production—mold and fashion the individual imagination, not only enabling movements such as Fascism but making them inevitable, rising and flourishing again and again like fungi. Morante was an extremely ambitious writer, in the sense that she wanted to change literature itself. In Lies and Sorcery, she challenges the form of the novel by reinventing it. She mimics, melds, and transforms the styles of popular romantic fiction, epic poetry, opera, tragic myth, the epistolary novel, the feuilleton, the picaresque, the heroic adventure novel, the psychological novel, so that her narrative becomes a steamy concoction of new ways of storytelling. ## Books with a similar feel - [Arthur & George by Julian Barnes](https://uncovered.ink/read/arthur-and-george-julian-barnes.md) - [The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-magicians-assistant-ann-patchett.md) - [Moon Palace by Paul Auster](https://uncovered.ink/read/moon-palace-paul-auster.md) - [The Bone Fire by György Dragomán](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-bone-fire-gyorgy-dragoman.md) - [The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto by Mitch Albom](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-magic-strings-of-frankie-presto-mitch-albom.md) - [The Gathering by Anne Enright](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-gathering-anne-enright.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). 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