“Lies and Sorcery” by the author Elsa Morante is an ornate story of family life in Sicily.
Starting in the late summer of 1943, the Italian writers Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante spent nine months hiding in the small village of Sant’Agata. Situated in an impoverished mountain region, Sant’Agata offered few amenities. The couple lived in a small hut with an earthen floor where they slept on a mattress stuffed with corn husks. In October, with cold weather approaching, Morante briefly returned to occupied Rome to fill a suitcase with warm clothes.
Many of these details appear, either directly or in refracted form, in “Lies and Sorcery,” newly translated in its entirety by Jenny McPhee. Set in turn-of-the-century Sicily, it is 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.
It can be difficult to trace the political evolution that resulted in her next major work, “The World Saved by Kids,” though it would be safe to attribute some of the shift to her friendship with the writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Children would always be an important presence in her writing. Morante seems to have admired their utopian imaginations, their ability to construct a paradise through make-believe.
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