Fiction: ‘Lies and Sorcery’ by Elsa Morrante

“Don Quixote,” thought Vladimir Nabokov, is a work of monumental cruelty. After all, what really happens across its hundreds of pages except that a deluded old man endures an endless series of physical punishments and nasty pranks? “The irresponsible, infantile, barbed and barbarous world of the book,” Nabokov argued, was intended to be little more than a lowbrow parody of courtly romances. It was only through the accident of art that Don Quixote’s slapstick suffering converted him into something noble and poignant, a secular Christ figure, and that his escapades became the classic we know today, the progenitor of the self-aware modern novel.

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Lies and Sorcery

By Elsa Morante

NYRB Classics

800 pages

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The Italian novelist Elsa Morante (1912-85) was quite clear about the influence of “Don Quixote” on her enormous 1948 debut, “Lies and Sorcery,” which now appears in English in a deliciously ornate translation by Jenny McPhee. Just as Cervantes’s book “marked the end point of the ancient chivalric epic,” she wrote, her novel aspired “to be the last one possible of its kind,” what she called the “bourgeois epic.” In the 17th century, readers familiar with “The Song of Roland” were primed to see a buffoonish knight-errant get roughed up by a windmill. Morante’s audience had been shaped by the triple-deckers of 19th-century maestros like Dumas, Dickens, Tolstoy and Manzoni. Her novel is a savage spoof of those masterpieces, an enormous work of literary disenchantment.