August 1, 2023
An epic tale of passion and obsession. At the heart of this novel, first published in Italy in 1948, is a tortured pair of love triangles: When Francesco falls in love with Anna, Anna is already desperately in love with her cousin Edoardo, who loves no one but himself. In the meantime, there's also Rosaria, a "fallen woman" Francesco loved and tried to reform before he'd ever heard of Anna. Rosaria loved Francesco, too, but--alas!--in came wealthy Edoardo with his expensive gifts to ruin everything. Morante's vast, sprawling epic of passion and delusion, obsession and madness, certainly contains multitudes. In that sense, as the publisher has noted, the influence of old masters like Tolstoy and Stendhal can be felt, though Tolstoy's exquisite kindness and patience for his characters isn't exactly prevalent here. Morante's novel is peopled with characters it can be exceedingly difficult to sympathize with: No one here is blameless except, perhaps, the self-effacing narrator. The events are described years after the fact by Elisa, the daughter of two of the major players, who, following her parents' deaths (which are revealed in the book's first few pages), goes to live with Rosaria. There, Elisa is so consumed by her family's past--or what she imagines to be her family's past; who can say what the difference might be?--that she is unable to live her own life. "If I did happen to find myself among others," she says, "their voices reached me as echoes, their faces mere reflections, and all that was present and real appeared to be at a great distance across time and space and to have no connection to me whatsoever." Morante's novel is a masterpiece, and to have it finally translated into English in unabridged form is a great gift. A masterpiece by one of Italy's foremost modern writers.
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Starred review from July 31, 2023
This 1948 novel from Morante (1912–1985), appearing unabridged in English for the first time in a translation by McPhee, is a thrilling saga of love and madness in a southern Italian city. The narrator, a young woman whose guardian recently died, tells the tale in hopes of freeing herself from the memories of her ancestors, including dissolute nobleman Teodoro Massia, who married young governess Cesira sometime around the turn of the 20th century. When Cesira learns her husband is actually destitute, she begins to hate him, but their daughter, Anna, worships her doting, drunken father and matures into a dreamy, isolated young woman convinced of her own superiority. Encountering her wealthy, beautiful, and cruel cousin Edoardo Cerentano, son of Teodoro’s sister, Anna falls in love, and the teenage cousins embark on a passionate yet chaste affair. After a bout of illness, Edoardo abandons Anna, pushing her off on his friend, the resentful, intelligent student Francesco di Salvi, who adores Anna and breaks up with his girlfriend Rosaria, a village girl and sex worker he’d previously wanted to marry. Seduced and blackmailed by Edoardo, Rosaria eventually emerges as the most sympathetic of the four, the only one capable of sympathy and forgiveness. Maintaining an ironic distance, Morante’s lengthy but propulsive narrative describes in detail the characters’ desires, fears, and superstitions, as well as the stultifying class divisions, religiosity, and financial troubles that define their lives. It’s a tremendous accomplishment.