in medias

Just a brief note while savoring every page of Elsa Morante's Lies and Sorcery, available in unexpurgated English translation for the first time via NYRB Classics – Jenny McPhee does the honors and is a marvel, a translator of sensitivity, wit, and rhythm. It's a huge book, but three hundred pages in it's no burden; that this was Morante's first novel is rather shocking. I became a fan after reading Aracoeli from Open Letter (it seems to have gone out of print; find a copy if you can), and went on to read History: A Novel and Arturo's Island with pleasure. But Lies and Sorcery provides the daily satisfaction that only an epic can give, scattering jewels across its complex accounting of courtship and class – like this, that pulled me up in my tracks just now:

Francesco, as we know, had not broken off his meetings with Rosaria, nor could it be said that his heart wasn't in them.

So much in so little, nested within so much more...this book is a joy.