Le chiavi magiche. Indagini di una lettrice su Elsa Morante e i suoi romanzi

The Magic Keys: Investigations of a Reader on Elsa Morante and Her Novels

For many, Elsa Morante is the serious, socially engaged neorealist writer who judges us from the pages of school anthologies. For others, she is a proto-feminist, an experimenter with synthetic drugs, an impulsive and at times unmanageable lover. In reality, Elsa Morante was both: a complex and elusive figure, a woman made of “anger, sweetness, laughter,” as Cesare Garboli writes, a woman in “eternal discussion with the world.”
Amid legends and gossip, high-society chronicles, and the false information she herself circulated, Morante’s true profile remains in shadow. Driven by curiosity and a consuming passion as a reader, Ludovica Lugli decided to follow the Roman writer to the only place where she truly reveals herself: the books she wrote.
This is how this precious volume was born — at once an investigation and an homage, cultural journalism and reading diary, a shared space for enthusiasts, and an invitation for those hesitant at the threshold of such a current and significant literary universe. From canonical masterpieces like La Storia and Menzogna e sortilegio to the peculiarities of Il Mondo salvato dai ragazzini, from L’isola di Arturo to her collections of short stories, from her poetry to her children’s tales, Lugli rereads Morante’s entire body of work, visits symbolic places, and reconstructs the stories intertwined with her novels and characters.
Page after page, she traces the living voice of the author, questioning and listening to her, returning to us the vibrant and disenchanted worldview that makes Morante’s work one of the most modern and countercultural of the twentieth century. Reading The Magic Keys is like participating in a book club: an invitation to embrace slowness, to return to literature as an exercise in depth. In a time when everything seems to demand speed and lightness, this book claims the right to get lost in the labyrinths of great works and great authors.