Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893–1973)

This isn't really a good choice for non-native-speakers to read in Italian. Much of it (narrative as well as dialogue) is in various shades of dialect, there is a lot of wordplay, free association, intertextuality and all the rest of it. I probably missed four-fifths of it, but it will be fun to re-read some time and pick up a few more of the jokes. I think I did get all the physics references, at least, and some of the musical ones!

It looks like a crime story, with conspicuous allusions to show more Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue", and it seems to have influenced a lot of modern crime writers, but it is obviously a lot more than that. Gadda was writing in the forties and fifties, but the story is set in March 1927 (Gadda is very precise about dates, vague as he is about other things), in the early days of fascism, and there are quite a few barbed references to the fascists as well as a general underlying questioning of the whole idea of state power. The dialect is an important part of this undermining of authority, of course, and we also see (for example) police officers visiting an illegal brothel/bar/fortune-teller/sewing-workshop as customers, without the narrator treating it as anything worth commenting on.

There's also a lot of questioning of conventional ideas of narrative — notoriously including the complete elimination of what's usually the most important element of a crime story, the capture of the criminal and the resolution of the case. That's left as an exercise for the reader. And Gadda has a lot of fun interrupting the progress of the story at critical points with apparently irrelevant descriptive passages and flights of fancy. Apparently, where most writers spend the final editing period cutting the text, Gadda did the reverse, inserting delay-passages wherever he felt things were moving too fast. It's quite typical of the whole that the policeman, Commissario Ingravallo, finally gets issued with a car only about ten pages before the end of the book. Up to that point he's been travelling by tram and on foot. There's even a ludicrous sequence where two officers go to conduct investigations in the countryside on a motorcycle. When they arrest two suspects, they have to commandeer a horse and cart to transport them back to the station (it's not made clear how they get the motorbike back...).

Opinions about Gadda's sexuality seem to vary, but the motorbike passages at least have a very strong homoerotic flavour about them, with a lot of stuff about gleaming uniforms and throbbing machinery between the legs (think Tom of Finland...). And there's also a bit in the early part of the book where a bachelor civil servant gets very nervous when the police ask questions about the unusual number of delivery boys calling at his apartment ("Well, you can't expect someone in my position to walk through the streets carrying a ham and a bottle of olive oil...").

A very interesting book, but one it isn't easy to make sense of! show less

Baroque, ornate, dense, tangled, funny, brilliant unfinished 400-page rant from Carlo Emilio Gadda[ai:Carlo Emilio Gadda|299133|Carlo Emilio Gadda|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1280678291p2/299133.jpg] thwarts logical conclusions and forces the reader to go along for the ride in the many-layered, stinky, cacaphony of corruption and magic depicted as 1927 Rome. Ostensibly a detective novel, there's a theft, a murder, and a host of descriptions of Mussolini-era Italy in 1927 including the show more memorable references to Il Doochay as "Death's Head," "Fierce Face," the Shit...the syphilitic Swaggerer." But the investigation is incomplete, derailed like the train, and the tale ends inconclusively, indeed an inventive "mess."
The book club discussion was lively and mostly enthusiastic. One member even produced a fantastic glossary of the book's elaborate vocabulary.
William Weaver's translation was masterful in dealing with Gadda's imaginative vocabulary, made-up words, puns and double-meanings. show less

Baroque, ornate, dense, tangled, funny, brilliant unfinished 400-page rant from Carlo Emilio Gadda[ai:Carlo Emilio Gadda|299133|Carlo Emilio Gadda|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1280678291p2/299133.jpg] thwarts logical conclusions and forces the reader to go along for the ride in the many-layered, stinky, cacaphony of corruption and magic depicted as 1927 Rome. Ostensibly a detective novel, there's a theft, a murder, and a host of descriptions of Mussolini-era Italy in 1927 including the show more memorable references to Il Doochay as "Death's Head," "Fierce Face," the Shit...the syphilitic Swaggerer." But the investigation is incomplete, derailed like the train, and the tale ends inconclusively, indeed an inventive "mess."
The book club discussion was lively and mostly enthusiastic. One member even produced a fantastic glossary of the book's elaborate vocabulary.
William Weaver's translation was masterful in dealing with Gadda's imaginative vocabulary, made-up words, puns and double-meanings. show less

Halfway through:

Made a foray into one of the more difficult books I’ve ever read—and that’s saying something since I never shrink from a challenging read. But this thing . . . hooboy. Its language is evocative, invented, infinitely referential and most probably lost in translation. But it still has a power and rhythm that is undeniable under all that varicolored wrapping. The fact that someone has written a murder mystery and I care less about the identity of the killer halfway through show more the novel and more about the world engulfing that bloody act is an accomplishment alone. That it is also gorgeously confusing and makes the brain itch with urushiol-soaked taffeta is worth every damn paragraph. I can’t wait to get to Italo Calvino’s introduction when I’m done.

“The glinting eyes of the hereditary syphilitic (also syphilitic in his own right), the illiterate day-laborer’s jaws, the rachitic acromegalic face already filled the pages of Italia Illustrata: already, once they were confirmed, all the Maria Barbisas of Italy were beginning to fall in love with him, already they began to invulvulate him, Italy’s Magdas, Milenas, Filomenas, as soon as they stepped down from the altar: in white veils, crowned with orange blossoms, photographed coming out of the narthex, dreaming of orgies and the educatory exploits of the swinging cudgel.”

—That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda

Upon completion:

Never will I come across a book quite like this again. Some honeybees that bumped against sepals on their way to the heart of the flower:

“A widespread and delicate ovaricity, that’s the word, permeated the whole stalk of their soul: like ancient essences, in the ground and the meadows of the Marsica, in the stalk of a flower: pressed at length until they explode in the sweet perfume of the corolla: but their corolla, these women’s, was the nose, which they could blow as much as they pleased.”

“If you’re carrying a heavy suitcase, you don’t get past the Customs in Paradise . . .”

“Don’t do good if you are not prepared to receive evil.”

—That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana show less