That Awful Mess On The Via Merulana (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

gadda is one of italys greatest writers of the 20th century; and is virtually unknown in this country. he lived in rome during mussolinis "reign" and was a contemptuous opponent of the duce. his great novel (quer pasticciaccio nella via merulana, in italian) is a detective thriller about a robbery and murder in the via merulana. the hero is no hercule poirot, sherlock holmes or even philip marlowe; he is a jowly, frizzyhaired italian from the deep south (perhaps he has something of the appearance of our own antonio carluccio). he is unimpressed by "Authority" and is cleverer than the rest. does he get his man? read the book.
the book is a brilliant, joycean, evocation of the life of romans in the twenties; especially of humble romans. sometimes his descriptions remind one of dickens, sometimes of dostoevsky. he conveys this in the original by an effortless switch between demotic roman dialect and formal, educated italian; weavers translation wisely doesnt attempt to mimic this, so the reader loses out who cannot read the original. but the power of his writing is still apparent even to us anglophone readers.

This book is quite amazing. I think if you read it as a murder mystery then it might irritate, because they depend so much on the plot moving forward in a clear way, but just lose yourself in the language and it is really quite special. I can't remember when I last had to make notes to look up references to events and people of which I was unaware, let alone the meaning of words I had never before met, but it was all worth while.

Gadda's novel may be closer to postmodernists like Pynchon than to modernists like Joyce. But Gadda wouldn't have cared; when he wrote this almost nobody in Italy knew about modernism vs. postmodernism. It might be described as a philosophical crime novel--but it isn't the usual crime novel. Basically it's a literary masteripiece which happens to be *also* a crime novel. In it you have everything you usually find in a "classical" whodunit: a victim, a detective, some suspects, police inquiry, and the culprit. But these things are no more than a pretext for such an immense writer like Gadda to talk about Fascist Italy and the city of Rome (Gadda was born in Milan, but he chose to move to Rome and knew the city and the surrounding area incredibly well). Then you have his gift for language, his corrosive irony, his restless intelligence, his deep understanding of the human mind (also with a lot of psychoanalytical insight). Plus a wealth of references to Italian and Latin literature (such as the Retalli family, whose names echo those of Aeneas' family in Virgil's Aeneid). Plus a wide knowledge of Italian geography and anthropology. Not bad for a man who had graduated in engineering!
The plot is often interrupted by lengthy descriptions. But those descriptions, which might seem pointless at a superficial reading, are the plot itself. In the novel, if you read it carefully, you are even told who really killed the rich signora of Via Merulana (btw, a street which really exists in Rome, though at n. 219 there is a shop, not a block of flats). But everything is shown obliquely, indirectly, through allusions and hints that you may easily miss on a hurried reading. I'd say that this is a novel that unfolds reading after reading--just like all real masterpieces.

I am not surprised Calvino extolled Gadda. Gadda is a slightly greater novelist than Calvino. Ehm, did I say "slightly"? I should have said "decidedly"! Obviously Calvino is one of the great ones... but good ol' uncle Carlo Emilio is one of the "greatest ones". I am afraid, though, that some of his greatness may get lost in translation, though he has been "rewritten" by such a fine translator as William Weaver.

It's a pity Gadda's other masterpiece, his essay Eros and Priapo, a bewildering but absolutely brilliant psychonalysis of Fascism (told in a baroque mix of styles), hasn't been translated into English. Hey, this ain't a perfect world, folks...