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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderfully baroque novel., April 7, 1999
By A Customer
A philosophical novel...murder mystery, this baroque, caustic, and ultimately poignant work has been lauded by no less than Italo Calvino, whose introduction alone is worth the cover price. Carlo Emilio Gadda--in this and in his only other published novel, _Acquainted With Grief_--concerned himself with the exploration of the interrelatedness of things, the never-ending, kaleidoscopic complexities of life, the myriad, frequently interrelated causes that converge to produce every effect. He was also vehemently anti-fascist, as his outraged--and hilariously scatological--rants against the Mussolini regime attest (Gadda started the novel soon after the close of WWII). More delightful still is Gadda's playful love of language, captured brilliantly in William Weaver's translation. (Why do so few translators, of any language, produce work as stylistically and linguistically rich as Weaver's? His work is consistently brilliant.) This is a fantastic novel. Do yourself a favor and buy a copy. Then thank whichever god you believe in that George Brazilier has for so many years kept this masterpiece in print, to the enrichment of us all.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a philosophical whodunit, December 9, 2005
Obviously Gadda's novel is not 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' Aeneid). Plus a wide knowledge of Italian geography and anthropology. Not bad for a man who had graduated in engineering!
Somebody complained about descriptions. Well, actually those descriptions, which seem pointless at a first 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 masterpiece.
And 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 greats... but good ol' uncle Carlo Emilio is one of the "greatests". 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. Heh, this ain't a perfect world, folks...
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Feast of Languages, but also the Ultimate Whodunit, August 7, 1998
By A Customer
It is a great, original, learned, creative, enthralling novel; yes, sure. But it is also a masterpiece of the detective-story genre it its own right. A bold experiment with languages, but also a grandiose fresco of what life in the capital of Italy was like in the early years of Fascism. And a deformed picture of what Italy has been until a few years ago--and probably still is. Maybe detective Ingravallo, the police official who tries to disentangle the awful mess, is not as cynical as his colleagues Marlowe and Spade (not to mention their legitimate heir, Mr. Rick Deckard); but surely he's as clever as his American counterparts, and has the same uncanny ability to read the destinies of his country in the stories of the people he meets during his inquiries. Some of the linguistic wealth of this novel can get lost in translation (e.g. Gadda's wonderful use of Italian dialects, even more baroque than Chandler's usage of slang), but the beauty of the plot and the i! nsights into common history and individual stories are still there. Highly recommended to all those who think that Kafka, Proust, and Joyce are the only avantgarde classics around.
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