That Awful Mess on Via Merulana [Paperback]

Carlo Emilio Gadda (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1984

In a large apartment house in central Rome, two crimes are committed within a matter of days: a burglary, in which a good deal of money and precious jewels are taken, and a murder, as a young woman whose husband is out of town is found with her throat cut. Called in to investigate, melancholy Detective Ciccio, a secret admirer of the murdered woman and a friend of her husband’s, discovers that almost everyone in the apartment building is somehow involved in the case, and with each new development the mystery only deepens and broadens. Gadda’s sublimely different detective story presents a scathing picture of fascist Italy while tracking the elusiveness of the truth, the impossibility of proof, and the infinite complexity of the workings of fate, showing how they come into conflict with the demands of justice and love.

Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Alberto Moravia all considered That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana to be the great modern Italian novel. Unquestionably, it is a work of universal significance and protean genius: a rich social novel, a comic opera, an act of political resistance, a blazing feat of baroque wordplay, and a haunting story of life and death.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The experimental masterpiece modern Italian literature has long been awaiting.… There is a kinship to Joyce, especially in Gadda’s inspired outbursts of comic invective, his ferocious Romantic humor.” —The New York Times --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Language Notes

Text: English, Italian (translation)

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Product Details

• Paperback: 388 pages
• Publisher: George Braziller (August 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807610933
• ISBN-13: 978-0807610930
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,618,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

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

This review is from: That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (Paperback)

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.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a philosophical whodunit, December 9, 2005

By 

marco deral (Italy) - See all my reviews

This review is from: That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (Paperback)

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...

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

This review is from: That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (Paperback)

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.