Customer Reviews

That Awful Mess on Via Merulana

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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.

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...

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.

First off, DO NOT READ THE $#%@ing INTRODUCTIONS. This is not an easy book to get through - but it's much harder to get through when the introductions reveal the ending and deprieve you of your (much needed) motiviation to plow through this text. Am I the only one who thinks we need more Afterwords? The main reason I bought the book was for Italo Calvino's introduction - and even in the introduction the book sounded boring.

Here's the problem: You have a typical literary crime novel drowning in what appears to be an encyclopedia. You have sprawling descriptions of cities, metal processes, historical respectives, a minor treatise of pastries, etc. And occasionally, there plot plods drunkenly on. It is so bad that the real investigation does not get underway until will into the second half of the book. Oddly, despite the piles of description in the text, you get no real sense for anyone in the book.

It reads like the Italian answer to Joyce's Ulysses only something of a story.

The sentences in this book are verbal labyrinths- by the time you finish a sentence, you forgot were it began and how it related to the sentence in front of it or how it related to the novel.

Here's an example of the actual text (and yes, this is one sentence):
"A majolica pan, as if from a clinic of the first category, was set on the brick floor, and not even near the wall: and neither did it lack some undeciphered content, on the consistence, coloration, odor, viscosity, and specific weight of which both the lynx eyes and bloodhound scent of Ingravallo felt that it wasn't necessary to investigate and analyze: the nose, of course, could not exempt itself from its natural functioning, that is from that activity, or to be more accurate, the papillary passivity which is proper to it, and which does not admit, helas, and interlude or inhibition or absence of any kind from its duty."

All that is too say: There's poo in the bucket and it smells quite bad.

If you're looking to read 300 pages of jammed meandering narrative like that above, this is the book. The jammed style isn't accidental, you get the feeling it is supposed to be humorous and makes typical references to the joys of a young buxom girls. The joke, however, becomes tedious within two minutes. And then you start wondering: Is this a joke? Was he getting paid by the word? Did the author enjoy peculiar snacks, such as mercury thermometers?

If you had fun reading Musil than you'll have even more fun reading Gadda. Get out the dictionary and prepare yourself for a long and hard read.

The book, that is not complete, is about a misterious murder in a middle-class house in Rome just after the rise of fascism. The style of the author is immaginific, resembling baroque. Unfortunately, I think that is very difficult to preserve in an english version the richness of different words in regional italian slang. So, please, read it in italian!!

The beginning is promising: one day a rich lady in the Via Merulana, Rome 1927, is robbed and a few days later the throat of another lady living in the same building is cut. Are these crimes related? Who did it? It is up to don Ciccio to solve this.

This looks like the start of a detective, but the book is not a detective. The investigations by the inspector and his colleagues are used by the author to give (beautiful) descriptions of anyone and anything the investigators meet on their way, be it a fellow inhabitant of the Via Merulana or a bunch of chicken running in front of a train. The book also contains a lot of non too flattering references to Mussolini, for whom Gadda has created a whole bunch of inventive nicknames.

My biggest problem was that after about half the book all descriptions start to be more of the same: they are beautiful, clear, inventive and therefore suprising, but there is not really a storyline.

So all in all: beautiful descriptions, less interesting as a book.

I read the book in a new and good Dutch translation, that tries to render Gadda's use of dialects. The book has an interesting beginning and seems to be a detective work, but then Gadda looses himself in endless descriptions and the crimes are not solved at all. In the end the reader is left with a unsatisfactory feeling.