That Awful Mess on the via Merulana Read Free

languages and dialects that has been compared to the work of Joyce.
    Via Merulana, the locale of much of the story, is also an unlikely setting for a great novel. It is the least romantic street in Rome: a long, straight thoroughfare with square, solid, ugly buildings, constructed for the square, solid bourgeoisie of half a century ago, already a bit down-at-the-heels in 1927, the year in which the novel's events take place, and still more down-at-the-heels today. A street no tourist ever sees, except to pass along it hastily en route to some monument of the neighborhood like Santa Maria Maggiore or the church of the Santi Quattro Incoronati, both mentioned often and tellingly in Il pasticciaccio (as the novel is familiarly called).
    Gadda himself, the poet and chronicler of Rome, is not a Roman; and this most Roman of novels was written, some years after the events it describes, in Florence, where the author lived between 1940 and 1950. Born in Milan in 1893, Gadda has lived not only in Rome and Florence, but for long periods in Argentina, France, Germany, and Belgium. Officially he was—until the years in Florence—an engineer, but this profession was also a part of the disguise behind which the writer and thinker operated.
    A soldier in the First World War (and a prisoner in Germany), Gadda had already begun filling notebooks with his round, precise hand. These notebooks, in part, appeared in his first published volume, La Madonna dei filosofi (1931), and, more completely, in his Giornali di guerra e di prigionia in 1955. His first articles had appeared in the distinguished Florentine literary magazine Solaria in 1926, and in Solaria's successor, the review Letteratura, he published installments of his two novels, Il pasticciaccio (1946) and La cognizione del dolore (1938-41).
    Gadda's first published volumes were collections of short stories which came out in small—almost clandestine— editions. Some of the books were published, wholly or partly, at the author's expense. But despite this secret manner of revealing his works, Gadda soon attracted the attention of the Italian critics and of a small but devoted band of readers. And, in time, those critics and readers included editors of two of Italy's leading publishing firms, Garzanti and Einaudi, who, after the Second World War, began to bring out Gadda's opera omnia in a more accessible manner, attracting new readers and renewed critical attention. And it was the influence of the Italian critics and publishers which brought about Gadda's being awarded the Prix International de Litterature at Corfu in 1963 for La cognizione del dolore.
    This prize came as something of a shock to the Italian literary world—where Gadda, though considered the country's most significant prose master, was still more or less a coterie possession—and as a complete surprise to critics and readers in other countries, where Gadda's name was known, at most, to a few specialists of Italian literature. A piece of Gadda's journalism (journalism, always, of a very unorthodox nature) had been translated into English for a special number of The Texas Quarterly, but otherwise his work had been totally ignored. A story of his then appeared, in English, in the review Art and Literature in Paris, and an article on his work was translated for a recent Italian number of The London Magazine. The present translation of Il pasticciaccio follows translations into French, German, and Dutch.
    La cognizione del dolore is an unfinished work, and so, in a sense, is II pasticciaccio. Gadda's short stories—which now number several volumes—are frequently not stories at all, but fragments of other, unfinished longer works. Unfinished, but not incomplete. Even the briefest of Gadda's fragments has its own curious wholeness; and if the "murder story" aspect of Il pasticciaccio remains unresolved, one feels—at the end of this long, apparently ambling work— that it is better not to know who is responsible for the