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By New York Revi… · 24 posts · 91 views
last updated Oct 02, 2012 04:14PM
That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, by Carlo Emilio Gadda
By Trevor · 47 posts · 92 views
By Trevor · 47 posts · 92 views
last updated Oct 07, 2019 04:02PM

By Louise · 92 posts · 102 views
last updated Dec 17, 2018 05:21PM
What Members Thought

A woman is elderly widow is robbed of her very valuable jewels, then across the hall, a young, beautiful sophisticated wife is brutally murdered. The murder victim is, in fact, good friends with the smartest detective in Rome. Think you'll learn the criminal at the end of 400 odd pages? [Spoiler alert] (view spoiler) This is a mystery as if Joyce wrote it. Except Joyce is only concerned with one idiom (I'm thinking Irish English, but that probably isn't true), and Gadda
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Imagonnabe thinking about this one for a while. Gadda and this novel had a mention in Enrique Vilas-Matas' totally wonderful Bartleby & Co. as a book the writer couldn't/wouldn't finish.
That awful mess a crime novel without resolution--an armed robbery plus a murder that may or may not be connected. It's a cutting misanthropic/misogynist social satire of Rome circa 1927, in the early days of Mussolini's reign. It's an exercise in playing with language from puns and near obscenities to dialect, ...more
That awful mess a crime novel without resolution--an armed robbery plus a murder that may or may not be connected. It's a cutting misanthropic/misogynist social satire of Rome circa 1927, in the early days of Mussolini's reign. It's an exercise in playing with language from puns and near obscenities to dialect, ...more

Baroque, ornate, dense, tangled, funny, brilliant unfinished 400-page rant from Carlo Emilio Gadda
thwarts logical conclusions and forces the reader to go along for the ride in the many-layered, stinky, cacaphony of corruption and magic depicted as 1927 Rome. Ostensibly a detective novel, there's a theft, a murder, and a host of descriptions of Mussolini-era Italy in 1927 including the memorable references to Il Doochay as "Death's Head," "Fierce Face," the Shit...the syphilitic Swaggerer."
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I didn't know what I was getting into when I started this book! Think of picking up Ulysses with no idea what it was all about.
For my complete review:
http://mookse.wordpress.com/2008/07/3... ...more
For my complete review:
http://mookse.wordpress.com/2008/07/3... ...more

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