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That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, by Carlo Emilio Gadda
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Today we start discussion on That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana. Who has read it, is reading it, will be reading it?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893–1973) was born in Milan, where he spent a “tormented childhood and even more miserable adolescence.” He earned a degree in engineering, volunteered to fight in World War I, and was taken prisoner by the Germans. After the war, he began to write while working as an engineer in countries as far afield as Argentina. Acquainted with Grief, Gadda’s first novel, set in an imaginary South American country, appeared in 1938. His masterpiece, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, was serialized after the war, but only published as a book in 1957. Both novels, like much else that Gadda wrote, were left incomplete. Among Gadda’s other notable works are essays, film and radio scripts, a travel book, and his journals from World War I.
PRAISE:I take Carlo Emilio Gadda to be a vituoso of philosophic fiction fully comprable to Broch and to Musil.
— George Steiner, in “An Exact Art”
The novel...is now considered a classic by modern Italian novelists, who especially admire its street language...from his thrusts against the dictator in this powerful novel, Gadda might be considered an early anti-Fascist.
— The New York Times
...[A] prize-winning look at a slice of bureaucratic society in Rome in 1927.
— The Christian Science Monitor
...[W]e are left with something possibly quite wonderful...[Gadda] and his book achieve a species of luminescence—perhaps phosphorescence...complex and truly remarkable effects, mimetically, rhetorically, and morally.
— The New York Times
I have started it- about 100 pages in. I love the title.
Sign me up. I special ordered this months ago, and am glad it's finally botm.It will be one of the few "dead tree" books I read this year, provided I do read it.
Sounds interesting.
Not sure when I'll start, but I've got this one earmarked for this month
I will start reading this next week
If anyone needs a copy in the UK then let me know and I will send it for postage.I read it for my Books In Translation bookckub the other month and whilst I did enjoy it I found it quite a lot of work.
I'm about 100 pages in and enjoying it a lot, though I agree that it's work.My copy is an older one, published in 1985, but I was suprised to see that it's the same translation and introduction in the NYRB edition. Does anyone have any thoughts on the translation? I find it lively and engaging but a little dated (it appears to be from 1965). I have a lot of sympathy for the translator, however. Having read his opening note, it sounds like a bit of a nightmare, written in various dialects, full of obscure references and wordplay, and everyone is referred to by three or four different names.
Despite a bit of confusion and a few translation niggles, I'm finding that this book, so far, rewards the effort put in.
William Weaver was quite the workhorse in his day.He translated everything (citation needed).
Wait, isn't he the guy who translated The Name of the Rose?
At which point, he was finally able to retire, maybe?
I'm making all of this up.
.William Weaver
True. Looking at his Wikipedia though, almost all of his translations are from the mid 60s on, so this must have been a relatively early one.I'm not criticizing the translation per se. I'm just mildly surprised NYRB didn't spring for an update, as it was already 40 years old at the time, and received wisdom seems to say that texts don't necessarily date, but translations do. I guess in this case, his fame was enough to justify keeping the original.
I’m on page 80 at the moment. I found the beginning hard to get into. I’ve been making a list of the characters, and that is helping me get my footing.
The two Italian translaters in our group tried to read the original and had to give up. Which is saying something!
I too am at around page 100, so I'm glad we are all more or less at the same point. I think I'm feeling a bit as I've felt in the past about Henry James. I think I'm getting most of it, but I'm not srue at all why I'm getting it. I never used to worry much about reading something in translation, but now I feel I'm missing a good deal, especially when it comes to some of this story.
I must say I'm having a hard time getting into this book. I could use a little encouragement. It is hard to follow, and the language is odd. The translator seems to have had his hands full with this one, and I'm not sure it is successful.
I've now read 200 pages and while still enjoying it, it is odd. I'm treating it like Joyce. I skim along, enjoying the language if I enjoy it, trying not to get bogged down in it if I don't, and telling myself that if I ultimately love the book I can come back and comb through it in more detail later.
Interestingly, I took a class on Joyce last year, in which I was the only person not reading it in translation. Everyone seemed to think I must understand it much better than they did, but it wasn't the case, although I suppose the original always has more richness. I do feel with this book that our inability to see where it switches between dialects must mean we're missing something.
I am kind of taking the approach that you are Emily. I think we probably miss a lot in translation with this one, and the different ways of naming the same person can be difficult. I have moments where I'm enjoying it and moments where I'm not. Which has also been true with Joyce, come to think of it. That said, though, it doesn't remind me that much of Joyce, but I'm prepared to believe that Gadda holds the status of Joyce in Italy.
I have started it twice, and twice I have tossed it to go read something else. With the Booker shortlist out this week AND the Giller longlist, I've got too many books to read so I don't think I will try this one again. But I will follow along with the discussion. I won't be posting any questions so if anyone else wants to throw some questions out there, please do.
I don't know about questions, but I'll be happy to post some links as I find them. I hope others do too. This one is by D.J. Enright, published, appropriately enough in the New York Review of Books.. I don't have all of it, but if you have a subscription you can probably read the whole thing. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966...
The bit that was open was very interesting!"And its weaknesses, I suspect, are the weaknesses of Gadda, who (like Joyce in Ulysses) is doing much more than telling a story, but (unlike Joyce in Ulysses) doesn’t tell a story."
That was bizarre! Gadda's story about murder, theft, and a police investigation is "not a story," whereas Joyce's tale of two men wandering around Dublin all day is.
I'm still not finished, but am firmly back in the liking it camp for now. It's one of those books that you are always going to have issues with -- it's confusing, rambling, at times seems more concerned with skewering Mussolini than following its characters. But I find it really makes me feel alive, unlike a lot of more "polished" fiction.
I found Chapter 6 (the initial questioning of Ines) almost a surreal experience to read, in which I lost track several times of who was who, who was being spoken of, what any of these people had to do with either of the crimes... but I also loved it for its vivid madness.
I enjoy a good murder mystery, and I love good writing. I'm going to abandon this book after 120 pages. The story is just ok, though that is not a deal breaker. There is an occasional wonderful analogy or metaphor. But so much of Gadda's writing is digressions and rants that i can't even follow. From reading others' reviews I know that the book is unfinished and the mystery unsolved. Pros and cons considered, with lots of other books on my list, I'm done.
You gave it a go, Catherine, and that's all anyone can ask.
Finished. I found it quite exhausting, but also very worthwhile. I definitely lost the plot at some point, though I imagine that's fairly standard.
Glad to hear it, Emily. I am juggling a not online reading group pick with trying to catch up here, but I did feel a renewed interest after reading your post. I am having a hard time getting through anything these days, so it's not a reflection on this book, really.
It's a book that has left me with a lot of questions, and in an attempt to get some of them answered, I found this article from the London Review of Books:https://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n18/tim-par...
It clarified a lot of points for me. It's interesting that the title in Italian really signals how the book will be -- overblown and partly in Roman dialect -- in a way that the English can't reproduce.
Other highlights:
"Every space is packed, every shelf and drawer is overflowing with bric-a-brac, every lexical field is brought into play in a mill of high and low, modern and archaic, domestic and technical registers. Hair is tangled, clothes are mismatched: bodies, especially women’s bodies, present strange combinations of contrasting features, of attractive forms and repulsive smells. Crucial conversations are drowned out by background noise; telephone wires are crossed; promising lines of questioning are disrupted by unpleasant odours. Truth messes with falsehood, fantasy with reality, neologisms with misspellings, history with myth, country with city. If Ingravallo has been invited to sort out the worst of tangles, everything about Gadda’s book declares the task impossible. Successful completion of the murder investigation is as unlikely as the discovery of a literary style or structure that might contain and possess the unruly world. Ingravallo never manages even to finish a cigarette."
I also feel a bit vindicated in my doubts about the translation:
"William Weaver has written convincingly of the problems of translating Gadda, but his 1965 version, reprinted in this new edition, never begins to solve them. It’s full of false or inappropriate cognates (e.g. the unhappy use of ‘infamous’ and ‘sex’ in the passage describing Liliana’s corpse) and has a tendency to follow Italian syntax with scant respect for the rhythms and habits of English prosody, present or past. True, Gadda’s style is very strange and a challenge that most translators would be glad to pass up, but in so far as it is a play of different voices there is no chance of arriving at a satisfactory equivalent if even the most ordinary sentence in Gadda’s Italian becomes extraordinary in English."
Started this this evening. Interesting so far, though I'm only up to around page 25 or so. With the wide disparity of comments about this in the group so far, I was starting to get a little worried.For some reason, this kind of reminds me of Berlin Alexanderplatz, though I couldn't say why. I had to get BA from the library, so I can't look through it to see--probably something about the style.
I'm about half-way through. I like the book, but it's not an easy one to get lost in. There are moments, but then some new topic comes along to disrupt the flow. I can see that this is a book that would benefit from a re-read.
I started this yesterday - up to about p25. I must admit that I am finding it very hard work, but I do want to read it. So, I think that I will allocate myself 10 pages per day and see how I go then.With reading these 10 pages and my daily read of Anniversaries, I think I might have to find something really light that I dont have to think about.
I'm getting close to the end. I've found that since Ingravallo has left the scene, I've had a much more difficult time keeping interested.
Cordelia wrote: "I started this yesterday - up to about p25. I must admit that I am finding it very hard work, but I do want to read it. So, I think that I will allocate myself 10 pages per day and see how I go the..."I'm also doing the daily read of Anniversaries and my head was definitely spinning a bit the week I read the Gadda! :-)
I persist, but still am only about halfway through. I think there are many aspects of the book that would be easy to understand from a Roman or even an Italian point of view. Well, not that I don't understand it on a broader level, but I still don't get its significance on a broader scale. I wonder if a woman in the U.S. in this later era is really the ideal reader. (Meaning me.)My hope is to get done and then read some more analysis.
First I must apologize for being so absent in the group discussions lately. Life has gotten too busy :-(Any closing comments? Would you recommend this book to others?
I thought it was worthwhile, but maybe not enough to recommend. There were long sections that I felt invested in, and then others that were a chore to read. In the end, I think it's a book that has to be read more than once for it to really sink in--the first time through, I'm trying to hang on to the plot through the tangle of the author's style. Reading a second time, I could relax the effort of trying to keep straight the movements of the characters and enjoy the digressions and asides more. Those that I could understand, anyway. The book is not only very Italian, it's very 1930s Italian.
I think it's very worthwhile, though not for every reader. I think I came to this book at the right time, because I've taken some courses on Modernist writers in the past couple of years, mainly because I've never understood them and wanted to. I would certainly never claim to have fully understood this book, but I think coming from having recently read a lot of Joyce and Woolf and Eliot was a good starting point, and probably also made me more patient with its waffling on and on.I would never recommend it to my mother, but I think people who like experimental styles could get a lot out of it.
I'm still struggling along with it, if you can believe that. But I reached page 300 today, which is where chapter 9 starts in my edition. I feel as though I become progressively more engaged with it as I go along. I've found that reading some of the longer passages out loud actually makes it easier for me to stay focused on it, and has also made me appreciate the beauty (and density) of the language--or at least William Weaver's skill in translating it. I do think it's a disservice to non-Italian readers not to have provided more footnotes. The few provided have been helpful, so I'm not sure why it was decided to keep them to the minimum. I know Gadda removed some from an early edition, but we are reading at such a remove in time and culture that I can't see how he would have objected.
Seana wrote: "I'm still struggling along with it, if you can believe that. But I reached page 300 today, which is where chapter 9 starts in my edition. I feel as though I become progressively more engaged with i..."I agree. Hopefully some university press will make a new edition one of these days and include some more!
I finished it today. I feel like persisting was worth it, despite gaps in my understanding of particular allusions. Sometimes you just need to struggle through in order to get a sense of the book as a whole to appreciate it. I'm glad I read it.
For anyone who is still checking in here, and perhaps especially for anyone who got to the end, this review of That Awful Mess and a broader view of Gadda himself might be interesting. It's written by novelist Tim Parks, who has a lot of connection to Italy, for the London Review of Books. I think it's a pretty fair assessment of the novel's (and the translation's) strengths and weaknesses, although I found that the story got more interesting in the second half, while he did not. But he does have a bigger theory about the work than I do.https://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n18/tim-par...
Parks is a translator of Italian as well--it sounds near the end as if he might be angling for the job if a new translator is ever needed.I thought the second half of Merulana dropped off as well, though I thought it picked up again near the end. I wonder if there's any plans to bring Acquainted with Grief to NYRB. I suppose it probably depends on how well Merulana did.
Bryan "goes on a bit too long" wrote: "Parks is a translator of Italian as well--it sounds near the end as if he might be angling for the job if a new translator is ever needed.I'm not sure about that, given he says "Gadda’s style is very strange and a challenge that most translators would be glad to pass up."
I've done a bit of literary translation and I wouldn't touch Gadda with a bargepole. :-D
Emily wrote: "I've done a bit of literary translation..."Very cool...what language?
Bryan "goes on a bit too long" wrote: "Emily wrote: "I've done a bit of literary translation..."Very cool...what language?"
Spanish and Catalan to English, but it's by no means my regular job!
Emily wrote: "Bryan "goes on a bit too long" wrote: "Emily wrote: "I've done a bit of literary translation..."Very cool...what language?"
Spanish and Catalan to English, but it's by no means my regular job!"
Still...very neat. I can read enough French to make it through a novel, and enough Spanish to read the blurbs on the back of a novel, but I'm afraid my translations would look like something out of Monty Python
It has definitely given me an appreciation for really good translators. There are just so many ways you can go wrong, from misunderstanding nuances in the original to getting sucked into the other language's syntax in your version (something that happens to Weaver a bit in this book according to the Tim Parks article) to failure to recreate voice... and on and on.
That's probably why there should never be a translation that's considered 'definitive'. Especially of difficult works like this one.
Publication Date: February 27, 2007
Pages: 416
Introduction by Italo Calvino.
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver.
Originally published in 1957.
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.