Telefoni bianchi
May. 5th, 2021 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, by Carlo Emilio Gadda, translated by William Weaver
This was the third book that I acquired second-hand last year, having been on my Goodreads to-read list since 2014, possibly as a recommendation when I joined the site. They have all been reasonable, but none of them has been outstanding. The introduction in this edition, by Italo Calvino, informs me that the novel is unfinished, a fact of which I had not been aware, but it does not really spoil it.
It is Rome, in the 1930s. Inspector Ingravallo, aka Don Ciccio, is called to a burglary from an apartment on the Via Merulana. A few days later, a murder occurs in the apartment across the stairwell, in the same building. The victim is known to Ingravallo, socially, which perhaps ought to compromise the investigation, but like an Inspector Morse novel, it never does. Are the two crimes connected? Ingravallo and his team have a few leads, but they do not sound particularly promising. They follow a trail across Rome and into the nearby countryside.
Calvino compared the writing to that of Joyce, which sounded intimidating (and, without personal experience, provided me with no quantitative point of reference), and there were a fair few words in Weaver's translation that I had to skip over or assume were quasi-adopted from the Italian. It certainly seems that Gadda never uses one word where ten or even a hundred will do, and evidently there is much subtlety that is essentially untranslatable; Weaver does his best in footnotes to explain points where there are Italian puns, or references to contemporary figures or politics. The impression I got was quite cinematic: part Hitchcockian psychological investigation and thriller, part Telefoni bianchi-style melodrama, with comedic hysteria, mildly hypocritical moral judgement, and the overtones of a Fascist state inevitably finding their way into the city police department, itself locked in an eternal struggle with the Carabinieri.
This was the third book that I acquired second-hand last year, having been on my Goodreads to-read list since 2014, possibly as a recommendation when I joined the site. They have all been reasonable, but none of them has been outstanding. The introduction in this edition, by Italo Calvino, informs me that the novel is unfinished, a fact of which I had not been aware, but it does not really spoil it.
It is Rome, in the 1930s. Inspector Ingravallo, aka Don Ciccio, is called to a burglary from an apartment on the Via Merulana. A few days later, a murder occurs in the apartment across the stairwell, in the same building. The victim is known to Ingravallo, socially, which perhaps ought to compromise the investigation, but like an Inspector Morse novel, it never does. Are the two crimes connected? Ingravallo and his team have a few leads, but they do not sound particularly promising. They follow a trail across Rome and into the nearby countryside.
Calvino compared the writing to that of Joyce, which sounded intimidating (and, without personal experience, provided me with no quantitative point of reference), and there were a fair few words in Weaver's translation that I had to skip over or assume were quasi-adopted from the Italian. It certainly seems that Gadda never uses one word where ten or even a hundred will do, and evidently there is much subtlety that is essentially untranslatable; Weaver does his best in footnotes to explain points where there are Italian puns, or references to contemporary figures or politics. The impression I got was quite cinematic: part Hitchcockian psychological investigation and thriller, part Telefoni bianchi-style melodrama, with comedic hysteria, mildly hypocritical moral judgement, and the overtones of a Fascist state inevitably finding their way into the city police department, itself locked in an eternal struggle with the Carabinieri.