Carlo Emilio Gadda

Carlo Emilio Gadda (born Nov. 14, 1893, Milan, Italy—died May 21, 1973, Rome) was an Italian essayist, short-story writer, and novelist outstanding particularly for his original and innovative style, which has been compared with that of James Joyce.

Gadda was educated as an electrical engineer and volunteered in World War I. During the 1920s he worked as an engineer abroad. He began writing in the 1930s and from the first demonstrated a fascination and facility for language as well as a gift for unemotional and acute psychological and sociological analysis. His first works were collected in I sogni e la folgore (1955; “The Dreams and the Lightning”). Gadda’s best-known and most successful novel, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957; That Awful Mess on Via Merulana), is a story of a murder and burglary in fascist Rome and of the subsequent investigation, which features characters from many levels of Roman life. The language of the novel, known to Italians as Il pasticciaccio (“The Pastiche”), is literary Italian, with an admixture of three Roman dialects and puns, technical jargon, foreign words, parodies, made words, and classical allusions. Gadda’s approach is as mercurial as his style: ironic, bitter, outrageously comic, philosophical, and obscene.

Gadda’s La cognizione del dolore (1963, revised 1970; Acquainted with Grief) is autobiographical, though its setting is transferred from modern Italy to an invented South American country.