Description

‘The seething cauldron of life, the infinite stratification of reality, the inextricable tangle of knowledge are what Gadda wants to depict’ Italo Calvino

Gonzalo is a highly educated man living alone with his ageing, widowed mother in a town scarred by war. He rages against the world. The doctor tells him to get out more. But his frustration starts to erupt in increasingly ferocious and unexpected ways, with disastrous consequences. Set in a fictional South American country, Carlo Emilio Gadda’s intensely personal, visceral novel was written at the height of Fascist rule in Italy, tearing apart language itself to explore the violence and chaos of the darkest of times.

Translated by Richard Dixon

‘His best work . . . among the most powerful passages in 20th-century Italian fiction’ Tim Parks, London Review of Books

Publisher Review

His best work . . . among the most powerful passages in 20th-century Italian fiction. The drama of the book lies in the son’s extremely aggressive behaviour towards his mother, prompted by her relaxed openness to the world . . . Gadda’s achievement in evoking a chaotic world is simultaneously a declaration of his disinclination and perhaps inability to enter into a direct relationship with it.-Tim Parks, London Review of Books

Gadda was brought up in and belongs to a time in which it proved impossible to view the world as a whole – a magma of disorder, corruption, hypocrisy, stupidity, injustice – from the vantage of hope . . . His anguish is without remedy; his style obsessive and tragically mixed.-Pier Paolo Pasolini

Visceral . . . superabundant . . . comedy, humour, grotesque metamorphosis are natural means of expression for this man whose life was always unhappy, tormented by neurosis, by the difficulty of relations with others, by the anguish of death-Italo Calvino