Diary: March 23

It's not easy to read Carlo Gadda becuse his logorrheic plentitude rides a knife edge between literature and madness. Dostoevsky is perhaps the only writer ever fully to get away with it. Maybe Melville. Robert Burton, except he may have been kidding.

With Gadda, if it works at all, it works because in Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana--That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana--he finds a subject that suits him. That would be Rome, in particulr Mussolini's Fascist Rome, a city just as obsessive, just as anarchic, and blessed or cursed with the same plentitude as Gadda's style itself. The task is not made easier by the fact that there is a lot of language-play here, in a nation where language was (at least traditionally) fully as fractured as the nation it lives in.

One saving grace, even in translation, is Gadda's almost unerring eye. Here he is not precisely in Rome itself, but in the hills that surround the great city:

It was dawn, even later. The peaks of the Algido, the Careseolani and the Velini unexpectedly present, gray. Soratte, sudden magic, like a fortress of lead, of ash. Beyond the passes of Sabina, through small openings, portholes that interrupted the line of the mountain’s crest, the sky’s revival manifested itself in the distance by thin stripes of purple and more remote and fiery dots and splendors of sulphur yellow, of vermillion: strange lacquers: a noble glow, as if from a crucible of the depths. The north wind of the day before has died away, and here, to alternate the auguries, the hot slavering on skin and face, the gratuitous and now subsiding breath of a sirocco’s lashing. Further on, from behind Tivoli and Carsoli, flotillas of horizontal clouds, all curled with cirrus, with false ribbons of saffron, hurled themselves, one after the other, into battle, filed joyously towards their shredding: whither? where? who knows? but surely where their admiral ordered them to get it in the neck, as ours orders us, all their little sails with the range of the winds. Labile, changing galleys, tacked at a high, unreal height, in that kind of overturned dream which is our perception, after waking at dawn, tacked along the ashen cliffs of the mountains of the Equi, the whitened nakedness of the Velino, the forewall of the Marsica. Their journey resumed, the driver obeyed the road, the machine addressed the curves, bending with the two men. The opposite half of the weather there, above the shore of Fiumicino and Ladispoli, was a brown-colored flock, shading into certain leaden bruises: gravied sheep pressed, compact, meshed in the as by their dog, the wind, the one that turns the sky rain. A roll of thunder, rumm, son-of-a-gun! Had the nerve to raise its voice, too: on March the 23^rd.

--Carlo Emilio Gadda, That Awful Mess
on the Via Merulana (1957; NYRB ed., 200?).