UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, by Carlo Emilio Gadda (1957)

Francesco Ingravallo is the thirty-five-year-old homicide detective who investigates the murder of Liliana Balducci, who, along with her husband Remo, is a friend of Ingravallo, who had dinner with them several weeks before the murder. Ingravallo was attracted to Liliana and is emotionally affected by the murder and by his investigation, which first implicates her cousin Giuliano and then her husband, though their account of things is eventually supported by all whom Ingravallo interviews. Ingravallo is dark haired, and his curly mop of hair is often mentioned in the book. He despises Mussolini and calls him all sorts of names, some playing on il Duce, such as “the Douche” or “the Deuce,” and others merely scurrilous, such as “the syphilitic” or just “the Shit.” Yet it irks him that he hasn’t even achieved the first of Mussolini’s two ranks of honorary titles for citizens, cavaliere, let alone the second, commendatore.

He is introspective and philosophical, with a view about causes—not just murder motives but all human causation—that sees them as a complicated mix of individual willed motives, circumstances, character as destiny, and ultimately untraceable influences, “a whole multitude of converging causes” making a “knot, or tangle, or muddle., or gnommero, which in Roman dialect means skein.” For Italo Calvino, who wrote in 1984 an introduction to this 1965 translation by William Weaver, this view of the limitations of our knowledge of human causes “is reflected in Gadda’s style, in his language, which is a thick amalgam of folk expressions and learned speech, of interior monologue and artistic prose, of various dialects and literary quotations.”

The usual level of the style is elevated and philosophical, reflecting Ingravallo’s thought, but he sometimes thinks and talks in a mixture that reflects his native Molise and his adopted Rome, and street language or diction that reflects social class is frequent. He plays language games with names even as the Romans around him just get them wrong half the time. Sometimes Gadda will record Ingravallo’s thought with an ellipsis that indicates he might have used a stronger word, that the one he chooses after a pause is a euphemism, or he merely thus corrects himself. A half-page-long sentence is not unusual. I rarely got through one of the novel’s 388 pages without having to look a word up, and frequently I did not find it because Gadda had made it up: for example, whatever the Italian word was that William Weaver translated as velocipederasts.

The book is widely satiric, encompassing various levels of Roman and Italian society generally, savage in its aim at Mussolini, at the charisma worship of too many Italians, and at fascism in all its manifestations, and it is petty sometimes in going after Gadda’s pet peeves, such as the pictograph road signs newly devised by a Milanese engineer. As Weaver points out in his translator’s preface, sometimes “his attacks are so thoroughly veiled as to be incomprehensible to all but the author himself.”

Commenting on its stature, Weaver asserts that the book “occupies in contemporary Italian literature the position that Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, and The Man Without Qualities occupy in the literatures of their respective countries” in regard to its experimentalism and obsession with language. As Calvino writes in his introduction to the New York Review of Books edition, it is simultaneously a novel about Rome, a book about a philosophical attitude toward causation and our ability to know it, a detective novel, and an attack on the fascism that gripped Italy from the twenties until Mussolini’s death at the hands of partisans in 1945.

As detective novel it’s going to disappoint many of its readers. The murder is memorable, and the detective is an interesting character, but Ingravallo is absent from a lot of the action of the book, as the investigation moves outside of Rome into the Alban hills and is taken up by minor members of the national police, the carabinieri. Gadda is often more interested in finding the picturesque or elaborating on some of his minor characters than he is pursuing the investigation, and once we seem to have the leads to take us straight to the perpetrators of the crimes—there is jewelry theft as well as murder—he simply winds the book up in a few pages without the actual apprehension of the bad actors. As Johnson said about Clarissa, you’re going to be awfully frustrated if you read it for the story. But there are a lot of other things going on in That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana.

 

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

             A game-changer within the mystery genre: before this book, those who told us candidly of their lust, those whose malice we watched, those who concealed, more or less, their sicknesses—all of these came to a sticky end. After Ripley all things are possible.

            At the beginning, Ripley is a small-time grafter in New York expecting to be arrested every minute. He is hired by Richard Greenleaf’s father to go to Italy to try to persuade his son to return. He ends up killing Richard, impersonating him for a time, killing one of Richard’s friends, and ultimately getting away with both murders. These heinous acts are not excused by the narrative, but are made fascinating by Ripley’s characterization. Ripley is an orphan raised by a cruel and stingy aunt who has left him a moral imbecile. Ripley has an abbreviated list of emotions: he can feel fear and hatred, but he’s incapable of remorse or anything like compassion. Ripley is a sexual innocent—probably a homosexual—with a talent for mimicry and acting that has helped him fill in his emotional gaps. When Richard tells him at one point that Ripley needs to be nicer to Richard’s friend Marge Sherwood, Ripley thinks that he must be more convincing when he pretends to be nice to her.

            Ripley kills Richard in a boat at San Remo, an untidy murder reminiscent of the one in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. During the scene he is afraid of falling into the water and drowning, he is afraid of failing, but he never feels compunction or horror at the act itself.

            Our horror at this murder and the nearly motiveless one of Richard’s friend Freddie Miles does not alienate Ripley from our interest, however. His character is compelling precisely because of what it lacks and the kinds of substitutions that Highsmith makes plausible. For Ripley the enjoyment of possessions, however they are obtained, takes part of the place of sex; gradually we come to realize that brushes with danger also have a sexual frisson for him.

            After the second murder Ripley has to negotiate one crisis after another: his forged signatures on Richard’s monthly maintenance checks are called into question, the Italian police accuse him of having killed Richard when he is being himself and accuse him of having killed Ripley when he is impersonating Richard, and eventually Ripley has to confront Marge Sherwood, Richard’s father, and an American detective the father has hired.

            All of these crises look as if they were building to Ripley’s entrapment, but suddenly he escapes the last threat and is free. We reach the last page and there is no retribution. Ripley looks out at the clear skies of Greece with his conscience—what there is of it—unclouded as well. Highsmith cannot make us love Ripley, but she has involved us in his fortunes and made him interesting, she has let him get away with murder, and she has changed crime fiction.