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.
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