Carlo Emilio Gadda is generally considered one of Italy's most important authors of this century. Gadda does not share the transparency of style one finds in Italo Svevo or Italo Calvino. His prose is characterized instead by a linguistic expressionism and a grotesque and baroque fantasy that have led Gianfranco Contini and other critics to see him as a contemporary practitioner of the Italian plurilingual, or macaronic, literary tradition.

Gadda worked for many years in Italy and abroad as an electrical engineer; he was seen for most of his career as a difficult and obscure author. Much of his work consists of short stories, novel fragments, and essays written in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, originally published in elite literary journals such as the Florentine Solaria and Letteratura and appreciated by a small coterie of critics and literati. In 1957 the publication of his detective thriller Quer pasticciaccio brutto...