SOURCE: Cannon, JoAnn. “The Reader as Detective: Notes on Gadda's Pasticciaccio.” Modern Language Studies 10, no. 3 (fall 1980): 41-50.

In the following essay, Cannon discusses the ways in which Gadda mocks traditional detective novel conventions in Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana.

Until the publication of Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957) and La cognizione del dolore (1963) in single volumes,¹ Carlo Emilio Gadda was conspicuously neglected in Italy by all but a small circle of “initiates.”² Since the publication of his two masterpieces, Gadda has not only been acknowledged in Italy as one of its most important modern novelists, but he has also been recognized by an entire generation of experimental writers as their forerunner. Gadda has remained a relative unknown in this country, however. This is perhaps due to the peculiar difficulty of translating his works: the mélange of dialects, neologisms, puns, clichés, idiomatic expressions, and “syntactical...