In [Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana], as if to underline by contrast his stylistic intentions, Gadda chooses the plot of a "giallo," a detective novel, This trite formula of murder and robbery with a little sex thrown in has been used countless times by the hacks who grind out cheap novels for consumption in the railroad stations of the world. If we were to abstract the plot …, we would have a decidedly second rate product…. Gadda takes this cliché structure and raises it to the level of the most profound art. His prose texture is capable of extracting the metaphysical and ethereal from the corporeal and banal. (p. 49)

[There] is a mystical union between Gadda's prose texture and his vision, the former corresponding to the physical, the latter to his metaphysical world, the first being a kind of objective correlative of the second. (p. 50)

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