Volume 15, Number 2 · July 23, 1970
You Gotta Read Gadda
By Robert M. Adams
Acquainted with Grief
by Carlo Emilio Gadda, translated by William Weaver
Braziller, 244 pp., $6.95
Italian novelists—who are they? We don't find on the peninsula an impressive list to recite, like Flaubert-Balzac-Stendhal-Zola-Proust in the neighbor culture. With some scraping and hauling, we are likely to think of Manzoni, Verga, Svevo, D'Annunzio doubtfully, Fogazzaro perhaps, Pavese, Moravia maybe—it is not a long tradition, and though rich in various ways, it isn't compact and sequential as various other national traditions obviously are. Carlo Emilio Gadda will certainly be found on future lists—affirming, as each of these novelists does, an extraordinary measure of global independence, a fresh imaginative start, stylistic riches—as well as a thin thread of typically Italian feeling which, though hard to define, is easy to sense.
Review, 2551 words
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