That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda

How hard is That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana to read?

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana scores 81 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 87 out of 100

Gadda's prose layers archaic Italian bureaucratic terminology, Roman and Neapolitan dialect words ('gnommero,' 'gliuommero,' 'gamic'), Greek fragments ('δύναμις'), Latin tags ('in utroque,' 'fama volat'), anatomical precision ('carotid,' 'jugular,' 'trachea,' 'vagotonic'), and recondite cultural references to Spinoza, Leibniz, Piranesi, and Virgilian myth. The translator's foreword itself flags untranslatable puns embedded in the dialect layers. This lexical density exceeds Moby-Dick's specialized whaling vocabulary because Gadda mixes registers—bureaucratese, street slang, philosophy, and folk expression—within single sentences.

Sentence structure: 88 out of 100

Gadda's sentences routinely nest parenthetical digressions within parenthetical digressions, shifting from direct narration to free indirect discourse to the narrator's editorial outburst within a single clause—for example, the extended meditation on Ingravallo's view of Assunta, which spirals from physical description through Roman mythology to the Ptolemaic system before returning to the dinner scene. Sentences running thirty or more words with multiple em-dash interruptions and subordinate clauses stacked three levels deep recur throughout. The effect is formally closer to Proust (scored 78) than to Absalom, Absalom because the digressive structure follows associative rather than temporal logic.

Abstraction: 68 out of 100

The novel grounds its philosophy concretely—Ingravallo's theory of 'multiple causes' is illustrated through a specific dinner, a specific robbery, a specific corpse—yet Gadda cannot resist escalating from the material to the metaphysical: the jewels become 'plutonic' geological forces, the apartment building becomes a symbol of Fascist corruption, and Liliana's infertility connects to Sabine rape mythology and Roman founding legend. The abstraction is real and sustained, but always tethered to sensory detail—a tram ticket, a garter's lilac hue—keeping it below the pure philosophical register of Waiting for Godot.

Information density: 82 out of 100

Each page of the novel carries several simultaneous registers: police procedural plot information, satirical commentary on Fascism, dialectal characterization, mythological layering, culinary-sensory digressions, and philosophical meditation on causality. The introductory chapter establishes Ingravallo's theory, introduces six named characters, embeds a complete social taxonomy of the apartment building, and delivers the first crime—all while cross-referencing Aristotle, Kant, D'Annunzio, and Gioacchino Belli. This density rivals 2666 (scored 75) and approaches Ulysses because no passage is free of secondary freight.

Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100

The novel withholds its central solution entirely—Gadda suppressed the clarifying fourth chapter and the book ends without identifying Liliana's murderer—leaving readers to infer motives, guilt, and meaning from accumulating circumstantial detail. The police investigation persistently follows false leads (Valdarena, Angeloni) while the true pattern—the 'field of forces' around Liliana—emerges only as atmosphere. Free indirect discourse means it is frequently unclear whether observations about women, sexuality, and infertility belong to Ingravallo, to Gadda, or to the Roman collective unconscious.

Symbolic density: 78 out of 100

Liliana's infertility and the succession of 'nieces' map directly onto Rome's founding myth of the Sabine women, making the personal tragedy a recapitulation of the city's violent origins. The 'palace of gold' functions as an ironic symbol of Fascist-era bourgeois aspiration hollowed by corruption. Gadda explicitly invokes Hermes, Circe, and Virgilian heroes as analogues for street characters, and the jewels—hidden in a chamber pot—become a symbol of buried desire and frustrated procreation. The symbolic architecture is dense but not as systematically encoded as Moby-Dick's cetological allegory.

Ironic distance: 82 out of 100

Gadda's narration performs elaborate ironic ventriloquism: the pompous Fascist bureaucratic register is adopted verbatim to skewer both the regime and its petit-bourgeois adherents, Ingravallo's philosophical gravity is punctured by his olive-oil stains and unlit cigarette stub, and Mussolini appears as 'Lantern Jaw' with 'ten fat fingers that hung at his sides like two clumps of bananas.' The irony is so thoroughly woven into syntax and diction that individual targets are often, as the translator notes, 'incomprehensible to all but the author himself.' This places it above Pale Fire (78) because the ironic distance is structural, not just situational.

Resolution withholding: 90 out of 100

The novel's murder investigation reaches no conclusion: Gadda deliberately excised the chapter that might have named the killer, and the narrative trails off after tracking the jewels to Torraccio without resolving either crime. Calvino's introduction confirms Gadda embraced incompletion as philosophical position—causality is infinite, so the novel cannot end. The reader is left with a 'field of forces' rather than a verdict, an approach to open-endedness that surpasses Infinite Jest (85) because the withholding is structural and intentional rather than a product of narrative sprawl.

Structural complexity: 75 out of 100

The novel jumps between Ingravallo's point of view and an omniscient satirical narrator who frequently collapses into the collective voice of the Roman populace; Calvino notes that 'all these voices coincide in a single speech, sometimes in the same sentence, with shifts of tone.' The timeline moves forward chronologically but is constantly interrupted by Ingravallo's retrospective reflections, embedded testimonies, and digressions that suspend narrative time for pages. The structure falls below Pedro Paramo (80) because there are no radical temporal reversals, but exceeds Great Gatsby because the voice multiplicity is far more systematic.

How That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana is regarded

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana holds a literary regard score of 77 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

Carlo Emilio Gadda