Reading: Gadda.

Several years ago, I started reading That Awful Mess on Via Merulina, by Carlo Emilio Gadda, and I have to say that this is the most difficult book I have ever tried to read. I felt like I was floundering in a net, bound by the snarled knots of Gadda's impenetrable language, fighting against the current of his dialects and the unraveling threads of sentences. After a time I gave up and went back to Umberto Eco; now, eight years later, I have plunged back in and I find myself again lost in the sea of words...Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millenium (the chapter entitled Multiplicity) gives a little insight, but otherwise I will have to slowly pick apart this awful (and I mean awful in the most beautiful sense) mess of a novel and absorb it word by word. It may take me another eight years to get through it all.