La cognizione del dolore Reading Order

La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with Grief, 1963 — though serialized from 1938–41) by Carlo Emilio Gadda is the most linguistically audacious of the great Italian modernist novels: a polyglot, pastiche-laden, hyper-literary work in which Gadda's private grief (the death of his beloved brother Enrico in WWI, his difficult relationship with his mother, his sense of himself as a failure) is displaced into a fictional South American country and narrated in a language that mixes Milanese dialect, literary Italian, bureaucratic language, Spanish, and grotesque neologism. Gonzalo Pirobutirro lives with his elderly mother in the country house where his brother died — the house she refuses to protect with the night watchmen's service that all their neighbors use — and the novel circles around Gonzalo's rage, grief, self-disgust, and his complicated love-hatred for his mother, which ends in a violent event the novel does not resolve. Gadda was an engineer by training and an obsessive reviser by temperament who spent decades on two novels (the other is the Roman detective novel Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, 1957) and left both formally incomplete. The cognizione is broken off before its ending; the pastiche multiplies without resolution. But the linguistic richness and the depth of Gadda's psychological self-examination make the cognizione one of the genuine masterpieces of twentieth-century Italian literature — a novel that influenced Eco, Calvino, and every subsequent generation of Italian writers.