I read the book in a new and good Dutch translation, that tries to render Gadda's use of dialects. The book has an interesting beginning and seems to be a detective work, but then Gadda looses himself in endless descriptions and the crimes are not solved at all. In the end the reader is left with a unsatisfactory feeling.

The beginning is promising: one day a rich lady in the Via Merulana, Rome 1927, is robbed and a few days later the throat of another lady living in the same building is cut. Are these crimes related? Who did it? It is up to don Ciccio to solve this.

This looks like the start of a detective, but the book is not a detective. The investigations by the inspector and his colleagues are used by the author to give (beautiful) descriptions of anyone and anything the investigators meet on their way, be it a fellow inhabitant of the Via Merulana or a bunch of chicken running in front of a train. The book also contains a lot of non too flattering references to Mussolini, for whom Gadda has created a whole bunch of inventive nicknames.

My biggest problem was that after about half the book all descriptions start to be more of the same: they are beautiful, clear, inventive and therefore suprising, but there is not really a storyline.

So all in all: beautiful descriptions, less interesting as a book.

A philosophical novel...murder mystery, this baroque, caustic, and ultimately poignant work has been lauded by no less than Italo Calvino, whose introduction alone is worth the cover price. Carlo Emilio Gadda--in this and in his only other published novel, _Acquainted With Grief_--concerned himself with the exploration of the interrelatedness of things, the never-ending, kaleidoscopic complexities of life, the myriad, frequently interrelated causes that converge to produce every effect. He was also vehemently anti-fascist, as his outraged--and hilariously scatological--rants against the Mussolini regime attest (Gadda started the novel soon after the close of WWII). More delightful still is Gadda's playful love of language, captured brilliantly in William Weaver's translation. (Why do so few translators, of any language, produce work as stylistically and linguistically rich as Weaver's? His work is consistently brilliant.) This is a fantastic novel. Do yourself a favor and buy a copy. Then thank whichever god you believe in that George Brazilier has for so many years kept this masterpiece in print, to the enrichment of us all.