The Experience of Pain
Published on 31. October 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
256 pages
978-0-241-70699-2 (ISBN)
Description
'The seething cauldron of life, the infinite stratification of reality, the inextricable tangle of knowledge are what Gadda wants to depict' Italo Calvino
Gonzalo is a highly educated man living alone with his ageing, widowed mother in a town scarred by war. He rages against the world. The doctor tells him to get out more. But his frustration starts to erupt in increasingly ferocious and unexpected ways, with disastrous consequences. Set in a fictional South American country, Carlo Emilio Gadda's intensely personal, visceral novel was written at the height of Fascist rule in Italy, tearing apart language itself to explore the violence and chaos of the darkest of times.
Translated by Richard Dixon
'His best work . . . among the most powerful passages in 20th-century Italian fiction' Tim Parks, London Review of Books
Gonzalo is a highly educated man living alone with his ageing, widowed mother in a town scarred by war. He rages against the world. The doctor tells him to get out more. But his frustration starts to erupt in increasingly ferocious and unexpected ways, with disastrous consequences. Set in a fictional South American country, Carlo Emilio Gadda's intensely personal, visceral novel was written at the height of Fascist rule in Italy, tearing apart language itself to explore the violence and chaos of the darkest of times.
Translated by Richard Dixon
'His best work . . . among the most powerful passages in 20th-century Italian fiction' Tim Parks, London Review of Books
Reviews / Votes
His best work . . . among the most powerful passages in 20th-century Italian fiction. The drama of the book lies in the son's extremely aggressive behaviour towards his mother, prompted by her relaxed openness to the world . . . Gadda's achievement in evoking a chaotic world is simultaneously a declaration of his disinclination and perhaps inability to enter into a direct relationship with it.-Tim Parks, London Review of BooksGadda was brought up in and belongs to a time in which it proved impossible to view the world as a whole - a magma of disorder, corruption, hypocrisy, stupidity, injustice - from the vantage of hope . . . His anguish is without remedy; his style obsessive and tragically mixed.-Pier Paolo Pasolini
Visceral . . . superabundant . . . comedy, humour, grotesque metamorphosis are natural means of expression for this man whose life was always unhappy, tormented by neurosis, by the difficulty of relations with others, by the anguish of death-Italo Calvino
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Penguin Books Ltd
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 194 mm
Width: 127 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
192 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-241-70699-2 (9780241706992)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Carlo Emilio Gadda
The Experience of Pain
E-Book
10/2017
1st Edition
Penguin Books Ltd
€8.99
Available for download
Person
One of the most distinctive Italian writers of the twentieth century, Carlo Emilio Gadda was born in Milan in 1893. An electrical engineer by profession, Gadda published many short stories before beginning work on his first novel The Experience of Pain. He received critical acclaim for his revolutionary use of language and narrative form, and is often compared to James Joyce in this respect. His other works include That Awful Mess on Via Merulana.