Abstract

As is the case with every work by Carlo Emilio Gadda, also the novel which brought him fame, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, carries echoes of the biographical and historical trauma of the First World War; a trauma which the fascist regime’s unscrupulous treatment of the memory of war made topical again. The “detritusµ of that story in the 1957 novel is, however, more concealed, and acquires greater relevance as we consider the “archeologicalµ metaphor found in a 1934 prose collected in Le meraviglie d’Italia, as well as the “ichthyologicalµ metaphor of the “sharksµ (as entrepreneurs and merchants who had made illicit profits during the conflict were called in the immediate aftermath of war): metaphors which allow us to return, with new arguments and insights, to the debated question of the author of the murder narrated in the novel.