The Experience of Pain

‘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

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.