"The Ambiguity of the Hypotheses": Four Landmarks Within the Tangles, Networks, and Knots of Gadda's Pasticciaccio - Paperback

by Adria Bernardi (Author)

It's a tangle. It is a big tangle of a novel. A series of knots within knots within knots within knots. Long, winding, intertwined strands overlapping, then, abruptly, snapped off. And the moment you think you are just about to unravel a single strand from a single knot, gratified, self-satisfied even, another knot appears within that very same tangle. The sentences, the paragraphs, are long, and if you try to pick up reading where you left off, you have to reenter a tangle in order to venture back into the text to try to tease out a single thread to latch onto. Even if it seems that in trying to understand how one event is involved in causing another event, even if it seems certain things should be clear cut, they are not; in trying to understand how multiple conditions are involved in the causality of a single event, it remains and will remain, continually, one big tangle. As when, in asking oneself, but how could this awful thing have happened?