Novel
The Experience of Pain
La cognizione del dolore
Carlo Emilio Gadda · 1963
Synopsis
In Maradagàl, an imaginary South American state whose landscapes and customs are those of the Brianza, north of Milan, lives the engineer don Gonzalo Pirobutirro. He lives with his elderly mother in a large villa that she had built at the cost of sacrifices he cannot forgive her for. He despises the peasants and the bourgeois of the neighbourhood alike, distrusts the night watchmen of the Nistitúo, and his rages against his mother and against the house fill the narrative.
Context
The text first appeared in instalments in the Florentine review Letteratura, from 1938 to 1941, and came out in volume form only in 1963, with an introduction by Gianfranco Contini; it received the International Prize for Literature the same year. The 1970 edition added two chapters to it, without the novel being completed. The French translation by Louis Bonalumi and François Wahl was published by Seuil; in English, William Weaver translated it in 1969 under the title “Acquainted with Grief”, and Richard Dixon in 2017 under that of “The Experience of Pain”.
Who it is for
A short but demanding novel, whose prose mixes Italian, Milanese, Spanish and other tongues.
Prizes and reception
The Éditions du Seuil and Points place it alongside the works of Céline and Joyce in the experimental literature of the century.
Sources for this page 4
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