I almost gave up on this book; as dense and sometimes convoluted as the prose is, it was a challenge to read during a pandemic. But Gadda’s passion for language (and, not incidentally, his disdain for Mussolini won the day for me). Two crimes take place in a seedy apartment house on Via Merulana in central Rome, and these crimes begin Dr. (really Detective) Ingravallo’s quest in this book: the theft of Signora Menegazzi’s jewelry and the brutal murder of Signora Balducci the next day. But the book is more about life in Rome, with its poverty and class tensions, but also its beauty. The novel is set in 1927 and fascism has already begun to remake Italian life; Gadda never misses an opportunity to poke fun at Mussolini’s obsession with trains, his vanity, his parochialism, and his narcissism, satire that was comforting to me in Trump’s America. It is spoiling nothing to reveal that the crimes are never solved—a Italo Calvino’s foreword tells the reader this—but that is not the point of the story. ‘That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana’ gives us a chance to live intensely in Gadda’s Rome for a while and that is worth the effort.