This book guides us into the laboratory of the gaze of the most experimental author of our 20th century: Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973).
The visual played a decisive role in shaping the engineer’s writing-thoughts, and provided a decisive impulse, according to his own definition, to sew “the lining of the self to the fabric of the world”. His complex, multifaceted linguistic workshop is matched by a similar work of study and reflection, revisiting a reservoir of images belonging to the most diverse historical periods seamlessly uniting high and low, recognised masterpieces and the visual culture assimilated from his travels, illustrated magazines, films and advertising posters. Gadda cannibalises the materiality of images to construct a surprising second-degree reality, which often ends up revealing unexpected features.
From the analysis of family memory to eros, from the satire of fascism to the genius loci, the writer’s way of getting to know the world (and veiling his biographical traumas) is bought up with the translation of the demon of the visual through the verbal pincers of writing. Gadda’s eye materialises the different worlds in which his characters move, demonstrating how visuality becomes part of both the “structure” of his unforgettable style and the transmedia rewritings of his most famous texts.
€ 26,00