Creative entanglements : Gadda and the baroque /

Short but substantial and never less than thought-provoking, this book offers English-speaking readers one of their few possible points of entry into the critical debate surrounding Gadda (1893-1973), whom Dombroski (CUNY) rightly calls the "most original, intricate, and now most celebrated, contemporary Italian novelist." The author studies the quintessentially modernist Gadda as an exponent of a 20th-century baroque, understood not as limited to mere style but as encompassing a wide range of responses (aesthetic, psychological, ethical, linguistic, cultural, personal, even political) to the fragmented and elusive experience of contemporary reality. Engaging not only with Gadda's own notoriously "difficult" texts and their reception but also with baroque scholarship and the theories of such thinkers as Deleuze, Jameson, and Benjamin, Dombroski constructs a dense and demanding, but ultimately compelling, critical argument. Along with such other outstanding recent contributions as Albert Sbragia's Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic (CH, Apr'97), Dombroski's book should help--at last--to earn this great writer's work some of the attention it deserves from readers in the English-speaking world. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. S. Botterill; University of California, Berkeley