The Experience of Pain

‘The seething cauldron of life, the infinite stratification of reality, the inextricable tangle of knowledge are what Gadda wants to depict’ Italo Calvino Gonzalo is a highly educated man living alone with his ageing, widowed mother in a town scarred by war. He rages against the world. The doctor tells him to get out more. But his frustration starts to erupt in increasingly ferocious and unexpected ways, with disastrous consequences. Set in a fictional South American country, Carlo Emilio Gadda’