In spite of the profound treatment of the themes of human alienation and insignificance diffused throughout his fiction, Carlo Emilio Gadda's importance is largely verbal. He employs numerous styles and lexical modes with equal success, from the arduous structures of classical Latin to the austere language of modern science and the spontaneous automatism of the surrealists. At times his style appears dry and reflects a desire for order and rational systemization, while at other times it is characterized by violent, uncontrolled expression and hyperbole. This mixture of harmony and disharmony, order and chaos, is the logical extension of the double edged attitude toward reality manifested in Gadda's War Journal and memoirs. However, to infer from this that experience alone dictated his literary technique would be to oversimplify. The First World War, to be sure, left Gadda with an extreme dislike for an external world which he judged incompatible...