[In] his collection of short journalistic travelogues titled Le Meraviglie d'Italia, Carlo Emilio Gadda discusses, with a preternatural solemnity verging on heavy irony, the Freudian theory that behind every pattern of adult behavior lies a childhood trauma, buried but capable of resurrection…. [He] moves on to describe a veritable cornucopia of his own fixations with their originating traumas…. But the most important trauma, which needs no explanation, came when, as a little signorino momentarily neglected by his nursemaid, he was playing at being a tiger. He was busy being a real tiger, prowling on all fours through the "jungle"—the shrubbery of the park—when he happened to put one of his forepaws into a "marmellata," that is, a turd.

The episode, like most of Gadda's, is simple but controlling. All his major writings, though they start bravely in some ostensible direction and make preliminary progress toward it...