It is also, considering how unsparing it is, surprisingly moving: How, it requires you to ask, did a life that might have become anything at all become precisely this? It’s among the most flawless novels I know, an airtight work of late existentialism, one that never quite violates the bounds of realism yet slowly, drop by drop, assumes an efflorescent dreamlike quality, generating an atmosphere of softly disquieting impalpability that seems, to me at least, much closer to how life actually feels in the memory than a more naturalistic, less troubled tone would permit Buzzati to achieve. Take a Stendhal or Tolstoy novel and then strain and clarify it through a Kafka filter and this is the book that might result: a battlefront epic without the battle, about the ease with which a life can be squandered on nothing more than hopes and routines. I myself, however, did not become a devotee of his work until more than a decade after I read it, when I discovered his out-and-out masterpiece The Tartar Steppe. It’s an excellent distillation of the practical, even reporterly, stance Buzzati often takes toward the fantastic, and of the punctilious, almost apollonian doom that is the signature mood of his fiction, which is to say that if you’re looking for a single representative Buzzati story, it’s certainly not a bad choice. The story follows the fate of a nineteen-year-old girl who, in the luster of a beautiful spring twilight, “seized by inspiration,” lets herself swoon from the edge of a skyscraper and gradually, as the building’s floors ease past her, becomes an old woman. Readers who have encountered nothing else by Buzzati might nevertheless recollect this one title, so frequently is it anthologized and so memorably is it devised. My first exposure to Dino Buzzati came during my junior year of college, when I happened upon “The Falling Girl” in an anthology of very short stories. In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias WolffįOR SOME TIME I WAS CONVINCED THAT THE BOOK YOU are now reading did not exist. Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins With hints of Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe, Catastrophe, published for the first time in the United States, feels as timely today as ever.The Essential Tales of Chekhov by Anton Chekhov In stories touched by the fantastical and the strange, and filled with humor, irony, and menace, Buzzati illuminates the nightmarish side of our ordinary existence.įrom “The Epidemic,” which traces the gradual effects of a “state influenza” that targets those who disagree with the government, to “The Collapse of Baliverna,” where a man puzzles over whether a misstep on his part caused the collapse of a building, to “Seven Floors,” which imagines a sanatorium where patients are housed on each floor according to the gravity of their illness and brilliantly highlights the ominous machinations of bureaucracy, Buzzati’s surreal, unsettling tales reckon with the struggle that lies beneath everyday interactions, the sometimes perverse workings of human emotions and desires, and, with wit and pathos, describe the small steps we take as individuals and as a society in our march toward catastrophe. In Catastrophe, the renowned Italian short story writer Dino Buzzati brings vividly to life the slow and quietly terrifying collapse of our known, everyday world.