6 days ago
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A Master of Surrealist Fiction and a Bard for Anxious Times
Roving Eye is the Book Review's essay series on international writers of the past whose works warrant a fresh look, often in light of reissued, updated or newly translated editions of their books.
The Italian writer Dino Buzzati (1906-72) sneaked up on me. I like to think of myself as a completist when it comes to the 20th century's international masters of fantastical and surrealist literature, from Julio Cortázar to Kobo Abe to Anna Kavan, yet despite the acclaim from his publishers and translators, the endorsements from Borges and J.M. Coetzee, and a name that makes him sound like a glam-rock guitar hero, I'd missed Buzzati until now. (Completists rarely get there.)
I may not be alone in this. American literary culture often seems to make room for precisely one famous writer in a given language at a time — say, Luigi Pirandello, Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco and Elena Ferrante, among Italians — while others, prominent in their native countries, never find a turn in the spotlight.
So much, of course, depends on publishing circumstance. Buzzati hasn't been without advocates in the English language. His 1940 novel 'Il Deserto dei Tartari,' translated into English by Stuart C. Hood and published as 'The Tartar Steppe,' was reviewed in major publications and has remained in print in Britain. In the 1980s North Point Press presented handsome collections of his stories, selected and translated by Lawrence Venuti. Still, until recently, the view of Buzzati in English was a fragmented, almost teasing one.
The U.S. publication of Buzzati's work is now in the deft hands of New York Review Books, which has corralled five titles for its Classics series. These include three novels — 'The Singularity' (1960), 'A Love Affair' (1963) and 'The Tartar Steppe,' which was recently retranslated under the title 'The Stronghold' — as well as 'Poem Strip' (1969), a graphic novel that will be reissued in the fall.
Earlier this year, Venuti continued his curation of Buzzati's short fiction with THE BEWITCHED BOURGEOIS: Fifty Stories (NYRB Classics, 328 pp., paperback, $19.95), a chronological survey culled from the hundreds of stories published in the author's lifetime. Our view of him may still be partial: Buzzati's life's work includes children's books, poetry, travel writing and journalism, and his jazzy drawings provide cover art for all five NYRB volumes. But these books form an extraordinary opportunity for Anglophone readers to take a leap into his unusual mind and have a look around.
Start with 'The Stronghold.' That's a recommendation. The story of an Italian Army officer who has been assigned to a mysterious mountain fortress at which nothing, precisely, ever occurs, Buzzati's third novel is a book at once consummate — an unrepeatable performance — and typical of the tone and temper, the anxious, distractible mournfulness, of all of Buzzati's subsequent work.
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