The Tartar Steppe. Dino Buzzati

outwitted and fantastically ingenuous, above all about himself. Yet everything that happens, every trick played by comrades, nature and fate, is entirely believable, even normal. Never do we feel that Drogo has been singled out for special punishment. At one level we even suspect that he is not entirely unhappy with his unhappy destiny. This is the book’s perplexing core.

      Much, far too much, has been made of Buzzati’s debt to Kafka. True, he flirts with symbolism and surrealism; true, his writing is suffused with a sense of life’s absurdity (‘a most stupid landscape’, the major assures Drogo on his arrival at the fort); but the same is true of so many of his contemporaries – Calvino, Beckett and Thomas Mann, to name but three, all writers whose stories achieve verisimilitude precisely in their refusal to grant the drama we crave. What Buzzati does not share is the all-pervading paranoia that characterises Kafka’s writing; as a result, the horror and humour that Buzzati evokes will, I suspect, prove more recognisable to the general reader than Kafka’s, closer to the grain of common experience.

      If asked to name the writer with whom Buzzati has perhaps the greatest affinity, one is tempted to say Giacomo Leopardi, Italy’s great poet of a hundred years before. Leopardi, an early atheist, was obsessed by the role of hope in human life, a hope he remorselessly exposed as the product of illusion, yet saw, and occasionally celebrated, as ever ready to flower again even in the most barren places, the most unexpected forms. This incorrigible inclination to hope, Leopardi felt, was both the curse and salvation of the race: it guaranteed that the defining experience of human life would be disappointment, and allowed us to press on regardless.

      Buzzati’s intuition is that with the collapse of the great collective illusions – religion, national destiny – and the consequently intensifying sense of absurdity (there is no common enemy to sustain the fort’s purpose), the individual mind can only react with ever more frenetic attempts to generate hope, the most preposterous hopes, out of nothing, to enchant itself with whatever desert terrain is available. Certainly the final chapters of The Tartar Steppe present Drogo as somehow in complicity with novelist and reader to drag out a vain illusion, perhaps even a whole tradition of literary fiction, far beyond the limits of reason. There is one marvellous moment, in particular, when the authorities ban the use of telescopes. With the help of a powerful lens, Drogo and a friend had managed to identify some tiny specks on the very edge of the visible horizon and had built around this mirage the fantasy of an approaching army that would at last bring to the fort the catharsis of war. Denied the collective pursuit of this fantasy by order of their superiors, Drogo nevertheless goes on staring into the empty desert until it seems his busy imagination, or Buzzati’s, or perhaps ours, at last wills the enemy into existence.

      For at the very end of The Tartar Steppe, the prospect of real war finally does present itself. What a huge relief! How pleased, busy, even joyous everybody is! How eagerly the rusty military machine is set back in motion, how bright the faces of the young men as they march up the gloomy valleys to the fort! And the reader is implicated too. Because you too are relieved, happy that war has come, that the wait is over. Yes, the reader too has been enchanted by the mirage of release, the fantasy that it might all have meant something.

      Buzzati’s typescript of The Tartar Steppe was submitted to the publishers in January 1939. There is no need to comment on what followed. In any event, the book still serves as an alarming reminder that the century that discovered nothingness would go to any lengths, however catastrophic, to fill that nothingness up.

       Chapter One

      One September morning, Giovanni Drogo, being newly commissioned, set out from the city for Fort Bastiani; it was his first posting.

      He had himself called while it was still dark and for the first time put on his lieutenant’s uniform. When he had done, he looked at himself in the mirror by the light of an oil lamp but failed to find there the expected joy. There was a great silence in the house but from a neighbouring room low noises could be heard; his mother was rising to bid him farewell.

      This was the day he had looked forward to for years – the beginning of his real life. He thought of the drab days at the Military Academy, remembered the bitter evenings spent at his books when he would hear people passing in the streets – people who were free and presumably happy, remembered winter reveilles in the icy barrack rooms heavy with the threat of punishment. He recalled the torture of counting one by one the days to which there seemed to be no end.

      Now he was an officer at last and need no longer wear himself out over his books nor tremble at the voice of the sergeant; for all that was past. All those days which at the time had seemed so unpleasant were gone for ever – gone to form months and years which would never return. Yes, now he was an officer and would have money, pretty women would perhaps look at him, but then – or so it struck him – the best years, his first youth, were probably over. So Drogo gazed at the mirror and saw a forced smile on his face, the face he had sought in vain to love.

      How stupid! Why could he not manage to smile in the proper carefree manner while he said goodbye to his mother? Why did he pay no attention to her last injunctions and succeed only in catching the tone of her voice, so familiar and so human? Why did he roam about the room nervously, inconclusively, unable to find his watch, his crop or his cap although they were in their proper places? It wasn’t as if he were going off to the wars. At this very moment scores of lieutenants like himself, his former companions, were leaving home amid gay laughter as if they were going to a fiesta. Why did he bring out for his mother nothing but vague, meaningless phrases instead of affectionate, soothing words? It was true that his heart was full with the bitterness of leaving the old house for the first time – the old house where he had been born and being born had learned to hope – full with the fears which every change brings with it, with emotion at saying goodbye to his mother; but on top of all this there came an insistent thought to which he could not quite give a name but which was like a vague foreboding as if he were about to set out on a journey of no return.

      His friend Francesco Vescovi accompanied him on horseback on the first stage of his road. The horses’ hooves rang through the deserted streets. Dawn was breaking, the city was still sunk in sleep; here and there on a top floor a shutter opened, tired faces appeared and listless eyes looked for a moment on the miraculous birth of the sun.

      The two friends did not talk. Drogo was wondering what Fort Bastiani would be like but could not imagine it. He did not even know exactly where it was, nor how far he had to go to reach it. Some people had said a day’s ride, others less; no one whom he had asked had ever really been there.

      At the gates of the city Vescovi began to chat about the usual things as if Drogo were going for a ride in the country. Then suddenly he said:

      ‘Do you see that grassy hill? Yes, that one. Do you see a building on top of it?’ he went on. ‘That’s a bit of the Fort, an outwork. I passed it two years ago, I remember, with my uncle, when we were going hunting.’

      They had left the city now. The fields of maize had begun, the pastures, the red autumnal woods. The pair rode on, side by side, along the white, sun-beaten road. Giovanni and Francesco were old friends, having lived together for years on end, with the same enthusiasms, the same friendships; they had seen each other every day, then Vescovi had got fat but Drogo had become an officer and now he saw how far apart they were. All that easy elegant life was his no longer; what lay in wait for him was serious and unknown. It seemed to him that his horse and Francesco’s had already a different gait, that the hoof-beats of his own were less light, less lively, with a suggestion of anxiety and fatigue, as if even the animal felt that life was going to change.

      They had reached the brow of a hill. Drogo turned to see the city against the light; the morning smoke rose from the roofs. He picked out the window of his room. Probably it was open. The women were tidying up. They would unmake the bed, shut everything up in a cupboard and then bar the shutters. For months and months no one would enter except the patient dust and, on sunny days, thin streaks of light. There it was, shut up in the dark, the little world of his childhood. His mother would keep it like that so that on his return he could find himself again there, still be