1 of 1 copy available
Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories, publishing several hundred over the course of forty years. Many of them are fantastic—reminiscent of Kafka and Poe in their mixture of horror and absurdity, and at the same time anticipating the alternate realities of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in their chilling commentary on the barbarities, catastrophes, and fanaticisms of the twentieth century.
In The Bewitched Bourgeois, Lawrence Venuti has put together an anthology that showcases Buzzati’s short fiction from his earliest stories to the ones he wrote in the last months of his life. Some appear in English for the first time, while others are reappearing in Venuti’s crisp new versions, such as the much-anthologized “Seven Floors,” an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; “Panic at La Scala,” in which the Milanese bourgeoisie, fearing a left-wing revolution, find themselves imprisoned in the opera house; and “Appointment with Einstein,” where the physicist, stopping at a filling station in Princeton, New Jersey, encounters a gas station attendant who turns out to be the Angel of Death.
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
January 7, 2025 -
Formats
-
OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781681378688
-
EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781681378688
- File size: 858 KB
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
Starred review from November 25, 2024
These captivating stories selected by Venuti and written over a 50-year-period by Buzzati (1906–1972) exhibit the author’s interest in fantasy, futility, and fate. In “Seven Floors,” a mildly ill patient checks into the top floor of a clinic, only to be moved inexorably down toward the most hopeless cases. “The Collapse of the Baliverna” details the ruinous consequences of the narrator’s decision to climb the wall of a ramshackle residential building. In the lovely one-pager “The Caliph Awaits Us,” residents of a boardinghouse are united, perhaps in their dreams, by a shared mission to leave for a better place. The title story finds a middle-aged family man taking a children’s make-believe battle so seriously he dies of an imagined wound. Later entries are slighter but more poignant in their concern with mortality. In “Why,” the narrator explains the mystery of the afterlife to a Martian diplomat: “It isn’t certain everything’s over.... This is actually the greatest problem, the most important and terrible thing.” Thanks to Venuti’s keen editorial eye and crisp translation, this stands as a brilliant record of Buzzati’s playful experimentation and lifelong obsessions.
-