New Release Collects 50 Absurdist Tales From an Italian Writer Often Compared to Kafka, Dino Buzzati

As much as any label helps identify a given strain of creativity, Absurdism fits the bill in describing the life’s work of an Italian writer, Dino Buzzati (1906-1972). The term is well applied to a new compilation of Buzzati’s short fiction published by the New York Review of Books, “The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories.” This isn’t the first time that the highbrows at NYRB have blessed Buzzati with their imprimatur: Three long-form stories and “a pathbreaking graphic novel” have already seen the light of day. This time around, benighted readers are offered a range of bite-sized nuggets of irreality. As translator Lawrence Venuti puts it, “The Bewitched Bourgeois” reflects a “steady output of feuilletons.” The “feuilleton” — a derivation of a French word for the page of a book, feuillet — originated in Journal des débats when the editors designated a section of the newspaper for non-political content of cultural interest: criticism, gossip, fiction, and the like. This was Buzzati’s domain as he paid the bills as a journalist, working for more than three decades in a variety of capacities at a Milanese daily, Corriere della Sera. The cadence and pith of Buzzati’s fiction owe much to the prerequisites of his day job. In the introduction, Mr. Venuti makes a point that the author was not an ideologue, being “neither a politically engaged intellectual nor an avant-garde experimentalist.” He does admit that Buzzati was “articulating collective anxieties with a marked tendency toward moralizing.” Still, morality tales tend to be concrete in both their ambitions and conclusions. Existential ambivalence was Buzzati’s forte.It’s possible to cull the tenor of Buzzati’s vision from a sentence found in “An Interrupted Story”: “There was only a heavy atmosphere of anticipation and mystery, the kind of vague foreboding that hangs over certain days.” As a stylist, Buzzati is dour and dry, though capable of poetic and sometimes jarring turns of phrase.Kafka is the go-to reference for this kind of thing, and comparisons to the doomed Czech writer dogged Buzzati: “several critics denounced my guilty similarities … even when I dispatched a telegram or filed my income tax return.” Yet the lassitude and unease typifying “The Bewitched Bourgeois” also hearken to the writings of Robert Musil and Thomas Mann. Airlessness of tone predominates, as does an intellectualism that’s at the end of its tether. Although the supernatural is glanced upon, the Buzzati cosmos is bereft of the comforts of spirituality.Not that God doesn’t show up. In “The End of the World,” the almighty makes his presence felt: “One morning at ten o’clock an immense fist appeared in the sky above the city. Then it slowly unclenched, and then remained this way, immobile, like an enormous canopy of ruin.” The countdown to judgement is a mere 10 minutes away and a young priest is made bitter by the multitudes seeking guidance: “They were cheating him of his soul’s salvation … the devil take them, all of them.” The story ends on a note that is as abrupt as it is noncommittal.Among the finest of the tales and, in a perverse way, the funniest comes early on. “Seven Floors” tracks the illness and treatment of Giuseppe Corte, a typical Buzzatian everyman given, in equal measures, to propriety and neurosis. He arrives in an unnamed township to attend an unnamed sanatorium specializing in the unnamed illness of which he is suffering. (Buzzati yoked the anonymous and generic to pointed effect.) The hospital has been built on a specific logic: Each floor is dedicated to a particular severity of the sickness, with the top floor holding the mildest cases and on down to the ground floor, where “most of the windows were hermetically sealed by gray sliding shutters.” Buzzati’s story unfolds at a dedicated pace, as if predetermination were the default mode of an illogical universe.“Since each floor was entrusted to a different doctor,” we read, “different methods of treatment emerged … despite the fact that the chief executive officer had imparted a single fundamental direction to the institution.” What follows is a comedy of errors in which our hero’s fate is less a matter of personal health than bureaucratic necessity. Signore Corte’s increasing awareness of his capitulations to fate give the story a sardonic edge.Mr. Venuti notes that Buzzati’s later stories are more conversational in style; they’re also more compressed, bringing to fruition a sometimes unbearable psychological pressure within the run of a few pages. The risky eroticism underscoring “Alfredo Brilli, Accountant” is tautly configured and unnerving in consequence. At other moments, a disabused whimsy takes precedence, as in a fable about the limits of belief, “The Count’s Wife,” or a story whose origami-like ironies will have you thinking twice about swatting that fly, “What Will Happen On October 12th?”Buzzati was adamant in proving how permeable the barrier is between the hard-and-fast and the highly unlikely. Readers taken with the quixotic byways of 20th-century literature should welcome “The Bewitched Bourgeois” as a necessary addition to their libraries.

New Release Collects 50 Absurdist Tales From an Italian Writer Often Compared to Kafka, Dino Buzzati

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