This is the kind of novel I would ordinarily avoid. I read it because it seemed "important" in the history of Italian literature, not because I thought I'd truly enjoy it.
It's mentioned frequently, almost reverentially, usually with that overused word "masterpiece." It's even listed on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century (which of course you have to take with a grain of salt, seeing as how most of the "best books of the century" turn out to be French, according to the coincidentally —bien sûr! —French Le Monde).
The reason — maybe indefensible — that I'd avoid it is because it seemed to be a "concept" novel — more philosophy than literature, more theory than life, more types than characters, addressing in sterile, anonymous fashion "ideas" of Nothingness and Man's Aloneness in the World.
I had a philosophy instructor once who told me he found discussions about God's existence or nonexistence, and all related concepts, supremely tedious and self-indulgent. "Whatever the answer may be," he said, "I am still going to go home and eat a good dinner." Amen. A good dinner is so much more interesting than an endless, pompous argument or a volume of illustrated concepts passing as a novel. A good dinner — in all its fine detail — is the stuff of literature.
So I was surprised — humbled, chastened — to discover that Dino Buzzati's "Tartar Steppe" is an honest-to-God novel and not just a philosophy text masquerading as literature. The big concepts are definitely there; they're just gracefully integrated into the characters' lives so that, you know, you actually relate to them and care about them.
The plot concerns a young soldier who is stationed at a remote fort. He thinks the assignment is temporary, that it's his first stop on the way to military glory. The fort overlooks a desert, the so-called Tartar steppe, from which enemies once posed a threat of invasion, but the desert has been silent and harmless for ages. Even though the possibility for invasion is virtually nil, the vast, empty expanse exercises a sinister hold on the soldiers' imaginations — it's a big blank slate that might yield opportunity for heroic battle or that might, like life itself, consume your youth while you stand there dumbly staring at it. And trying to figure out what to do with it and what the heck it means.
The latter is what happens to our young soldier Drogo. He is more or less tricked, by others and then by himself, into staying at the pointless fort, into submitting to a life of meaningless military discipline. I wondered if the makers of "Jarhead" had read this, because that film is eerily similar in its focus on "waiting for war." Ha Jin's novel "Waiting" came to mind, too — the dreary fate of pleasures too long anticipated. I also wondered whether George R.R. Martin named his Dothraki khal Drogo in "Game of Thrones" after Buzzati's character. The two have little in common other than the warrior identity, but "Game" has a Wall that functions much like the fort; it overlooks a vast wasteland and is meant to keep the bad guys away from the good, but, of course, the bad guys are already here — they're us — and no wall or fort can keep them out. The bad guys are the things within us that make us believe that pointless self-sacrifice is more noble than villas by the seashore and soft summer nights and charming women and beautiful music — the things of Drogo's daydreams as he keeps watch at the fort.
Drogo stays year after year, then decade after decade, fixated on the threat beyond the desert and persevering "in his illusion that the really important things of life are still before him." There's still time. There's still time. And then — suddenly — there's no time. Drogo has wasted his whole life waiting for "the enemy." When he could have been sitting down to good dinners.
And when finally, near the end, something does stir in the desert, Drogo is too weary, too sapped, too disillusioned to be of use. In the last pages, in the most poignant image in the book, Drogo, forced to retire from the fort, sees a sleeping child at an inn, and remembers that "he too had been a thing of grace and innocence, and perhaps an old, sick officer (like himself) had stopped to look at him with bitter astonishment."
Bitter astonishment. What a phrase. I bet in Italian it's rendered as some vowel-filled lyrical incantation that belies its utter sadness.
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Buzzati, from San Pellegrino in northern Italy, is interesting for the variety of his creative achievements. He didn't just write a "masterpiece" of 20th century fiction. He was also a librettist, a journalist and an acclaimed artist. He wrote a classic children's book called "The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily" (which now has an introduction by Lemony Snickett) and what has to be one of the first graphic novels as we know them, called "Poem Strip," a retelling of the Orpheus/Eurydice story. I've bought both of these and am eager to get started. Here are a couple of amazing frames from "Poem Strip."
