Dino Buzzati

Ernst Kazirra confronts a trucker whose cargo consists of crates containing Ernst's lost days. One morning about ten o'clock a giant fist appears in the sky above the city. Gradually, it opens, and the citizens below set about confessing to their priests and putting their affairs in order. A son goes out to explore his father's kingdom, sending back messengers to report his findings, but the kingdom is so immense that years pass before each messenger can find his way back to the son. A man waits outside the walls of the utopian city of Anagoor, hoping that the gates will one day open and let him in. But at the end of the story we find that he has been waiting for years, and suspects the city to be uninhabited. Marta is nineteen when, looking out over the roof of a skyscraper, she is overcome with dizziness and falls. She is a frightened old woman by the time she passes a man sipping his coffee in a dining recess on the twenty-eighth floor.

"The Lost Days." "The End of the World." "The Seven Messengers." "The Walls of Anagoor." "The Falling Girl." These are the stories of Dino Buzzati, an Italian short story writer, novelist, playwright, musician, and artist who died in 1972 at the age of sixty-six. What's even more amazing about this renaissance man is that he managed to juggle all these accomplishments with a day job: he had been a newspaper reporter in Milan from the age of twenty-two until the time of his death.

Although largely unknown in this country, Buzzati has been translated into 25 languages, and is considered a major fantasist by the rest of the world. The power of his personal vision comes from his presentation of startling events with journalistic prose, creating a verisimilitude so convincing that the reader is persuaded that these fantastic narrations represent some higher reality. This may have come about because of the constant threat of fascist censorship early in his career, making it necessary for him to somewhat disguise his opinions, but as with most of the major figures of fantastic literature, there is a growing sense as we read through his large body of work that the strong, declarative nature of these bizarre stories comes out of the perception that a fantastic reality lies just beneath the surface of the contemporary world. It is finally this accomplishment which puts Buzzati squarely in the company of Borges, Kafka, and Italo Calvino.

"Fantasy should be as close as possible to journalism." -- Buzzati, in a 1972 interview.

Finding Buzzati stories to read is currently no easy task for the English reader. He has one novel in print from David R. Godine publishers: The Tartar Steppe, a Kafkaesque tale of a young soldier and his hunger for glory, waiting for a foreign invasion that never occurs. For the rest of his work you'll need to haunt your local used bookseller, or run a search through such internet services as Bibliofind and MX Bookfinder for his two North Point Press short story collections, Restless Nights and The Siren, and his previous novel A Love Affair (Happily, Godine has announced they will be coming out with this novel as well).

-- Steve Rasnic Tem, 1999