Customer Reviews

The Tartar Steppe (Carcanet Collection)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

On first thought, this is a overwhelmingly desolate book. It is the life of Giovanni Drogo who, after graduation as military officer, is sent to Fort Bastiani, located on "the Northern frontier", and beyond which the Tartar steppe lies for miles and miles. At Fort Bastiani, nothing ever happens. Holding the absurd hope that some day something will happen that will bring him military glory, Drogo consumes his life amidst the boredom and the rutine of the site. But his hope never dies: as another reviewer correctly noted, it acts like a drug on him. I haven't spoiled anything about the plot: some day, something will happen.

This novel is pure literary magic, and it is a shame and a pity that it is so ignored, especially in English-speaking countries. Note: Enlgish-language literature is certainly one of the best corpus of literature in the world, but their ignorance of many other literatures is in their own detriment, unfortunately.

"The Tartar steppe" is a masterpiece which, with an ironic and subtle sense of humor, talks about the desolation, the apparent uselessness of living, the futility of existence. It talks about it, but in a subtle yet powerful manner contradicts those theses: Drogo will show the reader that, no matter how dull and empty your life is, there is ALWAYS something about life that makes it worth living. Fort Bastiani and the Tartar Steppe are both real and symbolic: they may be an office, a shop, a house or a city.

Read this novel and you will love it forever, not only for its content but for Buzzati's excellent handling of words. He showed he was a great writer. But beyond the style, you'll remember it every other time, when you feel you are Giovanni Drogo, eager for something to happen.

This book provides an excellent insight into an essence of human nature, "Hope". The slow yet gripping course of events reminds the reader of the steady and unforgiving passage of time while hoping for something to happen. We all live in fort Bastiani and through Lieutenant Drogo, Buzzati reminds us of how we let ourselves be driven through life passively either by lack of initiative or by fear to confront occurrences which might upset an already monotonous existence. Yet at the end, we all realize that there is always a last battle to be fought and won gloriously.

This is a book about how absurd existence is and how men are deemed to deal with the fissure they find between life and its meaning. The question of whether this meaning must come from within man himself or from an event which is external to him lies beneath the whole novel.

Sharing this sense of absurdity with Kafka and Camus, Buzatti creates an atmosphere within which not only the main character gets trapped, but also the reader. They both expect something that never actually occurs, and the tension this anticipation generates page after page makes the novel a compelling read.

The story of Giovanni Drogo, a simple man who attempts to make of his destiny something grand without really doing anything but live and wait and let go, is one of the most fascinating and moving stories in the 20th century literature.

After reading Dino Buzzati's short story collection The Siren I picked up Tartar Steppe(1945) and took it to the beach with me where I read it all the way through in about four hours. Its a captivating novel which takes place almost entirely in a remote hilltop fort which faces a foreboding desert that has never been crossed. The soldiers stationed at this remote outpost keep watch over the desert in anticipation of a confrontation with an enemy they have never seen. We learn about the history of the fort as well as those who occupy it when Giovanni Drogo, a young soldier, arrives there to begin what he hopes will be an illustrious career. Upon arriving at the fort Giovanni is immediately struck by the desolate atmosphere of the place and want s to leave but is coerced by the forts adjutant to stay for at least four months. Four months becomes four years and then four years becomes...... Giovanni like many young soldiers wants to advance his career and yet year after year he stays on in the fort and his career goes nowhere. As the years pass and Giovanni remains in the fort somehow unable to find the will to ask for a transfer Buzzati weaves in meditations on the passing of time, the fading of youth and youths dreams, as well mans infinitely renewable capacity for self-deception. Buzzati might be compared to Kafka for the parable like quality of his writing but Buzzati has his own style and Tartar Steppe is much more reader friendly than either of Kafkas novels. Jean Paul Sartre characterized Kafkas writing as "the impossiblity of transcendence" and that would fit Buzzati's writing as well. There certainly are similarities between the two authors but with Buzzati you feel much closer to real life than you sometimes do in Kafka (whose favorite author was Swift). I would call Tartar Steppe a very effective merging of nineteenth and twentieth-century style and content. Buzzati seems to me to be examining why 19th century adventure stories of war and travel appeal so much with a 20th century sensibility. The result is a mesmerizing read, like Giovanni you never stop believing that the enemy is about to show themselves. This book is often mentioned in the same breath as Julien Gracq's Opposing Shore, a book which I also highly recommend.

Poor Giovanni Drogo! Spends THIRTY years up at Fort Bastiani. Never has had a wife or girlfriend or children. Never has had a close friend. Never has engaged in combat, despite being a soldier. Never has accomplished anything of noteworthiness. Will the enemy finally arrive? Will all these years of service be vindicated?

What amazes me about this truly existential novel is that it was written by a realtively unknown, mediocre writer more than five years before the "quintessential" existential work, Beckett's WAITING FOR GODOT.

I consider Buzzati's novel a one-of-a-kind masterpiece. You suffer with Drogo throughout his years of meaningless service, and the ending brings you to your knees. I literally wept. A truly moving testiment to our insatiable need for struggle of any kind.

The Tartar Steppe is classic existentialism and a fierce criticism of military life.

Dino Buzzati is a major Italian author and the Tartar Steppe his masterpiece. So I am amazed at how little known he is in the English speaking world.

The book is certainly worth reading. The writing is beautiful (including the translated version) and the plot well suited to the philosophical message the author wished to convey.

The story tells of Giovanni Drago and his fellow soldiers' futile thirst for glory while they are posted to a desolate fort overlooking the barren Tartar Steppe.

This one stays with you and haunts you. If you read it when in youth, and then reread it midway in your life, then you'll be stunned by the depth of its truth. And it's almost relentless in its hoplessness, very hard to read because you know you are reading about yourself, in fact about everybody around you. And you cannot quit reading no more than you can stop breathing or hoping that this is it, that at last on the horizon (of your life)...There is something even more hopeless in Buzzati than in Kafka, because it is less fantastic, closer to home, truer to human experience.

"The Tartar Steppe" is, to my sensibility, a great (little known) masterpiece of the 20th century Italian and European literature.

This is an extraordinary novel where the main character looks into the eternal, emptiness beyond - just as we all look into the unknowableness of the future. And as we do it - sometimes with intimations of things to happen, sometimes with firm and dreadful 'knowledge', and sometimes with hopes - we are alone in our journey, despite those around us. There is only true solace in looking back at the past, in seeing what we have experienced that no-one can take away from us.

There is little humour in this vision, little hope, little respite. Always an aching emptiness prevails. But for all that it does have a crystalline beauty - a clear and shining crystal with cold, sharp edges. Read if you dare, but brace yourself when you do. This is no roller-coaster of action, its pace is slow, slow, slow ......

When I started this book, I had no idea how much it was going to affect me. The story is masterpeice -- a brutally honest but compassionate examination of our lives, no matter who or where we are. This story makes me smile every time I think about it, and I hope its message will stay with me for the rest of my life.

It is indeed a strange book. A young lieutenant is sent to a remote post in the Tartar frontier. At first, he hates it and wants to leave at any cost. Then he succumbs to the place's secret: some sort of masochism that acts like a drug, distorting the lieutenant's sense of time and consuming his life. Thirty years painfully fly, and then something happens. Theme and style are oddly alike in this book: you read and read and nothing happens, and yet it's fascinating. Slow as the book is, you breeze through it. In a stupor, you reach a beautiful ending, of which I am not going to tell you.