Tartar Steppe

The Tartar Steppe is ostensibly the story of a soldier posted to a distant fort whose life is wasted in fruitless vigilance for an attack which never comes during his active duty.But it’s more one of the great existentialist allegories of the twentieth century. The soldier, Giovanni Drogo, must first choose between an ordinary life surrounded by family and friends and a life led in pursuit of glory. The allure of gloriously defending the fatherland lures him to where he can no longer empathize with his family and former friends. Nature, that great source of commune for Romantics, is for Drago simply barren cliffs and unscalable mountains.Slowly, his soul accustoms itself to the previously unbearable life of soldiery. There are signs, such as needless and brutal slayings, that Drago is missing by his choices a good answer to the mystery of life. And finally, old age catches up with him and one sees the existentialist theme that death puts an exclamation point on the futility of man’s quest for meaning.Written in Fascist Italy the book, while somber, is anything but depressing. I read it as a critique of what Mussolini’s culture offered to the educated Italian. As such, it finds the various paths of life wanting. But I think the author wanted to say we can think of better, more humane ways of living. I see it less as a critique of man’s existence and more of a critique of what mid-twentieth century Fascism had to offer.But it’s written in terse, allegorical prose that allows for more than one interpretation. For what it’s worth, it’s the favorite novel of public intellectual Nicholas Nassim Taleb (this is how I heard of it.) Highly recommended.

Well, I've finished The Tartar Steppe, and it's really an excellent book. I'm glad I discovered it. It's melancholy throughout most of the book, and it may be best suited to a reader around my age, over 40, but younger readers can certainly get a lot out of it too... heck maybe it can even be a wake up call to some. It's very much a book about time, and the cruelty of the passage of time, lost opportunities, squandered moments and squandered years. It's a medium-short book, and a quick read, yet it manages to give the impression of immensity of space and events and long stretches of time.It also manages to be suspenseful and mysterious, and the tone of mystery is sustained effectively throughout. Hence, I won't spoil the narrative, but will confine myself to describing tone, style, impression.As far as the style, tone, I continued to think about it relative to the works of some other authors I admire. Its similarity to Kafka includes the heavy anxiety and the arbitrary swings between hopefullness and despair... it has a lot of reversals, reversals of mood, reversals of the interpretation of events... in that way, it's certainly like Kafka. It's more obsessive and committed to following a single theme than most of Kafka's works, and it's less absurd, but still has it's degree of absurdity, especially as expressed by the the absurd decisions and opinions expressed by the higher command of the army.Relative to Celine, it's pessimistic, but not nearly as pessimistic as Celine, and more sentimental. Celine's pessimism is brutal and uncompromising, Buzzati's is more muted, but still full of dread, and contrasted by the sentimentalism of youth and age. Honestly, though, I imagine Celine would himself have rejected Buzzati as wishy-washy... it's impossible to say for sure... but I resisted judging it that way, and let myself be sentimental and go along with the author's intent.I think it was the end of Chapter Six which cured me of my reservations and skepticism, and made me really feel what the author was after. This is quite early in the thirty chapter book. In it, Buzzati metaphorically describes the passage of life from youthful ambition to the disillusionment of the elders.Meanwhile, the opportunities for noble action are rare, ellusive, and easily lost if not acted on immediately. Words which are contemplated but go unspoken also undermine our hope for a noble, significant life. There's an almost mystical commitment to the idea that, if only the right words had been spoken at the right time, just a moment earlier before some sudden turn of events, things would have turned out quite differently for everyone.

I, like many, was led to this book by the reference in financier/mathematician/philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, The Black Swan. In short, I would rank it in the top five books I have ever read. Like a Camus novel, the language is sparse and monochromatic, reflecting the setting of the remote mountainous fort that Lieutenant Drago is assigned to help defend as a young man in his early twenties. Fort Bastiani defends the northern frontier against the Tatars, a real or imaginary foe lost in the mists of time. As a defense against the sameness and mind-numbingly boring routine at his desolate outpost, Drogo (like many others) constructs a fantasy of glory based on a future Tatar attack. As the seasons and years pass by and Drago realizes that the Tatars are likely to never come, he still cannot bring himself to leave the cold comfort of Bastiani. Fear of the unknown, of going back to the city that Drago grew up in but has now left him behind, keep him moored to Bastiani. The obvious parable to life is the creeping mediocrity the vast majority of us accept. Once it is acknowledged, it is almost always too late to redress, and that one glimpse of glory (in the form of defending against Tatars, real or imaginary), never comes.

I got inspired to get this via Nassim Taleb's description of it. The translation (Italian to English) is great. The story itself is easy to follow, didn't have a lot of complexity. However it's thought provoking for sure, the story has some important lessons. Drogo's life brought some sadness to me but allows us to reflect on our own.. figure out what fortress we're living in. Read this early in your life.

ドローゴ青年は辺境のバスティアーニ砦に赴任する。そこは隣国のタタールの戦士による襲撃に備えた要塞だったが、北方の砂漠は年々ひたすら沈黙するだけ。「逃げ出さねば」と思いつつ、ドローゴは北方の砂塵に引き止め続けられる。ドローゴが待ち続ける「宿命」は果たして訪れるか。登場人物名はイタリア系ですが、時代や地理は不明。作者の心象風景ですね。幻想文学というのか実存主義文学というのか、｢前書き｣ではカフカとの類似性や「神無き時代の神探し」的な大仰な解釈が述べられていますが、ブザッティはカフカ級の作家ではありませんし、個人的にこの作品に大テーマを見出す気にはなれませんね。軍人の「栄光」への妄執を風刺した作品だとか言われても、わざわざそんな解釈をするのはかえって恥ずかしい。テクニック的に心元ない作家さんです。視点が稚拙な乱れ方をします。読者が自力で解釈出来る部分をわざわざ説明してしまうし。ブザッティは企みが深くてダークな作家ではないと思いますね。しかしこれは大変に心打つ小説です。作者が三十代前半の無名の頃に書いた小説です。おそらく作者は二十代から三十代に入って、ある事を悟って愕然としたのです。だいたい若者というのは自分が永遠に生きると思っている。ブザッティ青年は「自分はいつか死ぬ存在なのだ」と臓腑の感覚として理解したのです。自分はもう二度と｢若者｣ではないのだと。彼は何かを信じ何かを希求して作家になったのでしょう。ドローゴ青年のように、彼もまた自分は永遠に若いという錯覚の中で時を過ごし、「宿命」や｢栄光｣を待っていたのですね。これは売れない作家として索漠たる日々を送っていた青年が、もしかしたら生まれて初めて時の流れの不可逆性に唖然とし、傷つき、｢人生｣を発見し、その時における己の真実を全て詰め込んで書き上げた小説ではなかろうかと思います。そしてそれがこの作者唯一の傑作となったのです。

This is a sad, haunting, beautifully written Italian novel, cast in the form of a fable about the erosion of time, the futility of a purposeless existence, the insecurity of humanity. A young soldier, his heart full of hopes for the future, is posted to a remote border fort sometime in the twentieth century. He is assured he can leave any time he wants, but the bleak, remote beauty of the place casts a life-sapping spell on him; it beguiles him with its stark, cold mountains, it's apparent security, its comforting rituals and homo-social pleasures. He ends up spending thirty years there, a time waiting for something cathartic to happen. From the topmost redoubt he can see a triangle of the desert through mountains beyond the border, the steppe; this becomes the focal point of his life, the territory where the imagined enemy will emerge; it is a metaphor for the emptiness of the soldiers' lives, for the mirage of a better, more heroic future. But they wait for it to come, as a form of validation and salvation, just as the two tramps in Beckett's play wait for Godot. In this story the enemy do eventually emerge, but for Giovanni Drogo it is too late: eaten away by disease, he is ejected from the fort at the climax of his time there - the bitterest pill of all to swallow.This kind of story tempts overarching metaphorical interpretations, but Tim Parks, in his brilliant introduction, warns us against this; instead, one should read it like an extended poem, teasing out personal readings, finding one's own parallels. But, having said that, it's not easy to comply with, such is the suggestive power of the narrative. For instance, and perhaps too obviously, the novel, written on the eve of the second world war, can be read as a metaphor of a European world waiting between the two wars for the barbarians to come over the plains again and attack the ramparts of civilisation. I tend to read it more as an evocation of the underlying futility and banality of much of life.

It was praised by D H Lawrence and the introduction mention Kafka three times. No need to read it really if you are looking for a happy ending

I enjoyed The Tartar Steppe and am glad that I came across it. But I didn’t see it as the masterly study of the disappointments of the human condition that others did. The core problem is that Drogo is a rather tedious character to carry the burden of Everyman. His dilemma is not that he gets stuck in this remote outpost but that he doesn’t actually know what he wants from either career or life. Again and again he throws away his chances. Still, there is some excellent writing here and the pointless deaths of Lazzari and Angustina are well handled. Having said that, I was left unsure what Angustina actually died of, but then the same applies to Drogo’s own death at the end. Advanced melancholy maybe?

A soldier waiting in a fort for his moment of glory in anticipation of meeting his enemy in the battlefield.Waiting, waiting and waiting....... till you are almost about to give up the book out of sheer boredom, but you still read on hoping for something substantial to happen, but finally end it feeling totally dispirited. And then the book haunts you for a long time .... and that is where I feel the marvel of this book is.In a world full of books that make you feel good by talking about achievement, success, greatness, and glory here is one book that quite beautifully takes you into a completely different direction and its also not really about a grief stricken tragedy or dramatic anticlimax. This book is really about Vanity. The book really leaves you with a deep haunting feeling about life's futility.A friend recommended this book and my first feeling was... what crap !! But this is a real masterpiece and I really would recommend it.