The Tartar Steppe. Dino Buzzati

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       Tim Parks

      ‘Now a book lives’, wrote D.H. Lawrence, ‘as long as it is unfathomed. Once it is fathomed, once it is known and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead’. He uses the remark to launch an attack on allegory, indeed on all stories that offer a neat equivalence between their characters or settings and abstract qualities. ‘A man is more than a Christian,’ he protests, ‘a rider on a white horse must be more than mere faithfulness and truth.’

      Written in 1938, The Tartar Steppe is the story of a young officer dispatched to do service in a remote mountain garrison overlooking a vast northern desert. At first desperate to escape and return to the pleasures of normal life, he nevertheless falls under the spell of the place to the point that he will spend the next thirty years there, sustained only by the vain hope that one day an enemy attack will offer a moment of glory and fulfilment. Buzzati remarked: ‘The idea of the novel came out of the monotonous night-shift I was working at Corriere della Sera in those days. It often occurred to me that that routine would never end and so would eat up my whole life quite pointlessly. It’s a common enough feeling, I think, for most people, especially when you find yourself slotted into the time-tabled existence of a big town. Transposing that experience into a fantastical military world was an almost instinctive decision.”

      Is the book, then, a mere allegory of equivalences? Buzzati had originally called his story The Fort and the title was only changed on the insistence of the publishers, who were eager to avoid allusions to the sensitive military situation in Europe. One Italian critic remarks: ‘The “desert” of the novel is thus the story of life in the “fort” of the newspaper which promises the wonders of a solitude that is both habit and vocation.’ You can СКАЧАТЬ