Ecco Art of the Story
The Delicate Prey by Paul Bowles
The Essential Tales of Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins
Continent by Jim Crace
The Vanishing Princess by Jenny Diski
The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield
Wild Nights! by Joyce Carol Oates
Mr. and Mrs. Baby by Mark Strand
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Preface by Kevin Brockmeier
The Collapse of the Baliverna
Catastrophe
The Epidemic
The Landslide
Just the Very Thing They Wanted
Oversight
The Monster
Seven Floors
The March of Time
The Alarming Revenge of a Domestic Pet
And Yet They Are Knocking at Your Door
Something Beginning with “L”
The Slaying of the Dragon
The Opening of the Road
The Scala Scare
Humility
The War Song
The Egg
The Enchanted Coat
The Saints
About the Author
Also by Dino Buzzati
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
by Kevin Brockmeier
FOR SOME TIME I WAS CONVINCED THAT THE BOOK YOU are now reading did not exist.
My first exposure to Dino Buzzati came during my junior year of college, when I happened upon “The Falling Girl” in an anthology of very short stories. Readers who have encountered nothing else by Buzzati might nevertheless recollect this one title, so frequently is it anthologized and so memorably is it devised. The story follows the fate of a nineteen-year-old girl who, in the luster of a beautiful spring twilight, “seized by inspiration,” lets herself swoon from the edge of a skyscraper and gradually, as the building’s floors ease past her, becomes an old woman. It’s an excellent distillation of the practical, even reporterly, stance Buzzati often takes toward the fantastic, and of the punctilious, almost apollonian doom that is the signature mood of his fiction, which is to say that if you’re looking for a single representative Buzzati story, it’s certainly not a bad choice. I myself, however, did not become a devotee of his work until more than a decade after I read it, when I discovered his out-and-out masterpiece The Tartar Steppe. Take a Stendhal or Tolstoy novel and then strain and clarify it through a Kafka filter and this is the book that might result: a battlefront epic without the battle, about the ease with which a life can be squandered on nothing more than hopes and routines. It’s among the most flawless novels I know, an airtight work of late existentialism, one that never quite violates the bounds of realism yet slowly, drop by drop, assumes an efflorescent dreamlike quality, generating an atmosphere of softly disquieting impalpability that seems, to me at least, much closer to how life actually feels in the memory than a more naturalistic, less troubled tone would permit Buzzati to achieve. It is also, considering how unsparing it is, surprisingly moving: How, it requires you to ask, did a life that might have become anything at all become precisely this?
That was all it took. As soon as I finished The Tartar Steppe, I set out to read everything Buzzati had written, or at least everything that was available in English.* At the time, his illustrated children’s novel The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily was newly in print, with extensive accompanying material by Lemony Snicket—fittingly, since its opera-comique narrative about the dangers that civilization poses to the wilderness, and, more abstractly, that humanness poses to bearishness, though not so astringent as Snicket’s own novels, is similarly playful, ambiguous and absurd. Soon to follow was Buzzati’s graphic novel Poem Strip, a rock ’n’ roll take on the Orpheus myth, heavily flavored with the 1960s, in which Buzzati himself makes a brief appearance as a cigarette-smoking sentry at the door to the underworld. Both of these books are treasures. In decades-old English-language editions were six additional Buzzati volumes: his story collections Restless Nights and The Siren, which are sometimes frightening, sometimes austere and always mesmerizing; his semi-autobiographical novel of tortured romantic obsession, A Love Story, inspired by Buzzati’s own late-life courtship of his much younger wife; his science fictional examination of digital reincarnation and artificial intelligence, Larger Than Life; and his classic work of cycling journalism, originally written in installments for the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera, by whom Buzzati was employed for more than forty years, The Giro d’Italia: Coppi Versus Bartali at the 1949 Tour of Italy.
And then there was Catastrophe. Supposedly published by Calder and Boyars in 1965, and supposedly reprinted by Calder in paperback in 1981, this particular volume escaped every effort I made to acquire it. The rare used edition that surfaced online went for multiple hundreds of dollars and swiftly winked from availability. Not once but repeatedly, I would locate a more affordable copy, order it, and wait weeks and then months for it to arrive—but again and again, attempt after attempt, it failed to do so. The fruit receded, the water ebbed, each time I reached for it, each time I bowed. Tracking down a relatively obscure book by a relatively undervalued writer rarely presents this kind of difficulty these days. I began to suspect that I would never lay my hands on the collection; to suspect, in fact, that I was never meant to. That there was no such book. That it didn’t exist.
Then, in 2010, visiting Omaha, Nebraska, for a literary festival, I went browsing through Jackson Street Booksellers, and there it was, a bright red paperback with black and white lettering on the spine, shelved alphabetically with all the other used and rare fiction and marked at five dollars—half off the cover price. This remains the single most exhilarating bookstore find of my life. As I paid for the volume at the register, I felt oddly like a thief. Even now I can’t help but think that by buying it for so little, after such a protracted search, I somehow managed to abscond with it.
Alone in my room that night, I cracked the collection’s pages. Inside, bookmarking a story called “Something Beginning with ‘L’,” was a receipt for four dollars and thirty-six cents, dated Saturday, August 31, 1991, at 5:15 P.M. (On August 31, 1991, I was just beginning my freshman year of
