Il deserto dei Tartari Reading Order

Il deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe, 1940) by Dino Buzzati is one of the strangest and most beautiful existentialist novels of the twentieth century — a book that takes the premise of a man waiting his whole life for something that may never arrive and turns it into a meditation on time, expectation, and the meaning of a life. Giovanni Drogo is a young military officer freshly commissioned; on his way to his first posting he passes through mountain terrain and arrives at the Bastiani Fortress, a lonely military outpost on the edge of a northern desert. Beyond the desert is the territory of the Tartars — a legendary enemy who has not attacked in living memory. Drogo intends to stay only briefly and request a transfer; instead, through a combination of bureaucratic inertia, the pull of waiting-for-something-to-happen, and the gradual erosion of the capacity to change direction, he stays for decades. The Tartars never come. Buzzati was a journalist at Corriere della Sera his whole life and wrote the novel quickly in the early months of WWII. Kafka's influence is everywhere: the fortress is a castle of bureaucracy and rule, the desert is an empty horizon of possibility that gradually becomes the entire world, and Drogo's inability to leave is never explained by a single decision but by the accumulation of thousands of small ones. The novel has been compared to Waiting for Godot, but it predates Beckett by more than a decade and has its own specific Italian melancholy.