Tartar Steppe     by Dino Buzzati, Translated by S Hood Original title: Il deserto dei Tartari Original language: Italian Published by Godine, David R. Pub. Date: 1994 Format: Paperback, 198 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.67 x 8.24 x 5.39 ISBN: 0879239921 List Price: $13.95, £11.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £11.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.16 Published by Paladin Pub. Date: 1990 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 214 pages Not available for ordering Published by Carcanet Pub. Date: 1985 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 214 pages Not available for ordering

This is the story of a young officer, Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo, who is sent on his first commission to Fort Bastiani, a desert outpost which is supposedly a vital strategic buffer against enemy attack. He reaches it with an enormous sense of relief and it seems at first that his stay there will provide the existential opportunity that he’s long been waiting for. ‘It was the day he’d been awaiting for years, the beginning of his real life’. But once there, Drogo is involved in a new and unnerving period of waiting, uninterrupted by either enemy assault or, indeed, any sign of life whatsoever. Ironically, the long-awaited chance of a heroic act that would instill some meaning in Drogo’s spiritually empty life arises only at the moment when he is no longer capable of discharging it, as illness and death prevent him from finally confronting the enemy and redeeming a long, immobile existence bereft of any real achievement.


In an atmosphere reminiscent of Kafka’s The Castle, Buzzati creates a symbolic interior voyage in search of an existential alternative that would allow a man to become himself through an authentic relationship with action. That his flight from a mediocre and lifeless reality towards the unknown ends up in another defeat reveals that an individual’s room for manoeuvre counts as nothing against the power of a cruel destiny.


Buzzati himself said of the book that made him famous: ‘I ought to have spent my whole life writing this book, or at least into late middle age, because it’s really a kind of autobiography’. It is the uncompletable work that tells the story of a writer’s impossible adventure in his writing.

‘His talk with the general down in the city had left him with few hopes of a transfer and a brilliant career, but Giovanni knew he could not stay within the walls of the Fort all his life. Sooner or later he would have to make up his mind. Then the old habits caught him up again with the old rhythm and Drogo no longer thought of the others, of the comrades who had escaped in time, of his old friends grown rich and famous; he consoled himself with the sight of the officers who shared his exile; it never occurred to him that they might be the weak ones, the ones who had been beaten, the last people to take as an example.’ p165