Restless Nights: Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati: Amazon.ca: Dino Buzzati, Lawrence Venuti: Books

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5.0 out of 5 stars Concise and often Marvelous Stories, Nov 7 2003

By	Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

"Deep inside Tibet a native guide offered to accompany me if by chance I wanted to see the walls of the city of Anagoor. I looked at the map, but there was no city of Anagoor." Thus begins Dino Buzzati's "Walls of Anagoor". Buzzati was a journalist and so he writes very succinct sentences which have a matter of fact feel to them. His stories are quite often no more than 4-5 pages long and even though his stories often veer into the uncharted terrain of human desire and fantasy you feel like you are reading a newspaper article and so the events and the characters actions seem perfectly plausible, perfectly within the realm of the possible, even ordinary. And that is Buzzati's style: to make the extraordinary sound ordinary. Even though they are each very short the stories are impossible to paraphrase because Buzzati chooses each phrase so carefully that paraphrasing would be misrepresenting his stories. He might be compared to Kafka but Buzzati writes like no one else. Generally speaking if you categorize Buzzati he would fit in with Kafka or Camus or Borges and if you are familiar with those writers and you come to Buzzati you will be reminded in subtle ways of those others but you will also notice important differences. Kafka often used fantasy in a negative way--to emphasize the dehumanizing nature of modern life. Buzzati uses fantasy to allow his characters a bit of release from the everday world. Even if the fantasy proves to be only an illusion Buzzati shows how people use fantasy to cope with existence. In this way he is not nearly as bleak as Kafka can sometimes be. Buzzati has a lighter touch than Kafka or Camus. You don't get that heavy sense of dread in Buzzati that you get with Camus, instead you get a sense of reality as something that each individual must construct for themselves and no reality is complete without an element of fantasy. Buzzati seems aware that just as children need to to be told stories which challenge their imaginations and allow them to wonder so too do adults need the same thing otherwise existence becomes dull and pointless. Thus when the unnamed protaganist in "The Walls of Anagoor" hears from his guide of a place which may or may not exist he has no choice, he must go.

There are 23 stories in this collection involving everything from Einstein making a deal with death to allow him to continue working on his theories to girls falling from buildings just for fun to a crew who decides to go on building the Eiffel tower until they have risen so high they can see the Alps. O and one particularly brilliant story about a beloved doctor whose death inspires an investigation that he may not have been who he says he was -- an investigation which grows and reveals that perhaps no one is who they say they are.

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Restless Nights: Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati (Paperback)

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