The Tartar Steppe

I read this book years ago and thought it was a good read--compelling characters, surprising plot and overall a good tale. I'm now reading it a second time, slowly and carefully. At the moment, I think it is the best book I've ever read. Probably an overstatement, but I can't get it out of my mind, seeing my own life reflected in the strange and lonely life of the protagonist. I'm now 78, and see many of the twists reflected in my own life now approaching the end--at least the end of the many adventures that I had planning and unplanned. The book is bound to be depressing to those just beginning, unless it's read for its elegant prose, as I did years ago. Frankly, it's hard to believe the author was so young when this masterpiece was published for the clarity of his vision and haunting style.

"Often likened to Kafka's The Castle, The Tartar Steppe is both a scathing critique of military life and a meditation on the human thirst for glory".
I have always been surprised by the platitude of some of the official reviewers of this wonderful book. Obviously Drogo's story has nothing to do with critique of military life and thirst for glory. The book is "only" one of the most creative allegories ever written on the human condition. Young we start our journey toward Fortress Bastiani dreaming of a glorious future full of meaning and glory. We incessantly toil along its ramparts during adulthood, trying to reconcile reality with our childhood dreams. The dreams fade and we cling to our duty and duty becomes our defining quality. And finally, alone and forgotten at the periphery of the action, we realize that duty has been our life accomplishment and what defines us, and this knowledge gives us strength to face death.

Poor Giovanni Drogo! Spends THIRTY years up at Fort Bastiani. Never has had a wife or girlfriend or children. Never has had a close friend. Never has engaged in combat, despite being a soldier. Never has accomplished anything of noteworthiness. Will the enemy finally arrive? Will all these years of service be vindicated?

What amazes me about this truly existential novel is that it was written by a realtively unknown, mediocre writer more than five years before the "quintessential" existential work, Beckett's WAITING FOR GODOT.

I consider Buzzati's novel a one-of-a-kind masterpiece. You suffer with Drogo throughout his years of meaningless service, and the ending brings you to your knees. I literally wept. A truly moving testiment to our insatiable need for struggle of any kind.

Being in my 40’s the idea of leaving a decent paying job, taking out loans, and going back to college to finish my degree is, honestly, scary. The possibility I might just wind up in a lot of debt with no good chance to put my feet back under me, starting over as I near 50 feels like it could take more energy than I feel like I have in me. Yet after finishing this beautiful and sad novel, I at least have something I can look to and say, “I don’t want to be Drogo from The Tartar Steppe.”

From what I’ve read about other people’s perception of this work is that it is an anti-war novel, that it exposes the futility of military life and how such a life can lead to nothing worthwhile since all military life can rest on is the possibility of killing someone someday. Tolstoy would agree, too. He would tell us to go live on the farm, free our serfs, and harm no person. The military is a lot of hurrying up to wait for something that can never come: glory, because there is no glory in killing or dying.

However, that’s not what this novel is about. Yes there are elements that deal with how pointless the military life is, just as there are some passing similarities to Kafka’s The Castle, but what The Tartar Steppe is really about is missed opportunities.

Drogo (and doesn’t that name just sound like the work drudgery?) has done nothing but wait and expect something good to come to him. Drogo is not a hard worker, and he’s not particularly clever, either. Drogo trades in his youth for the hope it will be repaid to him at some future time when something great will happen to him, or at least he’ll be well recognized and his life put all in order. And so he waits. And he waits. And he waits.

Drogo does nothing, however, to actually live. He takes the word of the men around him, men who have their own interests and ploys, and believes that if he just does what he’s told that he’ll be rewarded. But they see he’s an easy mark, tell him stories of Tartar’s on the wild over the desert’s horizon and he buys it all. He isn’t curious to find out if any of it is true, he just accepts it.

Now we could say that this is why the military is bad - nobody questions authority and orders - but this happens all the time to most people, it’s not unique to the military. We believe if we go to school, get a certain job, buy a certain house, that life will reward us in spades. We pass the time watching TV (or reading books), we “run and we run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking, racing around to come up behind you again”. We stay at some dead-end job for too many of our best years until it’s too late to start over.

This novel is about the dangers of not doing anything, of going along with what we think other people, or even society wants from us. And then when we’re old and sick and tired, what then? What can we say we lived for? For a job? For a mortgage? Why didn’t we take those opportunities when we had them?

Halfway through the novel the POV shifts and we get the sad adventure of Angustina. This whole section takes place with not a word from Drogo. Why? Because he missed a chance to go out on patrol with them. And every other time the only time he learns about an opportunity is when someone else tells him or shows him. The General tells him the Fort will be reduced, Simeoni tells him about the road: he never discovers anything for himself. Even his one chance for love he failed at because he didn’t take any chance at all to tell her his heart, he just kept making excuses for why he shouldn’t take that chance.

Drogo was a coward. This is why he’s whisked away to the Inn at the end. He’s not a real military man, and so he won’t even get to see what he thinks he wants. Fate took it away from him because he was undeserving. And so we too would be cowardly if we chose the easy path everyday, if we didn’t go out and see where some strange road leads to.

I know this sounds a little cliche, but Dino Buzzati is telling us not to waste our lives. He may have meant don’t waste it for some Fascist regime in Italy, but this is a brilliant work of art and it transcends just one reading. He’s warning us against not standing up and taking charge of our own lives.

And so as depressing as I found this novel, it is also inspirational in it’s warning: don’t let time get away from you because nobody will help you and they might even take advantage of you to get where they’re going.

The Tartar Steppe is ostensibly the story of a soldier posted to a distant fort whose life is wasted in fruitless vigilance for an attack which never comes during his active duty.

But it’s more one of the great existentialist allegories of the twentieth century. The soldier, Giovanni Drogo, must first choose between an ordinary life surrounded by family and friends and a life led in pursuit of glory. The allure of gloriously defending the fatherland lures him to where he can no longer empathize with his family and former friends. Nature, that great source of commune for Romantics, is for Drago simply barren cliffs and unscalable mountains.

Slowly, his soul accustoms itself to the previously unbearable life of soldiery. There are signs, such as needless and brutal slayings, that Drago is missing by his choices a good answer to the mystery of life. And finally, old age catches up with him and one sees the existentialist theme that death puts an exclamation point on the futility of man’s quest for meaning.

Written in Fascist Italy the book, while somber, is anything but depressing. I read it as a critique of what Mussolini’s culture offered to the educated Italian. As such, it finds the various paths of life wanting. But I think the author wanted to say we can think of better, more humane ways of living. I see it less as a critique of man’s existence and more of a critique of what mid-twentieth century Fascism had to offer.

But it’s written in terse, allegorical prose that allows for more than one interpretation. For what it’s worth, it’s the favorite novel of public intellectual Nicholas Nassim Taleb (this is how I heard of it.) Highly recommended.

Likely the best book I've ever read. Like poetry, with a moral to the story. I just can't say enough good things about this little novel. This book should be required reading for every young person about to graduate high school and/or college. Also, for anyone stuck in rut or facing a midlife crisis. It is not a book that I would want to read in my retirement and think to myself, "that was me." It has touched me deeply and will stay with me as long as I live. The translation by Hood is incredible. If you read one book this year, make it this one.

First I "saw" this novel at the cinema. Now, more than thirty years after that, I read it. And I read it because the movie was always present to me as it happens every time you stumble upon a parable. In fact, when you read that a novel is like a parable you tend to think that a level of excellence has been achieved. This is true to me when a simple and a universal truth can be drawn off from a story, no matter how twisted or complicated.

And this is the case here.

In Dino Buzzati's "The Tatar Steppe" the drama involves a young officer who have to serve in a far away fortress (named Bastiani Fortress) in the middle of nothing. This officer is lieutenant Giovanni Drogo, a delicate and sensible character. So much so that his presence is a very ghostly one. You cannot say much things about him without betraying his character. If you say something about him surely you are inventing it. Indeed, Buzzati created a character that is precisely what the fortress needed to be alive. I mean, the stairs, the walls, the battlements. So, lieutenant Drogo becomes the speaker, the interpreter and the heart of the Bastiani Fortress during the period that the novel covers. If you read the novel you need to be aware of this fact (which, incidentally, means that the fortress is also a character).

Now well, what happen in this novel? Nothing. Which at the same time means everything. You know, best writers don't need so much plot to tell an unforgettable story. The plot is just a pretext, nothing else. So in this novel nothing happens with the exception of a life that is absorbed by the temptation of a glory that never comes. It can be compared with Kafka's "The Castle" and Mario Vargas Llosa's "The time of the hero" (literally "The city and the dogs"). But it is not the same. "The Tartar Steppe" is different and in a sense goes beyond those.

Do not miss the chance of reading good literature. You will be provoked by a narration that posses the intellectual charge of an Ingmar Bergman's movie plus the entertainment which is always necessary. It will capture your attention with a subtle and memorable milieu. In a few words: everything that happens in "The Tartar.." is for you, not for Drogo.

Bottom line: An amazing and for most writers enviable achievement.

I picked this book up yesterday and I could not put it down. In fact, I finished it off before I went to bed. Dino's prose (along with the translator's skill) invoked the unease of desolation in the beginning of the book, and much later a similar desolation in a different setting. I felt the uncertainty and excitement of the characters when they saw unidentified things in the distance.

Dino's ability to keep me interested aside, this book gave me a feeling of uneasiness about my life itself. I am still quite young, and I fear the postponement of the great things in my life now more than ever. Occasionally Dino steps outside of the events of the fort to describe youth and the process of aging in a haunting way.

I'll be sure to keep this book around to read again on a lazy afternoon.

Waiting for Godot in the desert of the Tatars. Officer Giovanni Drogo is assigned to Fort Bastiani, a frontier post in front of the steppe in which the Tatars live (the book is a bit iffy geographically, no doubt deliberately, as it suggests an Italian fort in what seems like Central Asia). He doesn't like the place right from the beginning, and hopes he would be out of it in four months, but he ends up serving (SPOILER AHEAD) thirty years. In which absolutely nothing happens, and in which he sacrifices the possibility of having a family or a meaningful career. And when he is about to retire, the Tatars (or whomever the invaders are) really attack, he is considered too ill and old to fight, so he is shipped immediately from the front. A good book (not great, I think, as it is sometimes too repetitive) that would be considered existentialist today, even if author Buzzati didn't suscribe to that movement. Note: Buzzati wrote some other great books, including the great fantasy book The Mystery of the Old Forest, which I believe has not been translated into English.

This dark, beautifully structured novel is often compared to Kafka’s The Castle, and indeed it vibrates with the mystery of spiritual and literal displacement that made Kafka’s work the triumph of modernism it was. Buzzati places Giovanni Drogo, an unknown soldier in a military fort surrounded by desert and the eponymous steppes, where his four-month stay becomes several years. Drawing time out against the background of life’s emptiness, The Tartar Steppe is a deeply felt meditation on the nature of fate.