Restless Nights: Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati

by Dino Buzzati

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865471002
• ISBN13: 9780865471009
• Release Date: June 1983
• Publisher: North Point Press
• Length: 122 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Short Tales of the Bizzare and Fantastic

Buzzati reminds me of Calvino, only a little more willing to go to strange places. In these short stories (and I mean short-short stories - 23 tales packed into about 120 pages) a hotshot reporter acquires the ability to exist simultaneously in the present and the future with the help of an ancient grimoire, a group of engineers building the Eiffel barricade themselves at the top of the structure and try to keep building it infinitely higher, a literary genius slyly begins to write successively worse novels to appease his insecure friends, and the bogey man is hunted down and assassinated in the Italian night in a spray of carabineri gunfire. I haven't read any of Buzzati's novels, which I hear can get somewhat long-winded, but I find these micro-stories to be compact, idiosyncratic and intensely fun mash-ups of fable, myth, and fantasy with a spritz of science fiction.

Disappointed expectations

Buzzatti's terrifying, often self referential surreal tales of disappointed human expectation and the futility of most human hope strike an uncomfortable chord in all but the dullest reader. In the tradition of Beckett or Kafka (with a little Marquez), Buzzatti employs the fantastic in the service of philosophy. Unlikely situations abound (such as the one in which each prisoner serving a life sentence is given the opportunity to make a speech to the public which, depending on the crowd's reaction, will set him free or keep him imprisoned for life) and in some of stories the name "Dino" is even used directly, as though the author were writing directly about himself. Buzzatti is also obsessed with the Devil (who, in the peron of a dark angel of death, gives Albert Einstein the congrats for his groundbreaking work.) This is great stuff, an odd mix of the nihilistic and the imaginative.

Concise and often Marvelous Stories

"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.

Power and the One

This collection of stories by the versatile Italian writer, Dino Buzzati, bears a curious resemblance to the stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Borges's argument - and Buzzati's - appears to be with the nature of man. Like Borges, Mr. Buzzati employs a relative simplicity of language to reveal and conceal the circularity and ineluctability of time and destiny. The longest story in the collection, ''Barnabo of the Mountains'', deals with the fate of a young man who funks his duty as forester and then lives on to the critical moment of reprise, only to discover that the honor he sought to recover has been absorbed in the undifferentiated wholeness of experience. Another Borgesian device is the assumption that people and events are as well known to the reader as they are to the author. ''The inventor, the famous Aldo Cristofari'' is an invented inventor introduced with an air of universal familiarity. Preoccupied chiefly with conscience and social decorum, the 14 tales could be described as parables, being short on narrative and long on moral suggestion. A middle-aged man flirts dangerously with the fantasies of childhood. Another story proposes that human imagination has as much to do with reality as any case-hardened fact. A story about a literary doppelg"anger once again demonstrates that one must be careful what one wishes for. And so on...

Kafka + Rod Serling = Buzzati

Why don't more people read Buzzati? Perhaps because he's always associated with Camus, whose philosopy-laden novels are forced on all students. Buzzati is existential, but he's a much better storyteller than anyone else burdened with the "existential" label. Restless Nights is a great collection of short stories that should have won awards for its publisher. There are touches of the surreal here, but his style is too clear and concise to fit in with Breton et al. There are many sci-fi and Twilight Zone effects as well, yet with a more profound and, yes, existential, theme. Think of this as Kafka with a good sense of plot, as if Franz were forced to write half-hour tv scripts. I consider this one a classic. Much better than the other DB collections.