Fantastic. ( )

If you get into this book it can be life changing. You realise the stupidity of career structures and how you really have to fool yourself to believing in corporate management.
Not recommended for anyone working for a large company who thinks he has ambition. ( )

O deserto dos tártaros é a obra-prima de Dino Buzzati. Publicado originalmente em 1940, o livro marcou a consagração do autor entre os grandes nomes da literatura italiana e foi eleito pela crítica especializada um dos melhores livros do século XX. A obra narra a história do jovem tenente Giovanni Drogo, que recebe com alegria uma missão no forte Bastiani ― para ele, a primeira etapa de uma carreira gloriosa. Embora não pretendesse ficar por muito tempo, o oficial de repente se dá conta de que os anos se passaram enquanto, quase sem perceber, ele e seus companheiros alimentavam a expectativa de uma invasão estrangeira que nunca acontece. A espera pelo inimigo transforma-se na espera por uma razão de viver, na renúncia da juventude e na mistura de fantasia e realidade.

Dino Buzzati had mixed feelings about being acclaimed as "the Italian Kafka" when this novel was first published in 1940. The novel's setting, a desolate frontier fortress where young officers come and are somehow unable ever to leave, is certainly Kafkaesque. As the story develops, however, the auctorial tone diverges somewhat from Kafka's: the irony is softer and subtler, the details less stylized and more mundane. In the night, sweet dream sequences pass through the main character's sleeping mind, leavening the sense of desperation while leaving the predicament unchanged. The narrative becomes more reminiscent of Hesse than Kafka, the story of a life that has missed its mark (as whose life doesn't, one way or other?). Upon conclusion, the book left a feeling similar to having just savored the final phrases of an inspired and well-executed concert piece. ( )

Well, I'll say it straight out with no apologies or shame. This book made me cry. It is not a heroic tale in the ordinary sense of the word. It would be more apt to say it is the story of everyman. An ordinary man trying to find meaning in his life. A man of decency and dreams. I know the book hit me hard due to the point I'm at in my life and my quiet struggles. Others might find the story and the man who is the focus of the story boring and irrelevant. I understand that but stand firmly with the man and his ultimate dignity. A story well told, a simple life shared with beauty, and a book I am not likely to forget. ( )

Yup, that's disillusionment for ya. ( )

This reminds me a little of Catch-22.. a little. Its shows the absurd side of military life somewhat. However this shows not the horror of war but rather the horror of peace.
The story is about a solider posted to a barracks which guards an area no one ever expects to be attacked. The place is so isolated and runs on such strict rules and regulations its practically a prison. Some people suffer from what in prisons is termed 'institutionalization', unable to find a place or function outside of the routine of the barracks.
Mostly though this is a story about trying to find a purpose in life and how time can slip by so quickly while your waiting for that purpose to find you.
Its kind of haunting and a bit depressing but it'll stay with you for a while. Also its quite a quick read and is just the right length i'd say. ( )

Attesa.
Attesa. Questa è la parola che meglio descrive Il Deserto Dei Tartari di Dino Buzzati. L’intero romanzo è una lunga e interminabile attesa, dall’inizio alla fine a cui fa da protagonista la speranza nell’arrivo dei Tartari.

Personalmente ho trovato all’interno del libro una immensa poetica che scava a fondo dell’animo umano, soffermandosi su paure, bisogni e necessità; è un romanzo ricco, sensibile e curato, attento sempre e scontato mai.
La trama è avvincente, la scrittura superba ed è per questo, fondamentalmente, che ho apprezzato enormemente Il Deserto Dei Tartari. Devo dire però, che, nonostante tutti i grandissimi pregi che il romanzo ha, l’ho trovato estremamente lento e poco scorrevole, nonostante le 200 pagine che lo compongono. Ammetto che, se non ci fossero stati dialoghi frequenti come ce ne sono, avrei fatto un enorme fatica a terminare il libro.
Perché sì, stupenda trama e scrittura superba, personaggi perfettamente delineati e ambientazioni descritte magnificamente, ma, proprio per il grande senso di attesa che persiste per l’intera narrazione, il ritmo è rallentato e raramente accelerato.
Nel complesso, però, è un grandissimo romanzo che ho apprezzato moltissimo e che deve essere letto almeno una volta nella vita ( )

It is a book about some of my favorite topics- the fleeting nature of time, the futility in basing all your hopes and happiness around something in the future that may or may not take place, and weather a man needs to start a family to be happy.
It captures the transient nature of time really well. We are there with Drogo when he is a young officer just starting his career and his entire life lies before him, and he is not much careful about being caught unawares though he is repeatedly warned by his seniors, much like any young person. When he does realise how the tables have turned, it is too late- his entire life has been spent waiting. With nothing at all going on in his life, except a hope for a future that never seems to arrive, his days pass so quickly. My quarantined self can relate to this, though mine is on a much smaller temporal scale. His old friends from his hometown have their progeny and their buisinesses, which testify for them that their lives have not been for nothing, that they have created something through which they will keep on living after their death, that they have altered the world from how they found it, if only by a very small amount. Drogo has none of this. For all that is worth, he might as well have never existed, he has nothing which he can see as the result of the fervour of his youth, he might as well have never been young- again a feeling to which I can relate. His case is much worse than someone who might have had a career and a wife and children and who lost them to some accident, because such a person at least has the memories. He dies all alone at a roadside inn, with nobody to cry at his bedside and leaving behind nobody and nothing- a death befitting his life.
Another thing is how quickly a man is thrown out from a world he has inhabited for so long, if he be absent for a fraction of period that he has been there. When Drogo returns to his hometown after four years, only four years, compared to the twenty he spent there, he finds himself an outcast. Except his mother, nobody waits for him, nobody has kept a hole in their heart in the place that he might have occupied before leaving, instead that place has been filled up by the multitude of people who are present there. When he comes back he finds there is no place for him, even his lover has moved on. We are all so replaceable, except maybe to our parents, and I would like to think one or two of those we consider our friends.
And the worst part is when the hope Drogo based his entire empty existence upon, is belied. It shows the futility of disregarding your present as anything important for something in the future, no matter if it is remote or at hand, the future is always uncertain.
It is also worth noting how it is never too late to bring a change in your life. The doctor says that its too late for him to get a transfer after spending 25 years at the Fort goes on to spend the larger part of his exile after mentioning this fact.
It is a harrowing portrayal of what happens when you don't take the stock of your days, keep on waiting and waiting, think that you can afford to squander the time of your youth in waiting, live for some time in the future and not in the present and don't create anything with the energy of your youth, not even memories. ( )

This is a wonderful book that focuses on how we choose to give meaning to our lives. This book came just in the right time for me, and I believe it helped me take some important life decisions. ( )

Probably my favorite book of all time. When I first read this book, it stayed with for such a long time. I empathized so much with Drogo - his feelings of leaving home, being homesick while still amazed and afraid of what lies ahead.

I really like the debate that it has over being familiar and comfortable with the simple life. Not being caught on false promises of greatness and chasing an eternal goal, only to see that what was good and true was left behind. Chapter 5 is probably the one that best touches on this subject - and probably is the best on the book.

It's a book to read many, many times. ( )

a simple yet haunting story. ( )

In an unnamed country, Giovanni Drogo, young lieutenant, makes a 2-day horseback ride to join the forces at Fort Bastiani for a 2-year posting. The fort guards the mountainous frontier, looking over the desert to the north. The fort and its soldiers wait for an attack from an unnamed and not really known enemy to the north. No one there has seen the enemy. Somehow, he stays after his 2 years and makes a career of it.

The fort is a strange place. Old, out of date, and staffed with young soldiers and men who never left. The nearest town is a day's ride away. The fort is very yellow, has strict discipline, and seems to serve no real purpose. Until it does.

Nothing much happens at the fort, and hasn't for decades. The few things that do happen are heartbreaking.

This is an odd book, yet somehow very readable. I found it filled with a sense of foreboding and general creepiness, which made me want to keep reading. ( )

L'abitudine e l'abituarsi ad essa che uccide i sogni di ogni uomo, l'inganno di pensare di riuscire a continuare a sognare. ( )

This book by Italian author Buzzati, written during the fascist regime, is on the list of 1001 books to be read before you die and has been compared to Kafka. That comparison may have been made because the plot involves some Kafkaesque bureacratic snafus. However, the book is not bleak, despairing or absurdist. I'm not a fan of Kafka, and I enjoyed The Tartar Steppe.

A young soldier is sent to a remote fort overlooking a vast, empty steppe. Life is monotonous; the soldiers, in fact, look forward to, and sometimes imagine, invaders appearing on the horizon. Although the soldier at first intended to seek reassignment to a more central location as soon as possible, years pass, and he finds he lacks the will to leave--his life in town, the people he knew, no longer exist for him.

This is a puzzling book, but by no means boring or dense. I loved the descriptions of the lonely steppe and the quiet and solitude. ( )

As said in other reviews, young Drogo is stationed at a remote post high in the mountains where he seems to be the only soldier not there by choice. Told he may be transferred on medical grounds after a few months, he nonetheless chooses to remain at the Fort. There is after all a chance of invasion, the hope of a battle in which he would attain glory. And, more and more, the punctilious routine the soldiers must follow makes each day like every other day and hence like one long day offering the prospect of an almost infinite future.

On his infrequent leaves Drogo finds that those who had been close to him are preoccupied with church, jobs, families. It's really only at the Fort that he has a place and only there that he has hope. During one trip to the city he makes his only attempt to get a transfer, but as he returns thwarted to his duty the disappointment and bitterness he feels aren't unadulterated; seeing the Fort again, he feels relief. Nor do the disillusioning revelations his mentor offers shortly afterward destroy his hope.

The descriptions of the landscape in this book are outstanding: the Fort, surrounded by mountains and the misty wilderness of stones and scrub across which Tartars are said to have swept, is almost like an unknown Boecklin painting. And Buzzati's treatment of the passage of time--the journey to the shores of the leaden sea--is pitilessly and frighteningly honest.

It's too bad that Canongate didn't commission a new translation; it's a shame that an editor didn't give this translation the treatment it deserves. Buzzati was a reporter and editor and I don't think for a moment that the Italian had the clangers in grammar and diction the English does. This isn't nit-picking; while the book isn't littered with errors, it's scattered with them, and they interrupt a smooth reading. A bit like listening to a beautiful song sporadically interrupted by the singer's hiccups, I suppose. I'm sure I'll read this book several times, but I hope I'll be reading a different edition. Great cover, though.

There are very few book descriptions that strike more fear in my heart than "Kafkaesque." Despite the comparison to one of my most disliked authors, I actually did like Dino Buzzati's "The Tartar Steppe."

The novel is the story of Giovanni Drogo, an Italian soldier who is waiting for his life to start as he becomes a solider, waiting for a great war to start to make a name for himself and later, waiting for his life to end after a humdrum existence at an isolated and mostly useless fort.

This could have been the world's most boring story, but I liked the rhythm of it. Buzzati does a great job keeping the thread of the story going without things getting too dull. I probably wouldn't pick this up to read it again, but I definitely didn't mind reading once. ( )

Drogo arrives at Fort Bastiani full of hopes and dreams of his future military career. Fort Bastiani has a suspenseful and eerie feel about it, leading one to believe that once you check in you’ll never leave. For various reasons, mostly to do with military bureaucracy and ineptitude, Drogo is not allowed to transfer out. He grows old gracefully without regretting his self-enforced bachelorhood and enjoys in his own way the remote location, his solitude, and brother-in-arms lifestyle. Eventually the Tartars arrive en masse but Drogo has become too sickly to take his place in the ranks, having grown too old for the war he waited all his life for. ( )

The Tartar Steppe by Buzzati
3.5 stars
The novel tells the story of young military officer, Giovanni Drogo. Drogo is stationed at isolated Bastiani fortress. Upon arriving he requests to be transferred elsewhere but agrees to stay an additional 4 months. Life at the fortress is monotonous and all that sustains the soldiers stationed there is the vague hope in a potential outbreak of war to break the monotony and fulfill their military aspirations.

I wasn’t sure if this book was supposed to be a warning about the dangers of giving up and being stuck in life (e.g. wasting your life passively waiting for something to happen) or whether it was a commentary on the absurdities of military life (or both). It was bleak and kind of sad read (Drogo is an intentionally frustrating character) but I appreciated elements of the book and liked both the military commentary and message about wasting time.
( )

One September morning, Giovanni Drogo, being newly commissioned, set out from the city for Fort Bastiani; it was his first posting." Not only is this Drogo's first posting, but his last. The year fly by quickly: "One after the other, the pages turned--the grey pages of the day, the black pages of the night." Drogo is an Everyman figure. The whole novel, through his story and those of the Fort and men, is a meditation on life and death, hope, self-delusion, and glory. I recommend most highly.

With the first sentence quoted above begins The Tartar Steppe, a strange but oddly compelling book. We are never told when or where exactly it takes place. Although soldiers in an outlying fort are eager for battle, they spend their banal days and nights on guard duty or at roll call or inspections. Passwords and even the smallest military regulations assume a greater importance than normal. The Tartars are just a legend, Drogo's superior officer tells him. But...are they fanciful or do they really exist? The steppe in the novel is a rocky desert, not grass as we generally think of a steppe.

I enjoyed the novel no end. I think the Kafka, Franz or Borges, Jorge comparisons can be carried only so far. These two writers have influenced him, but Buzzati speaks in his own distinctive voice. I thought of the Fort as comparable to Shakespeare's Elsinore, a closed, claustrophobic society. The author marvellously expresses Drogo's feelings and aspirations. We feel for him at each step of his military life. He feels out of place during his leave in the city to see mother and girlfriend and is disappointed to be refused a transfer. Are Tartars building a military road towards the fort as he and a soldier-friend suspect? Are they massing for attack? The book was written in a spare, but exquisite style. The last chapter was especially moving. ( )

Giovanni Drogo graduates from military academy and is assigned duty at Fort Bastiani on the border of the Tartar Steppe in the mountains, on the edge of a desert. It is an obscure posting and one he is not entirely happy with and one that several people try to dissuade him from. Wanting to leave immediately he is convinced to stay for 4 months by the commanding officer. This is Catch 22 as written by Magnus Mills as Drogo suffers the pointlessness of his posting, the solitude of being so far away from home, apathy combined with duty, insensitive rules poorly applied and an institutional lack of decisiveness taken to the heights of absurdity but held up as an ideal to aspire to. Highly recommended.

Overall – sparse yet beautifully told ( )

Speranze disattese. Non succede nulla. ( )

Not much to say, this book simply changed the way I see my life. Much better than a psychological book, it gets into you and makes you face your life. You can't ignore the message inside this book, it's too strong. Everyday I can't help myself from thinking "Remember The Tartar Steppe". If you read it and you're stuck somehow in some situation of your life of which you seem to can't get out, you'll understand.
And please, forgive my bad English! ( )

Giovanni Drogo is a young officer who has been posted to Fortress Bastiani, a place far from civilisation where we await life rather than have it in our faces. Drogo wants to leave immediately but is persuaded to stay for a short while before he can return without losing face. Is there a threat from the neighbouring state or not? Do we desire the inflow of foreign soldiers across the Tartar Steppe simply to justify our existence. The themes of the book are solitude, decisiveness (or the lack of it), the futility of preparations for war when there is none, the self and the "old guard" who do things that way because they always have been. Buzzati's writing is beautiful, sparse when it needs to be, descriptive of the wastes that Drogo inhabits. As a translation it works exceptionally well and it would be hard to tell, if you didn't know, that it was written originally in Italian. ( )

Great allegory not only about how we let our Lives go unLived, but how we know full well that we're doing it, accomplices to our own demise. Our own personal Catch-22. ( )