I finished reading
The Tartar Steppe today. A beautiful and devastating book about time and futility and delusion and the destruction of dreams. The parallels between Buzzati's novel, Kafka [ "There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe...but not for us"] and the existentialists are obvious. But this text about a perpetually deferred solution to an impossible problem also reminded me of a favorite poem of mine, one I had not read in a while: Cavafy's
Waiting for the Barbarians.
And as Malone wrote,
The Tartar Steppe is truly haunting. It seems wildly improbable that hope and habit would conspire to divest Drogo's life of all chance for happiness and love and achievement, but have we all not known such men, men who waste their lives believing that their destiny is always about to manifest? I think that Drogo is not just waiting for an enemy he will never confront, but for meaning in his long years of vigil on the ramparts of Fort Bastiani, a meaning that the life he has chosen will never produce.
I very highly recommend the book and I will be seeking the rest of Buzzati's work.