The Tartar Steppe

I am not embarrassed to say that I burst into tears on reading the last sentence of Dino Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe. It is a book of such exquisite melancholy, so well drawn, that the end comes as both a thunderbolt and a relief. It is the story of a young military officer posted to a remote fort on the northern border, facing a vast desert. He and his colleagues await the enemy, and wait, and wait, hoping for glory or at least meaning in their lives. The themes of isolation and hopelessness are explored elegantly, coolly, and without a whiff of sentimentality. There is not a single false note in the book. A paragraph, nearly chosen at random, will suffice to give an idea:

"One after another the pages turned -- the grey pages of the days, the black pages of the nights, and both Drogo and Ortiz (and perhaps some of the other senior officers) felt a growing anxiety that they might no longer have enough time left. Insensible to the wasting power of the years the Northerners made no move, as if they were immortal and it meant nothing to them if they gambled away whole seasons. But the Fort contained poor mortal men, with no defense against the work of time and their final term was upon them. Points in time which had once seemed unreal, so distant were they, now suddenly appeared on the nearby horizon and brought to mind how ruthlessly time strikes its balances. Each time, if one were to go on, one had to work out a new system, find new terms of reference, console oneself with the thought of others still worse off."

The Tartar Steppe is called a modern classic. It is a book that could be read profitably every few years for life.