Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo receives an assignment to the old Bastiani Fortress, on the frontier, where the desert starts and goes on for miles until disappearing inside a thick mist. Young Drogo is disheartened because he yearns for military glory, for the romantic death on the battlefield, and nothing has ever happened in Bastiani, and it’s unlikely any enemy should attack from the desert. The old officers try to cheer him up: many years ago in that desert there used to be Tartars, and some think they’re still there, preparing for a war; so the best thing is to wait, wait, wait. But maybe the Tartars are just a legend, made up by officers and soldiers who needed something to believe in while the years passed, and nothing will ever happen in Bastiani at all.
I won’t ruin anyone’s enjoyment of this brilliant novel by saying that this is practically the plot of the novel. Not much seems to happen in the novel, decades go by, and all's the same. Dino Buzzati, using the military life, has crafted a parable about the mistake of wasting one’s life waiting for something to happen instead of enjoying it fully, about all the squandered opportunities at happiness, and about the irreversible course of time. What the novel misses in action it gains in character moments, in reflections about life, which will seem familiar to anyone who has stopped to consider whether they're making the fullest use of the time they have on Earth.

The Tartar Steppe is almost Kafkaesque in that a man is placed in an oppressive situation from which he can’t escape either because of bureaucracy or because of a flaw in himself. But whereas Kafka writes like an intricate nightmare, Buzzati writes like an elegy, full of compassion for the protagonist.

Drogo is a fascinating character: he doesn’t want to serve in Bastiani, he wants the luxurious life young officers have in the city; some of the old officers even warn him to leave as soon as possible, or he’ll never leave: sooner or later the desert will exert a mysterious influence over him like it does over everyone. Drogo doesn’t believe that will happen, and the years ago on, until he no longer cares. Like K., he's just beaten into indifference.

The ending is heartbreaking: Drogo does leave Bastiani and the reader is ready to cheer for him, but Buzzati turns everything upside-down in an unexpected way that makes The Tartar Steppe one of the most beautiful novels I’ve ever read. ( )

Irrinunciabile! ( )