The story of a young officer dispatched to do service in a remote mountain garrison overlooking a vast northern desert. At first desperate to escape and return to the pleasures of normal life, he nevertheless falls under the spell of the place to the point that he will spend the next thirty years there, sustained only by the vain hope that one day an enemy attack will offer a moment of glory and fulfillment

This is a story of drama deferred, catharsis denied. To compensate, there are the moutnains

references Lacrimi si Sfinti:

‘Cruelty, at least in literature, is a sign of election,’ wrote the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran. ‘The more talented a writer is the more ingeniously he contrives to put his characters in situations from which there is no escape; he persecutes them, tyrannises them, traps them in blind alleys, forces them to experience every phase of a long drawn out agony.’

Again I think this is more telling of Cioran’s twisted world view that anything to do with literature. Nothing is more insufferable than deus ex machina. (Here I’m not responding to Cioran’s argument, but enough about him)

The novel is very subversive – sparing the protagonist the elected agony Cioran yearns for, or the total paranoia offered by his peers e.g. Kafka. Drogo is neither singled out, nor even discomfited by station in life

Buzzati’s typescript of The Tartar Steppe was submitted to the publishers in January 1939. There is no need to comment on what followed. In any event, the book will serve as an alarming reminder that the century discovered nothingness would go to any lengths, however catastrophic, to fill that nothingness up.

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One battle and perhaps then he would be happy for the rest of his life.

And the deferred catharsis is executed so well, there's an air of "something's rotten in the state of Denmark" mixed with Nosferatu, except that nothing really ever happens. Cursed dread looms, but doesn't ramp – it just is:

Some days will pass before Drogo understands what has happened. Then it will be like an awakening. He will look around him incredulously; then he will hear a din of footsteps at his back, will see those who awoke beforeh im running hard to pass him by, to get there first. He will feel the pulse of time fgreedily beat out the measure of life. There will be no more laughing faces at the windows but unmoved and indifferent ones. And if he asks how far there is still to go they will, itis true, still point to the horizon – but not good-naturedly, not joyfully. Meanwhile his companions will disappear from view. One gets left behind exhaused;another has outstripped the rest and is now no more than a tiny speck on the horizon,

…

At last Drogo will be all alone and there on the horizon stretches a measureless sea, motionless, leaden. … The good things lay further back – far, far back and he has passed them by without knowing it.

More Phantom Tollbooth x Monkey's Paw:

Yet twenty-two months are a long time and a lot of things can happen in them – … there is time for a man to die and be buried, for his son to be able to laugh again and in the evenings take the girls down the avenues and past the cemetery gates without a thought

himself excepted, everyone had some reason for hope, however small.

Dying over play pretend (in the absence of any enemy) and gaslighting on another/themselves into paranoia about imminent threat.

everything had been lost for a bet made in a moment of pride

And perhaps the most heavy passages are those that totallyprecurse fascism before it emerged in the ensuing war that Buzatti's characters yearn for. The institution of rules over meaning in order to stratify the population

‘It’s me, Lazzari. Don’t you see me? Moretto, Oh Moretto. It’s me. What are you doing with your gun? Are you mad, Moretto?’

But the sentry was no longer Moretto – he was simply a soldier with a hard face who now was slowly raising his gun to take aim at the enmy.

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