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A powerful novel, The Tartar Steppe’s writing and context made an impression on me from the start. I read it many years back, and now as I revisited it all came back. It's about looking for the meanings of life, and much more. The Italian Dino Buzzati immerses the reader in a story of hope and how cruelly such feeling can be wasted leading to disappointment. It's the story of a young officer dispatched to serve on a remote fort overlooking the desert. It's about waiting for the enemy at the frontier, in hope of glory.

"One September morning, Giovanni Drogo, being newly commissioned, set out from the city for Fort Bastiani; it was his first posting. ...This was the day he had looked forward for years - the beginning of his real life."

He paints a scenario of frustration and impotence, that should not come as a surprise:

"It was true that his heart was full with the bitterness of leaving the old house for the first time... full with the fears which every change brings with it, with emotion at saying goodbye to his mother; but on top of this there came an insistent thought to which he could not quite give a name but which was like a vague foreboding as if he were to set out on journey of no return."

A sequence of events start to be set and Drogo cannot escape. He knows that he must not stay in the Fort but is unable to leave. He slips into a routine, and we can fell it all happening as if we are there with him:

"But it seemed as if Drogo’s existence had come to a halt. The same day, the same things, had repeated themselves hundreds of times without taking a step forward. The river of time flowed over the Fort, crumbled the walls, swept down dust and fragments of stone, wore away the stairs and the chain, but over Drogo it passed in vain- it had not yet succeeded in catching him, bearing him with it as it flowed.�

The Tartar Steppe is beautiful and poetical, and it could be labelled an anti-war novel. Drogo is continually waiting in the fronteirs for the tartars, who are supposed to arrive any day. But they never do. And life goes on everywhere else, but the hero is always waiting. With time, Drogo comes to feel strange when among family and friends, those that are not part of his destiny anymore. Even I that only moved from one country to another and from city to city, know how easy it is to feel out of place with friends that stayed behind as we drifted away.

In a sense this is about mundane existence, about not finding meaning in everyday life and thus expecting to face death empty handed when all hopes were for nothing.

According to Tim Parks, in the introduction in the English edition, �…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 still serves as an alarming reminder that the century that discovered nothingness would go to any lengths, however catastrophic, to fill that nothingness." He could not be more accurate!