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'Time has slipped by so quickly,
that his heart has not had a chance to grow old'


While Dino Buzzati was putting the finishing touches to his 1938 novel, the world outside began a slow and oblivious path, looming towards a war that shook the very foundations of mother Earth. Is it possible Buzzati knew what lied ahead?, as his story here revolves around anticipating war, waiting, watching, fearful of what may appear over the horizon.

The Tartar Steppe is both a scathing critique of military life pre-war, and a meditation on the independent thirst for glory. Giovanni Drogo a young officer is posted to a remote mountain garrison, an anomalously surreal fort, smack bang in the middle of nowhere, known as 'fort Bastiani, which sits overlooking the vast and eerie 'Tartar Steppe' baron landscape (gaining it's title as supposedly Tartars once lived on the other side of the desert). Leaving the city by horseback, Drogo has no idea what to expect on arrival, and starts conjuring up thoughts of just what his life is going to be like.
Never thinking on staying long, he is suddenly overtaken by the passing of time, leading to weeks, months, and years of service, and never seeing any signs what so ever, that a possible army could be looming far off in the distance, biding time, ready to strike.
Becoming distinguished with fellow guards, he would rise in rank over the years, and slowly come to terms with his empty existence.
Over the course of many years the fort would be downgraded, and almost forgotten about by the powers that be, and the world around it, a place of solitude, but an important place of solitude nonetheless, as there is always, no matter how small, a chance an invading army will march through the mist, and take those holding the fort by surprise.

On a mysterious level the novel works so well at never specifying time or place, it could be 20th century, but then again as nothing is ever related to this, we could be going back much further.
When you here of the "the Northern Kingdom", it gets me thinking of centuries ago, but again it's a clever way to add even greater dimension, to it's already quite bizarre story.
The namelessness of the setting was surely deliberate: not only are the hopes and ambitions of the characters in total vain, but just as we are struggling to care about their fate, we also cannot care about their country, which, after all, doesn't even exist. This is easy to get over, as Buzzati writes with a big heart, you truly feel ever step, every though, and every action of Giovanni Drogo, and I am not ashamed to admit, was left close to moist eyes by the final haunting passages.

This is very much the epitome of the literary novel, by which I mean that Buzzati wasn't trying to tell a story but express something deeper through the medium of a novel. This is the sort of novel that professors of literature love, because it begs for a close reading, and that most genre readers hate, because the plot and the characters are just symbols to express the author's intent. Camus, Kafka and Calvino spring to mind when thinking of similarities, with Kafka's 'The Castle' a good point of reference in terms of overall tone.

On the one hand, this is a bleak, desolate and droll story of the wasting away of ones life, but on the other an unseen tension is lurking, even though it would appear the novel has absolutely no tension of any sort. Something just bothered me the whole way through, but can't put my finger on what that something is, there is obviously more to this work than meets the eye.
The leaden prose is not lacking in descriptive detail and the dialog is expressive enough (with help from an authorial style that tells us exactly what each character is actually thinking) to capture the empty years and desolation, for which the Tartar Steppe is a metaphor.
For all his boredom, Drogo is always anticipating war with an excitement, but also a lingering sadness, that his day will never come, and one day he will be cast off into oblivion having never any heights.

This was a read where going into it was a complete unknown, I knew nothing of Buzzati, or his Tartar Steppe, but have come out on the other side realizing a quite unique piece of writing has passed before my eyes.