Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

The first posting for the newly qualified junior officer Giovanni Drogo is a distant border fortress, Fort Bastiani, a kind of military Gormenghast with vast corridors, distant redoubts and an ancient regime of mindless inflexible ritual. It guards the kingdom against the enemy to the north. The forlorn wilderness overlooked by the fortress is called the Tartar Steppe. Where was that ? This was Tartary



but the name had been discarded by the 19th century. So this is not a historical novel.

Our unheroic hero asks an officer about this wilderness.

“A desert. Stones and parched earth � the call it the Tartar steppe.�
“Why Tartar?� asked Drogo. “Were there ever Tartars there?�
“Long, long ago I believe. But it is a legend more than anything else.�
“So the Fort has never been any use?�
“None at all,� said the captain.

There are three parts to the universe of this novel. There is the city � source of the pleasures of ordinary life, of taverns, pretty women, dancing, of business careers; there is the fort itself, austere, useless, monotonous and soul-destroying; and there is the wasteland to the north, a terrifying, blank mystery.

But strangely, the Fort is also clothed in magic :

Then he seemed to see the yellowing walls of the courtyard rise up into the crystal sky, with above then, higher till, solitary tower, crooked battlements crowned with snow, airy outworks and redoubts which he had never seen before. � Never before had Drogo noticed that the Fort was so complicated and immense. At an almost incredible height he saw a window� In the abyss between bastion and bastion he saw geometrical shadows, frail bridges suspended among rooftops, strange postern gates barred and flush with the walls, ancient machicolations now blocked up, long rooftrees curved with the years.

The sense of time spiraling away in pointless ritual, in perpetual maintenance of readiness for an enemy which never arrives, and the sense of a normal life voluntarily jettisoned for this utter uselessness, and the hypnosis that seems to pin poor Drogo to his drudgery, is the whole story of this melancholy book. You can make various meanings from it should you be so inclined. You can see it as a parable - Drogo waiting forever for the Answer to arrive from the Tartar steppe � a philosophic or religious answer, maybe; Ingmar Bergman fans might want to read it as an extended metaphor for the silence of God; but others may prefer to find here a beautiful meditation on disappointment, institutionalization, unfulfillment and resignation. Unheroic virtues.

(So many other writers and their buildings were interweaving with Dino Buzzati as I read this � everyone says Kafka, but also Dracula’s castle, Mervyn Peake, Ballard’s lonely landscapes, JG Farrell’s Majestic Hotel, even Tolkien’s Minas Morgul, there are many of these great constructions of the mind.)

And there are several long passages that lift off into exquisitely sad canticles of how spendthrift human life is, how the hours, the days and the years fall through our fingers.

Recommended. 4.5 stars.

(Great thanks to my friend Selma in Istanbul who pretty much ordered me to read this one.)