Buzzati’s nights, surreal places, are certain both to delight and dismay the reader. We meet monsters and witness miracles, but a constant rhythm runs throughout, a recognisable backdrop of facts and clues that allude to and resemble the entire maelstrom of collective existence. Like fables but lacking any moralistic aim, these stories, spawned by Buzzati’s dedication to fantasy and invention which he held as essential to freedom, are intended to give everyone the chance to dream. Their ironies and paradoxes momentarily break the ties that keep us social animals earthbound, and we are seduced by the idea of a fourth dimension in which everyone’s existence turns into dreamlike fantasy. This is the case with The Count’s Wife, which recounts one woman’s Kafkaesque metamorphosis as a way of escaping the drabness of provincial life, or The Scandal on Via Sesostri, in which one man’s death reveals his true identity and at the same time the false identity of us all.


What stands out in each story is Buzzati’s journalistic interpretation of the dreamworld, which captures a sphere of visions and apparitions in the detached manner of news commentary. In this sense he maintains a close and vital link with reality, the aim of each story being to expose the social pretence which debases people, killing the individual while allowing only a licensed existence.

‘One morning about ten o’clock an immense fist appeared in the sky above the city. Then it slowly unclenched and remained this way, immobile, like an enormous canopy of ruin. It looked like rock, but it was not rock; it looked like flesh but it wasn’t; it even seemed made of cloud, but cloud it was not. It was God, and the end of the world.’ p7