Love surprises the staid, middle-aged protagonist of the novel on a visit to a brothel. This illicit passion is aroused by the dazzle of youth, this unexpected and unfamiliar emotion provoked by the sight of the beautiful prostitute Laide, a woman who is only apparently within his reach. What is merely a game for her, to be played with cynical unscrupulousness, becomes an obsession for him, a continual source of jealousy and anxiety onto which all his existential terrors are projected. Surrounding them is Milan, a corrupt city, an ungovernable Babel, a secret and indecipherable labyrinth as confusing as Laide. Woman and city merge in an indefinable mystery, both symptoms of the world-weariness which torments the book’s main character. There is no redemption in this love, therefore, no regeneration: eroticism is the only sphere accessible to a man who has too long refused to face his own emotions. All the same, it’s eroticism which provides a final glimmer of hope in Laide’s alleged pregnancy which, if it breaks the spell of the mystery surrounding her, could introduce her to the everyday emotions of normal life.


Written in the 1960s, A Love Affair is atypical of Buzzati’s work: here, all the standard features of his prose and subject matter are abandoned, and in this sense it’s a unique text where, as the writer Guido Piovene rightly said, ‘the surreal is supplanted by the real’.

‘He day-dreamed that Laide had fallen under a street car and lost a leg. How wonderful that would be! Deformed, cut off forever from the world of prostitution, and dancing and sexual adventures, she would no longer be at the mercy of all those people. Only Antonio would continue to worship her. And that might be his only hope that Laide, if for no other reason than gratitude, would begin to love him... She was the symbol of a world that was common and nocturnal, gay and vicious, fearlessly wicked and sure of itself, a world that teemed with life insatiable, surrounded by the boredom and respectability of the middle class.’ p92