The Bewitched Bourgeois - by Dino Buzzati (Paperback)

About the Book

"Poe and Kafka meet The Twilight Zone in this anthology of fifty fantastical tales, many of them reflecting the political and social energies of the time, by an Italian master of the short story. The modern Italian writer Dino Buzzati wrote a huge body of short fiction, several hundred pieces, spanning a forty-year period. They offer a remarkable inventory of fantastic premises and tropes, international in the reach of their geographical settings, at times commenting on Italian issues but usually reflecting the worldwide horrors, catastrophes, and fanaticisms that characterized the twentieth century. A journalist for much of his life, Buzzati was adept at turning current events into fantasies that depicted social and political nightmares. He challenged the ideological complacencies of his era in accessible stories that solicit the reader's vicarious response, mixing sentiment, humor, and tragedy. Here Poe and Kafka meet Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. Lawrence Venuti presents a retrospective anthology that ranges from Buzzati's first publications to texts written as he was dying of cancer. Buzzati's own book-length selections are sampled, so that previously untranslated stories join new versions of classics like "Seven Floors," an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; "Panic at La Scala," where, fearful of a left-wing revolution, the Milanese bourgeoisie are imprisoned at the opera house; and "Appointment with Einstein," in which the scientist encounters a gas station attendant who is the Angel of Death. Venuti's crisp translations re-create Buzzati's technique of making the fantastic seem frighteningly plausible, establishing unreal worlds that disrupt dominant notions of what is real. The Bewitched Bourgeois is a definitive gathering of Buzzati's work in short fiction".--

Book Synopsis

Poe and Kafka meet The Twilight Zone in this anthology of fifty fantastical tales, many of them reflecting the political and social energies of the time, by an Italian master of the short story.

Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories, publishing several hundred over the course of forty years. Many of them are fantastic--reminiscent of Kafka and Poe in their mixture of horror and absurdity, and at the same time anticipating the alternate realities of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in their chilling commentary on the barbarities, catastrophes, and fanaticisms of the twentieth century.

In The Bewitched Bourgeois, Lawrence Venuti has put together an anthology that showcases Buzzati's short fiction from his earliest stories to the ones he wrote in the last months of his life. Some appear in English for the first time, while others are reappearing in Venuti's crisp new versions, such as the much-anthologized "Seven Floors," an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; "Panic at La Scala," in which the Milanese bourgeoisie, fearing a left-wing revolution, find themselves imprisoned in the opera house; and "Appointment with Einstein," where the physicist, stopping at a filling station in Princeton, New Jersey, encounters a gas station attendant who turns out to be the Angel of Death.

Review Quotes

"Buzzati's short-form fiction seems perfectly suited to our time of TikToks, tweets and online attention spans.... Pick up this book, and read one story each week.... Recreate the experience of those Italian newspaper readers who got to experience Buzzati's seductive skills regularly. One at a time is enough because the stories are so tightly packed they continue to unfold in your mind after you finish. With 50 stories here, they will last you almost a year. Then you can go back to the beginning and start again." --John Self, The Times (UK)

"Thanks to Venuti's keen editorial eye and crisp translation, this stands as a brilliant record of Buzzati's playful experimentation and lifelong obsessions." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"These marvelous stories inhabit a bewitched space. Borges and Poe are evident, but more importantly Buzzati's alchemical blend of the known world and some other, invading realm looks forward to the time of Stephen King, and Robert Aickman, and Shirley Jackson. These are tales that stick to your ribs." --John Darnielle

"There are very few writers whose stories feel so unique and original that you can't imagine anyone else writing them. Lawrence Venuti's deft translation of these fifty stories makes it clear that Buzzati is one of these few. Smart, quirky, buoyant and wonderfully absurd, Buzzati is the missing link between Kafka and twenty-first-century fabulism." --Brian Evenson

"Thanks to Venuti's keen editorial eye and crisp translation, this stands as a brilliant record of Buzzati's playful experimentation and lifelong obsessions." --Publishers Weekly

"Buzzati was adamant in proving how permeable the barrier is between the hard-and-fast and the highly unlikely. Readers taken with the quixotic byways of 20th-century literature should welcome The Bewitched Bourgeois as a necessary addition to their libraries." --Mario Naves, The Sun

"Buzzati uncovers the cracks in the facade of reality and shows the consequences of a world from which humans have foolishly banned imagination. He does so by using a variety of fantastic modes and genres: allegory, fairy tale, horror, gothic, the occult, the absurd, science fiction, even dystopian fiction." --Valentina Polcini, LARB

About the Author

Dino Buzzati (1906-1972) studied law at the University of Milan and, at the age of twenty-two, went to work for the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he remained for the rest of his life. He served in World War II as a journalist connected to the Italian navy and on his return published the book for which he is most famous, The Stronghold (NYRB Classics). A gifted artist as well as writer, Buzzati was the author of five novels and numerous short stories, as well as a popular children's book, The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily.

Lawrence Venuti, professor emeritus of English at Temple University, is a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan, as well as a translation theorist and historian. He is, most recently, the author of Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic, the editor of The Translation Studies Reader, and the translator of J. V. Foix's Daybook 1918: Early Fragments, which won the Global Humanities Translation Prize at Northwestern University. He translated Buzzati's The Stronghold for NYRB Classics.