I got a review copy of Lawrence Venuti’s selection of Dino Buzzati short stories he’s translated as The Bewitched Bourgeois a few days before we left for a family vacation at the end of last year in Mexico City. I’d meant to take it with me, thinking that the (often very short) short stories would make ideal plane, airport, and I’m-exhausted-but-want-a-quick-brain-snack reading. But I ended up throwing José Donoso’s novel The Obscene Bird of Night into my ancient North Face Recon instead in a weird effort to get its last hundred and fifty pages “finished” before the so-called “next year.” I achieved that goal and am now rereading big chunks of The Obscene Bird of Night. I should have brought the Buzzati. I think it would have been ideal for my needs at the time, based on the handful of tales I’ve read so far.
Here’s NYRB’s blurb:
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.
Biblioklept 