Review of Catastrophe: And Other Stories by Dino Buzzati

The author depicts the daily travails of individuals encountering bizarre and unexplainable phenomena.

The details of the stories accumulate in subtle shifts of tone, always sliding toward uncanny doom. The consequences the hapless heroes face are sometimes uncertain – the tales are often abandoned at the perfect moment, when the destructive incident is about to occur, an implied fate, the inevitable slide of events toward piquant justice or divine retribution.

These characters have dealings with saints and devils, with people who may be possessed, with creepy creatures which inspire pity and terror.

In “The Alarming Revenge of a Domestic Pet,” the narrator is haunted by his aunt’s grotesque house pet, which performs in a disconcerting way before initiating some freakish mechanism which overturns his entire worldview. The atmosphere of the story is brilliantly stifling.

Buzzati is briefer in his descriptions than Kafka and more refined in most of his constructions. He had a clear idea for many of these endings, which unfold like paper airplanes, revealing their form as they unravel.

In “The Slaying of the Dragon,” the human cruelty is graphic, and the implicit disaster is implanted from the beginning, when the adventurers are warned of the creature’s smoke. Symbolic smoke appears in multiple stories, including “The Saints,” acting as a sign of God in some cases, a signature of the divine.

“The Enchanted Coat” is a fable about an unwitting deal with the devil. Impossible to forget, since we have all dreamed or imagined a similar scenario at some point in our lives.

A powerful collection of tales with varied pacing. Some of them are quite short, but pack the punch of a Borges mind-bender. Others are longer, slower, subtler. The intrigue lies in his mingling of the fantastic with the mundane. How his characters overreact to trifles and under-react to mayhem.

In “The Egg” a frantic mother obsesses over an egg hunt, willing to move heaven and Earth so that her daughter can walk away with a prize, possibly altering the underlying physics of the universe in her attempt at coddling.

“The Landslide” is one of my favorites. A mystery about a man searching for an event which may be mere conjecture or a hidden reality, until his overwhelming desire seems to bend reality. An unexpected masterpiece in my opinion. How many times have we found ourselves flabbergasted by the absence of something we expected, something we are told would be there. It makes me think of those times when Google Maps leads me to some abandoned warehouse instead of the restaurant I wanted, and I begin to sense the malice behind the machine’s insistence that I am at the right location.

Buzzati was a master of concocting fascinating settings. He does not bother with elaborate scenes and keeps his cast of characters limited to the essential players in a compact drama. In his novels, he also implements the technique of dreamlike storytelling, in which the narrative operates on a logic unique to his premise. His work is always easy to sink into and remember.

I think I will be reading this collection again. Along with everything else in his oeuvre.

Collapse of the Baliverna
Catastrophe
The Epidemic
The Landslide
Just the Very Thing They Wanted
Oversight
The Monster
Seven Floors
The March of Time
The Alarming Revenge of a Domestic Pet
And Yet They Are Knocking at Your Door
Something Beginning with L
The Slaying of the Dragon
The Opening of the Road
The Scala Scare
Humility
The War Song
The Egg
The Enchanted Coat
The Saints