New Release Collects 50 Absurdist Tales From an Italian Writer Often Compared to Kafka, Dino Buzzati
The lassitude and unease typifying ‘The Bewitched Bourgeois’ also hearken to the writings of Robert Musil and Thomas Mann. Airlessness of tone predominates, as does an intellectualism that’s at the end of its tether.
As much as any label helps identify a given strain of creativity, Absurdism fits the bill in describing the life’s work of an Italian writer, Dino Buzzati (1906-1972). The term is well applied to a new compilation of Buzzati’s short fiction published by the New York Review of Books, “The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories.”
This isn’t the first time that the highbrows at NYRB have blessed Buzzati with their imprimatur: Three long-form stories and “a pathbreaking graphic novel” have already seen the light of day. This time around, benighted readers are offered a range of bite-sized nuggets of irreality. As translator Lawrence Venuti puts it, “The Bewitched Bourgeois” reflects a “steady output of feuilletons.”
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