Dino Buzzati

1906–72

Buzzati’s stories, preoccupied with death and pervaded by the absurd, play out on the hinterlands of reality. Critics likened him to Edgar Allan Poe, Søren Kierkegaard and, to his eventual exasperation, to Franz Kafka, but Buzzati’s blend of the real and the fantastic, in parts sinister and playful, is entirely his own. He isolates moments of acute panic, peril, the collapse of norms. The titles of his stories – ‘Catastrophe’, and ‘The End of the World’ are two examples – locate calamity at the forefront of human experience. Like Savinio and Romano, Buzzati, raised predominantly in Milan, was an accomplished visual artist, and he greatly admired the work of the painter Francis Bacon. He began his long collaboration with the newspaper Corriere della Sera when he was twenty-two, working as a journalist and also publishing many of his stories in its literary supplement, La lettura. He was a war correspondent during the Second World War and later became the art critic for the newspaper. Poema a fumetti (Poem Strip), an amalgam of text and image that stymied critics, is now regarded as the first Italian graphic novel, and Il grande ritratto (published in English under the title Larger than Life), is considered to be among Italy’s first works of science fiction. Buzzati wrote many novels in addition to his stories. His most famous is Il deserto dei tartari (The Tartar Steppe), set in an imaginary country. Born in Belluno, part of the Dolomites, Buzzati was an avid alpinist who wove mountains into much of his work. ‘Sette Piani’ (‘Seven Floors’), among his best-known stories, is widely anthologized, so I have chosen another, in which the supernatural and the domestic savagely converge. He received the Strega Prize in 1958 for his definitive collection of short stories, Sessanta racconti (Sixty Stories).

And Yet They Are Knocking at Your Door

Translated by Judith Landry

Signora Maria Gron entered the ground-floor drawing room with her workbasket. She glanced round to see that everything was exactly as usual, put the workbasket down on a table and went up to a vase of roses, sniffing delicately. The other people in the room were her husband, Stefano, her son, Federico, known as Fedri, both sitting by the fireplace, her daughter, Giorgina, who was reading, and an old friend of the family, Eugenio Martora, who was concentrating on his cigar.

‘They’re all fanées, finished,’ she murmured to herself, drawing one hand lovingly over the flowers. Several petals fell on the table.

‘Mother!’ called Giorgina from the armchair where she was sitting reading.

It was already evening, and the great shutters had been bolted as usual. Yet the sound of the heavy, endless rain could still be heard. At the back of the room, towards the hall, an impressive red curtain hung from the wide arch that formed the entrance: at that time of day there was so little light that it looked black.

‘Mother!’ said Giorgina. ‘You know those two stone dogs at the bottom of the avenue of oaks, in the park?’