New Public Books article by Lawrence Venuti
Public Books published a new article by Senior Scholar Lawrence Venuti on The Tartar Steppe.
At a frontier outpost called Fortezza Bastiani, soldiers yearn for glory in a war against legendary invaders who never materialize. This hopeful yet futile wait for a meaningful event suggests nothing much happens but waiting. Yet it propelled Dino Buzzati’s 1940 novel Il deserto dei Tartari to a glorious spot in the modernist canon. From the very beginning, reviewers (in any language) would formulate humanistic interpretations, treating Buzzati’s amalgam of realism and fantasy as an allegory, a moral abstraction with universal application. Timeless...