The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories

ISBN: 1681378671

Author: Buzzati, Dino

Condition: New

Poe and Kafka meet The Twilight Zone in this anthology of fifty fantastical tales, many of them reflecting the political and social energies of the time, by an Italian master of the short story.The modern Italian writer Dino Buzzati wrote a huge body of short fiction, several hundred pieces, spanning a forty-year period. They offer a remarkable inventory of fantastic premises and tropes, international in the reach of their geographical settings, at times commenting on Italian issues but usually reflecting the worldwide horrors, catastrophes, and fanaticisms that characterized the twentieth century.A journalist for much of his life, Buzzati was adept at turning current events into fantasies that depicted social and political nightmares. He challenged the ideological complacencies of his era in accessible stories that solicit the readers vicarious response, mixing sentiment, humor, and tragedy. Here Poe and Kafka meet Rod Serlings The Twilight Zone.Lawrence Venuti presents a retrospective anthology that ranges from Buzzatis first publications to texts written as he was dying of cancer. Buzzatis own book-length selections are sampled, so that previously untranslated stories join new versions of classics like Seven Floors, an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; Panic at La Scala, where, fearful of a left-wing revolution, the Milanese bourgeoisie are imprisoned at the opera house; and Appointment with Einstein, in which the scientist encounters a gas station attendant who is the Angel of Death.Venutis crisp translations re-create Buzzatis technique of making the fantastic seem frighteningly plausible, establishing unreal worlds that disrupt dominant notions of what is real. The Bewitched Bourgeois is a definitive gathering of Buzzatis work in short fiction.