After reading A Love Affair, Dino Buzzati is on the ‘instant purchase’ list for me. The Stronghold is more enigmatic and metaphorical than A Love Affair, but no less compelling. The story is about a soldier, fresh from training, assigned to defend a remote fort from the Tartars, an enemy that is described as a clear and present danger, but seems to never materialize. The writing (and the translation) was spellbinding for me.

There are a lot of scholarly opinions about this book — that it’s a riff on Kafka’s The Castle, or that it’s an allegory for fascism under Mussolini in the runup to WWII. I’ll get to that.

But first: The Stronghold is a good book. It reads like a parable about how we let life pass us by while we’re doing things by the book, the drudgery of routine that robs us of finding novelty and joy. Here’s a long excerpt from early on, when Drogo is beginning his career in the military. After I read this the first time, I read it again out loud (yeah I’m that guy, but only when I’m alone):

At a certain point they close a heavy gate behind us and lock it with lightning speed, leaving no time to turn back. Giovanni Drogo, however, was now sleeping, unaware, and smiling like a baby.

Days will pass before Drogo comprehends what has happened.

He will then experience an awakening. As he gets his bearings, he will be incredulous, at which point he will hear the clamor of footsteps approaching from behind and see the people who have awakened before him, running breathlessly and overtaking him in an effort to arrive sooner. He will hear the beat of time greedily measuring out life. Now the smiling figures that used to appear at windows will be replaced by motionless, indifferent faces. And if he should ask how much of the journey remains, they will still point to the horizon, although not kindly or with pleasure. Meanwhile friends will be lost to sight. Somebody falls behind exhausted, another has bolted ahead, and soon he is no more than a tiny speck on the horizon.

After that river — people will say — another ten kilometers before you get there. But it never ends. The days become shorter and shorter, fellow travelers more rare, and at windows stand pale, apathetic figures shaking their heads.

Until Drogo is left completely alone and the horizon becomes a strip of boundless sea, motionless and leaden. He is weary. The houses lining the street have almost all their windows shut and the few people he encounters respond to him with a disconsolate gesture: the good lies far behind, very far behind, and he passed it without realizing. Ah, too late to turn back. Behind him swells the roar of the multitude in pursuit, driven by the same illusion but still invisible on the empty white road.

Giovanni Drogo is sleeping inside the third redoubt. He dreams and smiles. For the last time that night he is visited by the sweet images of a world that is utterly happy. He would feel different if he could see himself and how he will be one day, there, where the road ends, standing on the shore of the leaden sea beneath a gray uniform sky, and around him not a house or man or tree, nor even a blade of grass. And thus it has been from time immemorial.

That’s some grim shit, eh? It’s also gorgeous and unforgettable. Here’s Buzatti late in the book, when spring comes after a long winter:

The snow on the terraces of the Fortezza finally softened and feet were plunging into slush. The sweet sound of water suddenly arrived from the closest mountains. Here and there along the peaks you caught sight of vertical white strips sparkling in the sun. Every so often soldiers would find themselves humming as they hadn’t done for months.

The sun no longer sped past as before, eager to set. It began to slacken its pace midway in the sky, devouring the accumulated snow. It was useless for the clouds to keep hurtling from the icy north: they couldn’t produce any more snow, only rain, and the rain did nothing but melt the little snow that remained. Mild weather had returned.

Doesn’t that make you want to go walk barefoot in some grass? Literary legacy aside, the book is stunning. After some time at the fort, Drago goes home to find that even his own mother has rearranged her life in his absence. He visits a close friend to find their conversation full of awkward silences. You can’t go home again. Drago slowly turns into another cog in the machine, driven only by routine and rules. It’s a sad story, and it’s told beautifully.

About the cultural relevance: there’s lots written by smarter people than I about that. Here’s a piece in LARB that talks about how this translation of The Stronghold brings the military criticism to the front, and how the word choices a translator makes affect how a story is received by the reader, and how the translator approaced Buzzati’s work.

This review from Biblioklept gets into the weeds with Kafka. (aside: the about page on that site ends with “I have no idea what I’m doing”. Love it.)

Even if the WWII allegory and the influences on Cotezee and other modern art aren’t important to you, Buzzati’s book is accessible memorable and beautiful.

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