Monday, April 20, 2009

Review of Restless Nights: Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati

Restless Nights: Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati (Restless Nights Ppr) Restless Nights: Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati by Dino Buzzati


My review


rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book was a lot of fun. In this collection of micro-stories - most lasting only a couple of pages - Dino Buzzati comes off as the visiting writer at some liberal arts college in the fourth dimension. Focused more on architecture than character, many of the stories involve the fabric of reality elongating, telescoping in and out, collapsing on itself and yet, he does this in an immediately readable and rather fun way. His protagonists often find themselves dumbfounded by the twists of time and happenstance and forced to roll with the weirdness, which is pretty much all we can do in any situation.



This is the only thing of his that I've read but I'm curious to see if he can maintain the Fibonacci scaffolding to support this kind of bent cosmology in a larger work.


View all my reviews.

3 comments:

  1. Bizarre! i just ordered that myself, and it's been sitting on the shelf for the past few days while i wrap up a couple of Cortázars.

    Glad to see that you give it a thumb's up.

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  2. (whoops. i actually bought Buzzati's The Siren.)

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  3. It was your post about it that got me interested, and I happened to find myself in the Italian fiction section of the campus library.

    The Siren looked to be similar fare, with slightly longer stories. I look forward to hearing your take on it.

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