Dino Buzzati's Ideal House

摘要

Italo Calvino has the unfortunate privilege of being a pillar, perhaps even the mainstay, of the architect's literary library, with Invisible Cities now exalted to the level of fetish. But before Calvino came Buzzati - in life, as on the bookshelf. Born in 1906, a day shy of 17 years before Calvino, Dino Buzzati died the year Invisible Cities appeared, in 1972. But despite a prolific career as a journalist, painter, playwright and fiction writer, Italy's grande Buzzati remains little read in English. He is best known for The Tartar Steppe, his 1940 novel about an officer who spends his life guarding a remote fortress. Slow time - bureaucratic and existential - seeps through the novel, as it does in so much of his fiction. Yet his work is also intensely spatial, ranging from the desert fort to rooms, hallways, streets and skyscrapers. These are concrete spaces, but they feel universal too, like metaphors for the world. If Venice is Calvino's implicit city, the real place that all the other ones describe, Buzzati's Milan seems instead to encompass all other places.