The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories

These captivating stories selected by Venuti and written over a 50-year-period by Buzzati (1906–1972) exhibit the author’s interest in fantasy, futility, and fate. In “Seven Floors,” a mildly ill patient checks into the top floor of a clinic, only to be moved inexorably down toward the most hopeless cases. “The Collapse of the Baliverna” details the ruinous consequences of the narrator’s decision to climb the wall of a ramshackle residential building. In the lovely one-pager “The Caliph Awaits Us,” residents of a boardinghouse are united, perhaps in their dreams, by a shared mission to leave for a better place. The title story finds a middle-aged family man taking a children’s make-believe battle so seriously he dies of an imagined wound. Later entries are slighter but more poignant in their concern with mortality. In “Why,” the narrator explains the mystery of the afterlife to a Martian diplomat: “It isn’t certain everything’s over.... This is actually the greatest problem, the most important and terrible thing.” Thanks to Venuti’s keen editorial eye and crisp translation, this stands as a brilliant record of Buzzati’s playful experimentation and lifelong obsessions. (Jan.)