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The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories
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 reader’s vicarious response, mixing sentiment, humor, and tragedy. Here Poe and Kafka meet Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.
Lawrence Venuti presents a retrospective anthology that ranges from Buzzati’s first publications to texts written as he was dying of cancer. Buzzati’s 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.
Venuti’s crisp translations re-create Buzzati’s 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 Buzzati’s work in short fiction.
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 reader’s vicarious response, mixing sentiment, humor, and tragedy. Here Poe and Kafka meet Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.
Lawrence Venuti presents a retrospective anthology that ranges from Buzzati’s first publications to texts written as he was dying of cancer. Buzzati’s 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.
Venuti’s crisp translations re-create Buzzati’s 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 Buzzati’s work in short fiction.
340 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1958
79 people are currently reading
951 people want to read
About the author
Dino Buzzati
279 books1,137 followersDino Buzzati Traverso (1906 – 1972) è stato uno scrittore, giornalista, pittore, drammaturgo, librettista, scenografo, costumista e poeta italiano.
Dino Buzzati Traverso was an Italian novelist, short story writer, painter and poet, as well as a journalist for Corriere della Sera. His worldwide fame is mostly due to his novel Il deserto dei Tartari, translated into English as The Tartar Steppe.
Dino Buzzati Traverso was an Italian novelist, short story writer, painter and poet, as well as a journalist for Corriere della Sera. His worldwide fame is mostly due to his novel Il deserto dei Tartari, translated into English as The Tartar Steppe.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
April 20, 2025
What a treat for English speaking readers to have this cornucopia of 20th C. Italian literary fantastic finally translated. Buzzati clearly had a fiendishly clever mind for composing almost magically compact narratives that float somewhere adjacent to the best episodes of The Twilight Zone, his countrymen Calvino's philosophical absurdism, and Kafka's sociological nightmares, but with a wry humor that lightens up his tales like pastries in the oven.
March 15, 2025
Buzzati was an Italian journalist who wrote short, strange stories for his newspaper from the mid 1930s to the 1970s. This book even includes a couple from 1985. That's an incredible range of Italian history.
Many of the stories are inspired by Kafka or Poe, and are social commentaries. A number of them focus on a protagonist whose situation slowly deteriorates, like boiling a frog in a pot, with no apparent way to reverse the degradation. Stories also focus on the way that a society's viewpoint shapes individual perspective. For someone who lived through Fascist Italy, that's a powerful concept.
Some of the stories are 'meta', with Buzzati as a character, including one that spoofs his association with Kafka as he travels to Prague and is shown the hundreds of places where Kafka supposedly lived, ate and worked. Sort of like all the places George Washington slept.
The stories are presented chronologically by date of publication, so you can see how his interests developed over time. He actually became stranger as time went by; perhaps after WWII ended he felt more free to experiment.
These stories are sometimes compared to Rod Serling's 'Twilight Zone', and while they don't usually have overt fantasy content the way that show did, there is a similar feel.
Anyone who likes Twilight Zone, or reads 'slipstream' kind of fiction, would enjoy these short stories.
Many of the stories are inspired by Kafka or Poe, and are social commentaries. A number of them focus on a protagonist whose situation slowly deteriorates, like boiling a frog in a pot, with no apparent way to reverse the degradation. Stories also focus on the way that a society's viewpoint shapes individual perspective. For someone who lived through Fascist Italy, that's a powerful concept.
Some of the stories are 'meta', with Buzzati as a character, including one that spoofs his association with Kafka as he travels to Prague and is shown the hundreds of places where Kafka supposedly lived, ate and worked. Sort of like all the places George Washington slept.
The stories are presented chronologically by date of publication, so you can see how his interests developed over time. He actually became stranger as time went by; perhaps after WWII ended he felt more free to experiment.
These stories are sometimes compared to Rod Serling's 'Twilight Zone', and while they don't usually have overt fantasy content the way that show did, there is a similar feel.
Anyone who likes Twilight Zone, or reads 'slipstream' kind of fiction, would enjoy these short stories.
March 8, 2025
According to translator Lawrence Venuti’s introduction, the great Italo Calvino once described the basic form of Dino Buzzati’s stories as follows: “precise as a machine, stretched from beginning to end in a crescendo of expectation, premonition, anguish, fear, becoming a crescendo of irreality." The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories, published by NYRB Classics in 2025, is perfectly representative of said form and, in my opinion, an ideal introduction to Buzzati’s strange, uncanny, phantasmagoric oeuvre.
A chronological gathering of Buzzati’s stories spanning some 50 years (1936-1985), I was amazed at their singular effect. “In the beginning,” the narrator of a key story remarks, “the panic was in fact worse than the danger”—a sentiment that encapsulates the central theme of The Bewitched Bourgeois and calls to mind the famous quote by Seneca, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” This calling into question of the line separating reality and fantasy, the tangible and intangible, is explored throughout Buzzati’s work and reaches its apotheosis in his magnum opus, The Stronghold.
Often compared to the likes of Poe, Gogol, and Kafka to name but a few literary greats, this expansive collection surely asserts Buzzati as a master of the short form in his own right. Much of the credit belongs to his faithful translator, Lawrence Venuti, who “re-creates Buzzati’s technique of making the fantastic seem frighteningly plausible, establishing unreal works that disrupt dominant notions of what is real” (back blurb).
Thank you, NYRB Books, for sending me this ARC for review. I’m adding this book to my favourites from the NYRB Classics series.
A chronological gathering of Buzzati’s stories spanning some 50 years (1936-1985), I was amazed at their singular effect. “In the beginning,” the narrator of a key story remarks, “the panic was in fact worse than the danger”—a sentiment that encapsulates the central theme of The Bewitched Bourgeois and calls to mind the famous quote by Seneca, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” This calling into question of the line separating reality and fantasy, the tangible and intangible, is explored throughout Buzzati’s work and reaches its apotheosis in his magnum opus, The Stronghold.
Often compared to the likes of Poe, Gogol, and Kafka to name but a few literary greats, this expansive collection surely asserts Buzzati as a master of the short form in his own right. Much of the credit belongs to his faithful translator, Lawrence Venuti, who “re-creates Buzzati’s technique of making the fantastic seem frighteningly plausible, establishing unreal works that disrupt dominant notions of what is real” (back blurb).
Thank you, NYRB Books, for sending me this ARC for review. I’m adding this book to my favourites from the NYRB Classics series.
September 28, 2025
50 short stories in translation from Italian author Buzzati covering the output of his lifetime. In all, I believe thee author has 500 some pieces. With 50 stories averaging 6.5 pages each, it was hard to find a rhythm. I read this for a book group. I didn't like this for a number of reasons.
* Many of the pieces are magic realism, a genre I do not enjoy
* The author is compared to Kafka [one of my favorite authors] even by Buzzati himself; I found the Kafkaesque stories to be quite weak imitations.
* I am not fond of works in translation, especially when the quality of the language is highlighted (as opposed to plot or story telling). I am never sure whose work I'm reading. What process did the translator use? Is it a literal translation, or did the translator try to capture the rhythm of the writing? I'd say its even worse in this instance as some stories were translated twice, since the editor could not get rights to some of the stories already in print, and had them retranslated. Side note: the fact that a retranslation does not violate copyright kind of makes my point for me.
* It's hard for me to appreciate a satirical work when I am not familiar with the time period and history being satirized. That said, the first 7 stories were published during Mussolini's reign, but nothing in the stories felt like incisive critique of fascism.
* Many of the pieces are magic realism, a genre I do not enjoy
* The author is compared to Kafka [one of my favorite authors] even by Buzzati himself; I found the Kafkaesque stories to be quite weak imitations.
* I am not fond of works in translation, especially when the quality of the language is highlighted (as opposed to plot or story telling). I am never sure whose work I'm reading. What process did the translator use? Is it a literal translation, or did the translator try to capture the rhythm of the writing? I'd say its even worse in this instance as some stories were translated twice, since the editor could not get rights to some of the stories already in print, and had them retranslated. Side note: the fact that a retranslation does not violate copyright kind of makes my point for me.
* It's hard for me to appreciate a satirical work when I am not familiar with the time period and history being satirized. That said, the first 7 stories were published during Mussolini's reign, but nothing in the stories felt like incisive critique of fascism.
Read
December 14, 2025The author of this book was hired as a journalist for an Italian leftist magazine in his early 20s, and worked there for the rest of his life. He entered publishing early and evidently experienced very little resistance. This is a selection from his short fiction, taken chronologically. They were published widely, so evidently he experienced little resistance in his professional life as a writer. You can tell, because this fiction has a very low level of craft. Yes, it's a translation, but that does not count entirely for how plainly constructed and uninteresting the sentences are. They are not written by someone who is actually into literature: it's all telling, no showing.
The marketing copy describes this as "Kafka meets The Twilight Zone." Just to quickly address the comparison to Kafka: it's fucking bullshit, Kafka was a perfect example of an actual writer interested in literature. His prose, whichever translation you might read it in, is startling and challenging. Buzzati is a mere yarn-spinner: The Twilight Zone is apt. These stories are concept-heavy, drama/emotion/character/style-light. The few that I remember, I remember because of the concepts. But the concepts are all fucking old fashioned, hackneyed bullshit: what if Death comes for Einstein...but it wasn't to kill him, it was just to put the fear of God into him so that he would work harder?! Fuck off.
In the end, I wasn't learning anything about writing from this, there's nothing captivating in the writing itself, it's just boring summary; and I found that the entire imaginative framework from which the concepts were taken is just so dated and uninteresting. There's no risk, no imagination, no experimentation, as in a Kafka. Instead it's just some Italian fucker from a bourgeois family, in a cushy job, spouting self-important, moralizing yarns.
I am developing a suspicion of New York Review Books. The last novel I read from them, In the Cafe of Lost Youth, I found to be extremely "meh" (whereas this book I actively dislike). In both cases, I suspect that the design and the marketing got one over on me. If I try to think what I've read from NYRB that I really liked, I'm only remembering Berlin Alexanderplatz, but that book already has its own legacy.
The marketing copy describes this as "Kafka meets The Twilight Zone." Just to quickly address the comparison to Kafka: it's fucking bullshit, Kafka was a perfect example of an actual writer interested in literature. His prose, whichever translation you might read it in, is startling and challenging. Buzzati is a mere yarn-spinner: The Twilight Zone is apt. These stories are concept-heavy, drama/emotion/character/style-light. The few that I remember, I remember because of the concepts. But the concepts are all fucking old fashioned, hackneyed bullshit: what if Death comes for Einstein...but it wasn't to kill him, it was just to put the fear of God into him so that he would work harder?! Fuck off.
In the end, I wasn't learning anything about writing from this, there's nothing captivating in the writing itself, it's just boring summary; and I found that the entire imaginative framework from which the concepts were taken is just so dated and uninteresting. There's no risk, no imagination, no experimentation, as in a Kafka. Instead it's just some Italian fucker from a bourgeois family, in a cushy job, spouting self-important, moralizing yarns.
I am developing a suspicion of New York Review Books. The last novel I read from them, In the Cafe of Lost Youth, I found to be extremely "meh" (whereas this book I actively dislike). In both cases, I suspect that the design and the marketing got one over on me. If I try to think what I've read from NYRB that I really liked, I'm only remembering Berlin Alexanderplatz, but that book already has its own legacy.
September 25, 2025
the stories were totally fine but I did not need 50 of them
November 25, 2025
These are some of the best short stories I have ever read...Buzzati writes with a sharp sense of which imagery and word choices will create an eerie and unsettling feeling. He transports you to strange locations, seemingly pulled out of dreams or places you in absurd situations, that challenge the reader's perception of reality.
These are stories that remind me of old Twilight Zone episodes from the 50s. They grab a hold of you and get under your skin in the best way possible. This is an outstanding book that I would highly recommend.
These are stories that remind me of old Twilight Zone episodes from the 50s. They grab a hold of you and get under your skin in the best way possible. This is an outstanding book that I would highly recommend.
November 1, 2025
Our moment
- That moment when you realize death really is a sweet release
Seven Floors
- This would be such a great movie!!
- Adds such a cryptic layer to fear of hospitals
The Shadow of the South
- [ ] “It must’ve been the wind” ass hallucination
The Seven Messengers
- [ ] Eh, didn’t really care for this
Personal Escort
- [ ] Felt similar to shadow of the south
- [ ] Could this be allegory for running from death?
The Bewitched Bourgeois
- [ ] “And then, I woke up and realized it was all a dream”
- [ ] Corny way to end but I guess it wasn’t for the times
An Interrupted Story
- [ ] Eh, also didn’t care for this one either
Prank
- [ ] Being a woman core
- [ ] If their imagery for a big evil grin on the dude(s) faces could have been more spooky
The End of the World
- [ ] Self-perseveration never stops, even in the end times
Panic at La Scala
- [ ] This was honestly relatable
- [ ] Hive mindset can really snowball into catastrophe if it goes unchecked
Appointment with Einstein
- [ ] All roads lead back to J. Robert Oppenheimer
The Saucer has Landed
- [ ] Alien: met god, he really don’t like yall like that
- [ ] The amoeba hair is kinda cute though
The Survivor’s Story
- [ ] Whataboutmeism
The Caliph Awaits Us
- [ ] The immigrant dream and how wide-eyed the prospect of coming to America is without fully understanding the brutal reality of moving across the globe
The Collapse of the Baliverna
- [ ] Forgettable
The Five Brothers
- [ ] Could this have been a mischievous demon or the dad testing his sons?
The Time Machine
- [ ] Immortality is never a good idea!
- [ ] I wonder what the rapid reaging felt like
The Gnawing Worm
- [ ] This read like baby momma drama in a way
- [ ] But also, shoot to kill is canon here
The Walls of Anagoor
- [ ] Eh, I wanted more from the end. Don’t make me have to psychoanalyze everything
The Prohibited Word
- [ ] So, what’s the word? 🤔
- [ ] VERY reminiscent of the people’s sentiments to injustice. It does not exist, therefore I cannot see it
Human Greatness
- [ ] Was Morro really ever that Great?
- [ ] Kinda confused by this story tbh
The Plague
- [ ] Car bro final boss
- [ ] This gives pandemic vibes, but more Ebola than COVID
The Writer’s Secret
- [ ] Could this be interpreted as a case of carbon monoxide poisoning?
The Late Mistaken
- [ ] How far would you go for fame and (some) fortune?
- [ ] Sometimes it’s better to live in the FOMO than dying (literally and figuratively) to know what could be
The Flying Carpet
- [ ] Would a magical object be suffice with never being utilized for its purpose?
The Wind
- [ ] This reminded me of a movie who’s title is escaping my mind right now
- [ ] I like the idea of weather induced psychosis
Quiz at the Prison
- [ ] Note to self, always play mind games with people!!
- [ ] Also, people will always pray on your downfall!
Confidential
- [ ] You are a SCAMMER!
- [ ] Planning to do this with Lana Del Rey’s estate
The Colomber
- [ ] Sharks being couriers for samadhi is actually so real
The Jacket
- [ ] This was pressure
- [ ] Seeing parallels with HMADC by Kendrick Lamar
The Ubiquitous
- [ ] Could definitely see journalists and gossip bloggers abusing tf out of this ability
- [ ] Viejo mañoso core actually being driven away?
The Elevator
- [ ] The elevator of female doom and despair
- [ ] Now I understand the claims that this is when he’s starting to be freakishly obsessed with young women
The Falling Girl
- [ ] Post 9-11 the idea of people jumping out of buildings to their deaths doesn’t seem as surreal
- [ ] The random perspective switch at the end threw me off
The Eiffel Tower
- [ ] The Eiffel and Babel Tower comparison is pretty interesting
- [ ] Situating these historic landmarks with legends about their construction is prominent to narrative storytelling of the people and the land
The Scandal on Via Sesostri
- [ ] The multiple Spider-Mans pointing at each other meme if it were a short story
Kafka’s Houses
- [ ] Coming to terms with the mysteries of the man who influenced your work
The Bogeyman
- [ ] Wish I could also kill the bogeyman that appeared in my dreams
The Scriveners
- [ ] Could definitely see MAGA keyboard warriors falling for something like this
What will Happen on October 12th?
- [ ] At this point in time I’d much rather be on planet Z
Elephantiasis
- [ ] Microplastics discourse before I think there really even was an understanding of the gravity of the prioritization of plastic packaging
The Count’s Wife
- [ ] Clocking Giorgio as the devil was tea
- [ ] Great allegory for old men taking young women’s beauty and stashing it away for only them to admire
A Difficult Evening
- [ ] Why’s this kinda giving Weapons?
Alienation
- [ ] What if you were pretending to be you so that everyone you knew thought that you were you?
A Boring Letter
- [ ] Ugh to confess to a girl friend that you killed your husband while sharing a knitting pattern
Stories in Tandem
- [ ] Fuck I loved this premise
- [ ] I’m sure many dystopian authors would shit their brains out if they knew their stories came true
A Solicitous Young Man
- [ ] This is why you should never join the military
Stefano Caberlot, Writer
- [ ] Maladaptive daydreaming to cope with the thought of impending death
Alfredo Brilli, Accountant
- [ ] Pervert cheating husband 🙄
Wladimiro Ferraris, Chief Customs Inspector
- [ ] Freaky ass weird old man
Why
- [ ] Released posthumously and it’s obvious he was coping with his own mortality at this point
- That moment when you realize death really is a sweet release
Seven Floors
- This would be such a great movie!!
- Adds such a cryptic layer to fear of hospitals
The Shadow of the South
- [ ] “It must’ve been the wind” ass hallucination
The Seven Messengers
- [ ] Eh, didn’t really care for this
Personal Escort
- [ ] Felt similar to shadow of the south
- [ ] Could this be allegory for running from death?
The Bewitched Bourgeois
- [ ] “And then, I woke up and realized it was all a dream”
- [ ] Corny way to end but I guess it wasn’t for the times
An Interrupted Story
- [ ] Eh, also didn’t care for this one either
Prank
- [ ] Being a woman core
- [ ] If their imagery for a big evil grin on the dude(s) faces could have been more spooky
The End of the World
- [ ] Self-perseveration never stops, even in the end times
Panic at La Scala
- [ ] This was honestly relatable
- [ ] Hive mindset can really snowball into catastrophe if it goes unchecked
Appointment with Einstein
- [ ] All roads lead back to J. Robert Oppenheimer
The Saucer has Landed
- [ ] Alien: met god, he really don’t like yall like that
- [ ] The amoeba hair is kinda cute though
The Survivor’s Story
- [ ] Whataboutmeism
The Caliph Awaits Us
- [ ] The immigrant dream and how wide-eyed the prospect of coming to America is without fully understanding the brutal reality of moving across the globe
The Collapse of the Baliverna
- [ ] Forgettable
The Five Brothers
- [ ] Could this have been a mischievous demon or the dad testing his sons?
The Time Machine
- [ ] Immortality is never a good idea!
- [ ] I wonder what the rapid reaging felt like
The Gnawing Worm
- [ ] This read like baby momma drama in a way
- [ ] But also, shoot to kill is canon here
The Walls of Anagoor
- [ ] Eh, I wanted more from the end. Don’t make me have to psychoanalyze everything
The Prohibited Word
- [ ] So, what’s the word? 🤔
- [ ] VERY reminiscent of the people’s sentiments to injustice. It does not exist, therefore I cannot see it
Human Greatness
- [ ] Was Morro really ever that Great?
- [ ] Kinda confused by this story tbh
The Plague
- [ ] Car bro final boss
- [ ] This gives pandemic vibes, but more Ebola than COVID
The Writer’s Secret
- [ ] Could this be interpreted as a case of carbon monoxide poisoning?
The Late Mistaken
- [ ] How far would you go for fame and (some) fortune?
- [ ] Sometimes it’s better to live in the FOMO than dying (literally and figuratively) to know what could be
The Flying Carpet
- [ ] Would a magical object be suffice with never being utilized for its purpose?
The Wind
- [ ] This reminded me of a movie who’s title is escaping my mind right now
- [ ] I like the idea of weather induced psychosis
Quiz at the Prison
- [ ] Note to self, always play mind games with people!!
- [ ] Also, people will always pray on your downfall!
Confidential
- [ ] You are a SCAMMER!
- [ ] Planning to do this with Lana Del Rey’s estate
The Colomber
- [ ] Sharks being couriers for samadhi is actually so real
The Jacket
- [ ] This was pressure
- [ ] Seeing parallels with HMADC by Kendrick Lamar
The Ubiquitous
- [ ] Could definitely see journalists and gossip bloggers abusing tf out of this ability
- [ ] Viejo mañoso core actually being driven away?
The Elevator
- [ ] The elevator of female doom and despair
- [ ] Now I understand the claims that this is when he’s starting to be freakishly obsessed with young women
The Falling Girl
- [ ] Post 9-11 the idea of people jumping out of buildings to their deaths doesn’t seem as surreal
- [ ] The random perspective switch at the end threw me off
The Eiffel Tower
- [ ] The Eiffel and Babel Tower comparison is pretty interesting
- [ ] Situating these historic landmarks with legends about their construction is prominent to narrative storytelling of the people and the land
The Scandal on Via Sesostri
- [ ] The multiple Spider-Mans pointing at each other meme if it were a short story
Kafka’s Houses
- [ ] Coming to terms with the mysteries of the man who influenced your work
The Bogeyman
- [ ] Wish I could also kill the bogeyman that appeared in my dreams
The Scriveners
- [ ] Could definitely see MAGA keyboard warriors falling for something like this
What will Happen on October 12th?
- [ ] At this point in time I’d much rather be on planet Z
Elephantiasis
- [ ] Microplastics discourse before I think there really even was an understanding of the gravity of the prioritization of plastic packaging
The Count’s Wife
- [ ] Clocking Giorgio as the devil was tea
- [ ] Great allegory for old men taking young women’s beauty and stashing it away for only them to admire
A Difficult Evening
- [ ] Why’s this kinda giving Weapons?
Alienation
- [ ] What if you were pretending to be you so that everyone you knew thought that you were you?
A Boring Letter
- [ ] Ugh to confess to a girl friend that you killed your husband while sharing a knitting pattern
Stories in Tandem
- [ ] Fuck I loved this premise
- [ ] I’m sure many dystopian authors would shit their brains out if they knew their stories came true
A Solicitous Young Man
- [ ] This is why you should never join the military
Stefano Caberlot, Writer
- [ ] Maladaptive daydreaming to cope with the thought of impending death
Alfredo Brilli, Accountant
- [ ] Pervert cheating husband 🙄
Wladimiro Ferraris, Chief Customs Inspector
- [ ] Freaky ass weird old man
Why
- [ ] Released posthumously and it’s obvious he was coping with his own mortality at this point
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 1, 2025
Tempted to a 5 but I wanted more than this short story format gave me so I felt a little short changed. Don't get me wrong - this is a wonderful collection of short and shorter stories, the feuilletons of short stories but unlike other authors, Buzzati considered this his format. However this is less like a collection from say Algernon Blackwood or the master Jorge Luis Borges. Saying that they all do pack a little metaphor or meaning into their little punchy exploits. Buzzati has been compared to Franz Kafka (who he translated into Italian), and numerous others
Buzzati was prolific. He wrote constantly aside from his work as a journalist with Corriere della Sera by whom he was employed for most of his life. Most of the stories were written to be published immediately in one journal or another and then packaged and re-packaged by Buzzati himself. This collection has been put together by translator Lawrence Venuti (who is a bit of an intellectual and comes across a bit priggish based on his Intro and Translator’s Acknowledgements – but I could be wrong).
Fifty stories here, many published elsewhere in other anthologies and all of course published first in magazines and periodicals between 1936 and 1985. What this is not is something like Alberto Manguel’s anthology ‘Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature’. There are indeed the mystical, the surreal and the fantastic in Buzzati’s short stories but there are also those that are distinctly every-day observations with quirks. Death and the portrayal of Death is there in quite a few as Destiny or Haunting; but this is not a collection of gothic tales. These are very much of the 20th century Italy. The writing itself is sparse and clean reminding me of Tabucchi who I have just finished reading. Many are observations of the petit-bourgeoisie and their behaviours in Italy. and seem fully at home in the 70s and 80s despite being written up to 30 years earlier. So as well as the twists they are observations of Italian life, Italy in the miniature. Strife descends into farce, definitions of self-pity and apparent helplessness. And also at times suggestions of John Lennon singing ‘Power to the People’ from the comfort of his white Rolls-Royce.
Buzzati is an author I had not known about and it is always interesting to find someone quite new to you. This is well worth reading and a different take on Italian fiction.
Buzzati was prolific. He wrote constantly aside from his work as a journalist with Corriere della Sera by whom he was employed for most of his life. Most of the stories were written to be published immediately in one journal or another and then packaged and re-packaged by Buzzati himself. This collection has been put together by translator Lawrence Venuti (who is a bit of an intellectual and comes across a bit priggish based on his Intro and Translator’s Acknowledgements – but I could be wrong).
Fifty stories here, many published elsewhere in other anthologies and all of course published first in magazines and periodicals between 1936 and 1985. What this is not is something like Alberto Manguel’s anthology ‘Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature’. There are indeed the mystical, the surreal and the fantastic in Buzzati’s short stories but there are also those that are distinctly every-day observations with quirks. Death and the portrayal of Death is there in quite a few as Destiny or Haunting; but this is not a collection of gothic tales. These are very much of the 20th century Italy. The writing itself is sparse and clean reminding me of Tabucchi who I have just finished reading. Many are observations of the petit-bourgeoisie and their behaviours in Italy. and seem fully at home in the 70s and 80s despite being written up to 30 years earlier. So as well as the twists they are observations of Italian life, Italy in the miniature. Strife descends into farce, definitions of self-pity and apparent helplessness. And also at times suggestions of John Lennon singing ‘Power to the People’ from the comfort of his white Rolls-Royce.
Buzzati is an author I had not known about and it is always interesting to find someone quite new to you. This is well worth reading and a different take on Italian fiction.
August 9, 2025
Another gift from JS. For all the comparisons with Kafka, Buzzati is an underrated comic writer (and, as Orson Welles once asked, are there really any jokes in Kafka?) That being said, the best of these stories are dowsed in a idiosyncratic mid-twentieth century melancholy, and a fatalistic fear that transcends time: that we are not really in control of our lives, and our best intentions may not be enough to save us. In one story, Buzzati reveals Albert Einstein to be an unwitting agent of the devil - as amusingly as this reveal is brought about, the anger and depression about humanity’s prospects is real. Again and again, Buzzati characters make fair and reasonable decisions based upon the limited information that they have at the time, and only later do they realise that, through those decisions, they have doomed themselves, either damning their souls, skipping career successes and personal fulfilment, or missing the opportunity to find fulfilling and gratifying love. My favourite story of the bunch - ‘An Interrupted Story’ - ends thus:
‘The air, yes, it still carries a dark, profound expectation. But for something else, at this point, something very different. Who knows what: maybe the knight has already passed through, maybe he arrived a very long time ago and set out again, in the opposite direction, without even stopping. Of course we shall never see him again. The old story died within me, but I didn’t notice. It was broken off in the middle, and today’s too late to start over.’
The misfortune of these characters comes not through a tragic flaw, but only their finite being, and a certain sense of the cruelty of the world, that the terms and conditions of existence were never properly set out, and that fates have been planned for us without them being made explicable. We age quicker than we thought, and we miss opportunities we hadn’t even known we had. In this, Buzzati succeeds as both a powerful voice of the nuclear age and in voicing anxieties that we can find in Homer, Sophocles and Ovid.
‘The air, yes, it still carries a dark, profound expectation. But for something else, at this point, something very different. Who knows what: maybe the knight has already passed through, maybe he arrived a very long time ago and set out again, in the opposite direction, without even stopping. Of course we shall never see him again. The old story died within me, but I didn’t notice. It was broken off in the middle, and today’s too late to start over.’
The misfortune of these characters comes not through a tragic flaw, but only their finite being, and a certain sense of the cruelty of the world, that the terms and conditions of existence were never properly set out, and that fates have been planned for us without them being made explicable. We age quicker than we thought, and we miss opportunities we hadn’t even known we had. In this, Buzzati succeeds as both a powerful voice of the nuclear age and in voicing anxieties that we can find in Homer, Sophocles and Ovid.
August 22, 2025
So many great stories. My favorite is probably the longest one, the La Scala, that has to do with paranoia in post-WWII Italy and continued confrontations between fascism and communism, and of middle-class people gripped by fear and not knowing what to think or believe in. I'm most curious about how these stories in general fit into post WWII history, and I'd love to know more about Buzzati's own politics and allegiances. Elephantitis is another great story, that feels very prescient today -- it's about our uneasy relationship with plastics. It was interesting to see him work out some of his obsessions over and over in these stories. For example, somebody (Death?) often keeps watching and waiting for the narrator as the narrator squirms and tries to get away from them. The Colomber is the ultimate example of these stories, where the narrator is finally able to outwit the watcher, though nothing good comes out of his cleverness. The twist though was a nice relief.
March 22, 2025
Aside from Landolfi, Buzzati is the most underrated of the 20th century magic realism crew with Borges at its center. This career-spanning retrospective consisting of 50 stories out of a total of 500 (so about 10% of his short story output) runs the gamut from fables and fantasies in the 1930s to a post-WWII political thriller to Twilight Zone-esque pieces in the 1950s, and modernist borderline science fiction stories in the 1960s. It all caps off with a series of meditations on death in the 1970s and 80s. The stories are all playful: playfully literate, playfully magical, and playfully erotic. The translator Lawrence Venuti pegs Buzzati as a bourgeois fabulist in his introduction, which does him a bit of a disservice, but also not inaccurate. I'm hoping more of Buzzati's work will continue to get translated into English.
June 21, 2025
Twilight zone achtige verhalen waarvan sommigen ook aan kafka's werk doen denken, door de vaak absurde droomachtige situaties waar de hoofdpersonages in terecht komen. Zoals een man die de doodstraf krijgt op het vermoorden van een kat (eigenlijk wel terecht), of een passagier die zich niet kan losmaken van een trein die blijft voortrazen terwijl jaren voorbijgaan. Niet alle verhalen waren even goed of interessant, ook kwam bij enkele het einde wel abrupt terwijl ik nog wilde weten hoe het verder ging. Maar het was verder wel leuk om gelezen te hebben, buzzati had zeker een fantasierijke verbeelding.
February 20, 2025
Twilight Zone-y, Kafkaesque, even when you sometimes figure out what the twist is Buzzati’s prose still carries you through the story fully enjoying yourself. Some of these stories could be great movies, and the self-insertion stories must have been fun for a regular reader that recognised him from his journalistic articles. And I can’t end the review without a shoutout to Venuti’s translation—which felt natural and elevated at the same time.
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February 21, 2025Brilliant. Absurd. Depressing. Buzzati's stories introduce the fantastic into our world and magnify the fantastic within our world. But more than anything they capture the feeling of modern ennui and remind us of our mortality and that most important commodity: time. Time comes for us all. All things must pass.
June 8, 2025
Cannot recommend this collection highly enough. Buzzatti as translated by Venuti (who deserves his followers here as well) is, in turns, deeply profound and thought-provoking and riotously hilarious. With anywhere from a drop to a tablespoon of absurdity in each story, Buzzatti holds a fun-house mirror up to the world, with the reflection telling revealing some deeper truth.
August 1, 2025
Excellent fantastic stories; I will definitely want to re-read these before long. A couple of them (a couple of the [i]fifty[/i], mind you) are a little lower in quality, but the average is incredibly high. Buzzati should be considered one of the masters of the short story, along with Borges, Calvino, et al.
September 27, 2025
these stories... were a bit of a bell curve! it was fun to see buzzati's career and writing style change over the years but DAMN he had some major imposter syndrome and insecurity issues his whole life. would recommend taking breaks in between short stories instead of slugging through them back to back like I chose to. most of these would be great twilight zone episodes
October 21, 2025
I went in knowing nothing but the prolific nature of the writer and this huge collection. Buzzati definitely has a style to his stories, even though these collected pieces span decades. But when it works, it works, like "Falling Girl" for example, very clever weird short story. Take each story in small doses and it really extends the life here.
April 4, 2024
“Vorrei che tu venissi da me in una sera d’inverno e, stretti insieme e dietro i vetri, guardando la solitudine delle strade buie e gelate, ricordassimo gli inverni delle favole, dove si visse insieme senza saperlo”.
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February 17, 2025how fun!! feels wrong to give a star-rating to an anthology, but some of my favs included: Seven Floors, The Surviver’s Story, The Colomber, The Falling Girl, and A Boring Letter. would definitely recommend
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August 11, 2025Accidentally brought this to the beach - not the right space for reading it - prob best read little by little, not straight through. So I didn’t love it but do appreciate it! Seven floors was wild and I will remember that one!
October 4, 2025
4.5/5. Eclectic short story collection with an author so clearly obsessed with the passing of time, self fulfilling prophecies, and death/the end of the world. Heavy topics balanced with the sheer absurdity and lightness with which Dino writes, loved it
January 4, 2026
absolutely wonderful collections of short stories that will leave the reader enthralled and rereading lines to make sure the author actually wrote what the read thought they read. this book should be Read, shared and treasured.
May 22, 2025
I loved 98% of these 50 unique short stories. Would absolutely recommend this collection!
June 8, 2025
Brilliant. Really enjoyed many of these stories
September 25, 2025
The second Buzzati anthology I read after "Catastrophe: And Other Stories". I will reread these stories at some point in the future because they are so enjoyable.
October 10, 2025
I love the second short story in this book, but the longer it went on, the more it felt like a chore to finish this book.
January 12, 2026
A wonderful collection of short stories that read like a combination of Franz Kafka,Jorge Luis Borges, and Richard Matheson worldly but with a unique Italian flavour.
May 30, 2025
“Your resurrection, after so much adulation, would make a very bad impression.”
Dino Buzzati is one of my favorite authors, and so I've been delighted by New York Review Books publishing a series of new English translations of his works. The Bewitched Bourgeois is the best addition yet to that series, making Buzzati's short stories more accessible than ever before. This collection of fifty stories, translated by Lawrence Venuti, contains all the stories found in the difficult-to-acquire Buzzati collections The Siren and Restless Nights (both likewise translated by Venuti). Additionally, about a fifth of the stories have never before been available in English, at least I've not previously found them in my hunts for Buzzati translations.
These new stories are largely from the end of the writer's career, and therefore many are centered on death, meaning that the collection ends on a bleak note that I don't find representative of Buzzati’s usual tone. Despite this, the number of stories contained herein, including pretty much all of Buzzati’s best and most-famous short stories, make The Bewitched Bourgeois the current definitive English collection of those works. In fact, the only English collection of Buzzati’s short stories of which I’m aware that doesn’t entirely overlap with the ones collected in this volume is the recently published Catastrophe: And Other Stories.
Since Buzzati is one of my favorites, and since I consider his short stories to be his strongest works, and since The Bewitched Bourgeois is the best available collection of those stories in English, this volume gets a 5/5 from me.
Dino Buzzati is one of my favorite authors, and so I've been delighted by New York Review Books publishing a series of new English translations of his works. The Bewitched Bourgeois is the best addition yet to that series, making Buzzati's short stories more accessible than ever before. This collection of fifty stories, translated by Lawrence Venuti, contains all the stories found in the difficult-to-acquire Buzzati collections The Siren and Restless Nights (both likewise translated by Venuti). Additionally, about a fifth of the stories have never before been available in English, at least I've not previously found them in my hunts for Buzzati translations.
These new stories are largely from the end of the writer's career, and therefore many are centered on death, meaning that the collection ends on a bleak note that I don't find representative of Buzzati’s usual tone. Despite this, the number of stories contained herein, including pretty much all of Buzzati’s best and most-famous short stories, make The Bewitched Bourgeois the current definitive English collection of those works. In fact, the only English collection of Buzzati’s short stories of which I’m aware that doesn’t entirely overlap with the ones collected in this volume is the recently published Catastrophe: And Other Stories.
Since Buzzati is one of my favorites, and since I consider his short stories to be his strongest works, and since The Bewitched Bourgeois is the best available collection of those stories in English, this volume gets a 5/5 from me.
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