The Tartar Steppe (1940) was my introduction to Buzzati. It occupies one of my favourite types of literary space: a highly specific, plausible world whose logic and ontology remains just out of view. Many of the stories in this collection exist in similar territory, including ‘Catastrophe’. The story has a very simple shape. The narrator is on a non-stop, fast train to Northern Italy when an idle glance out of the window reveals the unexpected. A woman leaning on the fence, who he is smugly sure is watching his train speed by, is distracted from “a wonderful daily spectacle”, by a man who rushes up to her shouting. Similar episodes follow and start to create a disturbing pattern. The strange behaviour of people outside the train is captured in a few, spare images: a man with cupped hands calling across a field, fields of corn and lucerne trampled by anxious, running feet. As the train hurtles through a station, “[a] small boy with a bundle of newspapers tried to chase after us, waving one with great black headline on the front page…” Like many of Buzzati’s stories, ‘Catastrophe’ is about anxiety. The story starts to bounce between the images of flight and panic beyond the train and the passengers’ attempt to ignore what is obvious or break the silence, even when everyone stares at the emergency cord at the same moment. But no one does anything and they carry on hurtling towards the very place from which everyone else is fleeing, and the reader must travel with them.
First published in English in Catastrophe and Other Stories, Alma Classics, 2018
A Personal Anthology 