Looking Back
This passage from The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati shows why he's a master at using space metaphorically.
Buzzati could have conveyed the emotional turmoil of leaving home and the unnerving onset of adulthood in a thousand different ways.
The one he chooses is both vivid and memorable.
The protagonist, Giovanni Drogo, is accompanied by a friend for part of the way to his military posting.
On horseback, they reach a hilltop, and, turning round, they take in a view of the town they have left behind.
The town in which they both grew up.
And their town becomes their Past.
From this vantage point, Drogo picks out his bedroom window.
And his bedroom becomes his childhood.
We see the "patient dust" he imagines settling on it.
We squint at the "thin streak of lights" he pictures cutting through the shutters.
And we share the regret and nostalgia that sting his heart and his eyes.
Alberico Collina
"They had reached the brow of a hill. Drogo turned to see the city against the light: morning smoke rose from the roofs. He picked out the window of his room. Probably it was open. The women were tidying up. They would unmake the bed, shut everything up in a cupboard and then bar the shutters. For months and months no one would enter except the patient dust and, on sunny days, thin streaks of light. There it was, shut up in the dark, the little world of his childhood. His mother would keep it like that so that on his return he could find himself again there, still be a boy within its walls even after his long absence – but of course she was wrong in thinking that she could keep intact a state of happiness which was gone forever or hold back the flight of time, wrong in imagining that when her son came back and the doors and windows were reopened everything would be as before."
from The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
This passage from The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati shows why he's a master at using space metaphorically.
Buzzati could have conveyed the emotional turmoil of leaving home and the unnerving onset of adulthood in a thousand different ways.
The one he chooses is both vivid and memorable.
The protagonist, Giovanni Drogo, is accompanied by a friend for part of the way to his military posting.
On horseback, they reach a hilltop, and, turning round, they take in a view of the town they have left behind.
The town in which they both grew up.
And their town becomes their Past.
From this vantage point, Drogo picks out his bedroom window.
And his bedroom becomes his childhood.
We see the "patient dust" he imagines settling on it.
We squint at the "thin streak of lights" he pictures cutting through the shutters.
And we share the regret and nostalgia that sting his heart and his eyes.
Alberico Collina
"They had reached the brow of a hill. Drogo turned to see the city against the light: morning smoke rose from the roofs. He picked out the window of his room. Probably it was open. The women were tidying up. They would unmake the bed, shut everything up in a cupboard and then bar the shutters. For months and months no one would enter except the patient dust and, on sunny days, thin streaks of light. There it was, shut up in the dark, the little world of his childhood. His mother would keep it like that so that on his return he could find himself again there, still be a boy within its walls even after his long absence – but of course she was wrong in thinking that she could keep intact a state of happiness which was gone forever or hold back the flight of time, wrong in imagining that when her son came back and the doors and windows were reopened everything would be as before."
from The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
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