The Tartar Steppe
Ratings8
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings8
Average rating4.3
Idealistic young officer Giovanni Drogo is full of determination to serve his country well. But when he arrives at a bleak border station in the Tartar desert, where he is to take a short assignment at Fort Bastiani, he finds the castle manned by veteran soldiers who have grown old without seeing a trace of the enemy. As his length of service stretches from months into years, he continues to wait patiently for the enemy to advance across the desert, for one great and glorious battle . . . Written in 1938 as the world waited for war, and internationally acclaimed since its publication, The Tartar Steppe is a provocative and frightening tale of hope, longing and the terrible sorcery of dreams and desires.
Reviews with the most likes.
This is b l e a k. I followed up a stretch of 10 middle grades fiction books with an absolutely upsetting novel about a man marooned for his entire life at a fort of no importance. This is beautifully written though. I'd recommend it if you liked Calvino or maybe Borges.
A fantastic and haunting novel. Written and published at a time, in 1938, right before the onset of WWII, the books perhaps contained a “geopolitical” dimension that would be largely absent for a reader today. But that by no means diminishes its power. A dark and dreamlike story of an officer and his life at a distant desert fortress, with its clockwork, quotidian existence, that beyond the foolish hopes and secret desires, remaining unspoken within the soldiers of the fort, is a canvass for a life empty of meaning. Mindless adherence to labyrinthine guard protocol leads to the death of a young, exuberant soldier. Minute glimpses of hope kindles within the men, and festers into delusions that they allow to sideline their careers and lives, remaining at the Fort when they could leave. And then, when the time comes to leave, it is too late. Modern life is cruel in ways not present in older ages, it drains existence of its meaning and this novel is a stark warning and frightening vision of a life lost to empty hope and the ghastly inertia of believing one “still has plenty of time.”
