The Stronghold (aka The Tartar Steppe) - Dino Buzzati

The Stronghold by Dino Buzzati, translated by Lawrence Venuti (previously translated under the title The Tartar Steppe) / ISBN 9781681377148 / 207-page paperback published in 2023 by New York Review Books Classics *** A glory-starved soldier spends his life awaiting an absent, long-expected enemy in this influential Italian classic of existentialism, now newly translated and with its originally intended title restored. At the start of Dino Buzzati’s The Stronghold, newly commissioned officer Giovanni Drogo has just received his first posting: the remote Fortezza Bastiani. North of this stronghold are impassable mountains; to the south, a great desert; and somewhere out there is the enemy, whose attack is imminent. This is the enemy that Lieutenant Drogo has been sent to draw out of his lair, to defeat once and for all, returning home in triumph. And yet time passes, and where is the enemy? As the soldiers in the fortress await the foretold day of reckoning, they succumb to inertia, and