Dino Buzzati
Un amore

Short stories are like a night of passion, a novel, on the other hand, is a love story.

Thus, in Buzzati's latest novel, we observe the entire evolution of a love, until it eventually leads to something new.

Yet, time in this novel progresses differently than in the others. In fact, it always seemed to me that, in Buzzati, time rushed away with a speed that grew exponentially: days first passed with the same speed, then weeks, months, years, decades, and finally centuries; it proceeds differently in this love: it travels a circumference, in which a persistent anguish presents itself in forms that repeat over time and are only occasionally interrupted by very brief moments of respite.

However, if time is different, similar are the feelings that, as in his most famous novels and stories, also in this love, are passions that rhyme with obsessions. Love is a fixation, a disease, an oppressive obsession, and an obsessive oppression.

It is Antonio's love for Laide. A love unequal, unbalanced, all-encompassing, which is narrated in such a subjective, internalized, distressing way.

And the reading itself is distressing.

Antonio does not always have the voice of the narrative, but it is always his point of view for all two hundred pages of the novel. A partial, suspicious, naïve point of view, but above all weak and uncertain like autumn leaves, and torn, like a bombed country.

In reading, one wonders if this circular progress will ever end and lead somewhere. And one remains suspended, up to the surprising finale.

The style is not the elegant one to which Buzzati has accustomed us. There are apparent syntactic and stylistic inconsistencies. For example, the narrator switches from the third to the first person when, through a single ambiguous verb, the narrator hands over the word to the protagonist. There are lists reported lightly, seemingly careless in form, with a lightness of private writing. It seems like automatic writing.

One is completely immersed in the protagonist's soul.

And it's surprising how, in just a few years, Nabokov, first, then Buzzati, and finally Berto, managed to portray love in a profoundly authentic way, which still shocks today.