The Tartar Steppe (1000 Books to Read)

The guy can write! I agree with Mustich below - especially the cross between Kafka and Brothers Grimm. It was a slow-paced book. So, it was hard for me to keep engaged, but I was hooked by halfway and glad I stuck with it. It has a message!

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

Dino Buzzati is one of modernity’s most beguiling storytellers: His fictions are a cross between Kafka and the Brothers Grimm—fables and fantasies that are anxious, enchanting, exquisite, and elevated to an eerie sublimity by their reportorial matter-of-factness (the author spent his writing life in the employ of Corriere della Sera, Milan’s leading newspaper). Despite—or perhaps because of—its surreal stasis, The Tartar Steppe exerts a formidable spell. Buzzati refuses to reduce its force to a simple message, yet the novel suffuses our imaginations with a powerful sense of meaning nonetheless, for in its pages the author has fashioned a ghost story that is haunted by the most unnerving spirits of all: our own expectations.