Il Deserto dei Tartari – Dino Buzzati

On a bizarre camper holiday, my then-10 year old cousin (a really avid reader, at least back then) ran out of books and borrowed this from his rather surprised mom. He found it really, really sad. I don’t think my comments can be any more insightful, although I seriously don’t think I would have been able to read this classic of Italian literature when I was 10, I was sufficiently emotionally drained when I read it as a 25-year old.

The book is about a soldier’s wait for a long-promised attack to his fortress by the Tartars. Except that the attack never comes. And he waits. And the reader waits with him. I am often surprised by how great writers can draw up masterpieces from simple stories in which little happens, but Il Deserto dei Tartari takes this to an entirely new level – 80% of the book is just about the desolating wait of the main character, Drogo, and yet it keeps the reader’s interest very much alive.

And forget about Drogo’s final deep thoughts, I wanted him to fight the Tartars – winning or losing didn’t matter much, I wanted him to fight, and I am a relatively committed pacifist...

No One Writes to the Colonel – Gabriel García Márquez

Having been swept off of my feet after reading One Hundred Years of Solitude at age 16, almost immediately afterwards I jumped into No One Writes to the Colonel. Turns out, it was a rushed decision. Had I waited a little more, I probably would have enjoyed the book a lot more.

The sadness of the daily struggles of the colonel bored me when compared to the fascinating life of the other Colonel (with a capital C), Buendía. Yet, I now think that the book would have deserved something better than a couple of hours of distracted reading in my house’s “thinking room” (a room so tiny that one couldn’t do anything other than thinking – yet one with such a magnificent view over the Piedmontese hills and mountains that one just couldn’t turn it into a store room).

A friend of mine (probably too lazy to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, but sufficiently smart to realize that reading was actually potentially cool)  kept on quoting the last line of the book and constantly praised the novel. I never thought the last line of No One Writes to the Colonel was particularly good or funny, but I now think that maybe the book does deserve more credit than what I initially gave it.