The Bewitched Bourgeois
_Cover.jpg) | |
| Author | Dino Buzzati |
|---|---|
| Translator | Lawrence Venuti |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Short story collection |
| Publisher | NYRB Classics |
| Publication date | January 2025 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 328 |
| ISBN | 978-1-68137-867-1 |
The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories is a 2025 short story collection by Italian writer Dino Buzzati, translated by Lawrence Venuti. An original selection of Buzzati's works, it runs through 50 works of short fiction written by Buzzati for a variety of publications in chronological order of publishing, although the vast majority were first in the Corriere della Sera, the newspaper where Buzzati spent most of his career. Buzzati won the Strega Prize for an Italian collection of his short stories, and The Bewitched Bourgeois received generally positive reviews from English-language critics as well. The stories range in length, with the longest almost being classified as a novella, while the shortest are only one page.
Background
Throughout a span of his career lasting around 40 years, Buzzati wrote approximately 500 works of short fiction.[1] One of his Italian short story collections, Sessanta racconti (Sixty Stories), won the Strega Prize, the most prestigious in Italian literature, in 1958.[2] Despite his prolific writing career and his success at home, only three collections had previously been published in English: Catastrophe in 1965, Restless Nights in 1983, and The Siren in 1984. The Bewitched Bourgeois' translator, Lawrence Venuti, was also the translator for Restless Nights; in its introduction, published over 40 years prior to The Bewitched Bourgeois, he commented that Buzzati had been "strangely neglected in the English-speaking world", while his popularity had endured in Europe, even outside of Italy.[1]
Publication and contents
The Bewitched Bourgeois is a collection of 50 of Buzzati's short stories, picked by Venuti.[3] Some of the translations appearing in the book are entirely new, while others are retranslations, either of other translators' work or that of Venuti himself.[1] It was published by NYRB Classics in January 2025.[3]
Several stories in the collection were more frequently analyzed or mentioned as highlights. One is "Seven Floors", which follows a man who is driven to his death in a hospital by being sent from the top floor (which houses the healthiest patients) to the bottom (with those dying or dead), each time through a seemingly reasonable pretext or allowance for bureaucracy.[a] It has been adapted into multiple different mediums, including a 1967 film[8][9] and stage plays by Buzzati and Albert Camus.[10][11]
The cover art for the collection is a Buzzati painting of a jacket hanging on a back of a chair, which is implied to have been abandoned in a hurry, in part due to the broken windows behind it.[1] "The Jacket", a story in the collection, was one of Buzzati's more popular works, about a man who receives a jacket from a tailor that is seemingly stuffed with money received from various crimes.[1][12] The titular story, "The Bewitched Bourgeois", is about a man who gets caught up in a children's game while on vacation, which ends with his death after taking the game so seriously that a pretend arrow becomes lethal.[3][1]
"Panic at La Scala" is the longest story in the collection, described as being closer to a novella in length. A group of upper-class bourgeoisie barricade themselves in an Opera house in Milan out of fear of an upcoming left-wing revolution happening that night.[7][4][13][5] It was inspired by an incident where a fascist student shot a communist politician, Palmiro Togliatti, leading to violent protests that resulted in 30 dead and upwards of 800 injured.[14] Other stories, such as "The Caliph Awaits Us", are as short as one page.[3]
List
| Ch. | Title | Year | First published |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Our Moment | 1936 | Il Convegno |
| 2 | Seven Floors | 1937 | La Lettura |
| 3 | The Shadow of the South | 1939 | Corriere della Sera |
| 4 | The Seven Messengers | 1939 | La Lettura |
| 5 | Personal Escort | 1941 | Corriere della Sera |
| 6 | The Bewitched Bourgeois | 1942 | Corriere della Sera |
| 7 | An Interrupted Story | 1942 | Corriere della Sera |
| 8 | Prank | 1944 | Corriere della Sera |
| 9 | The End of the World | 1944 | Corriere della Sera |
| 10 | Panic at La Scala | 1948 | L'Europeo |
| 11 | Appointment with Einstein | 1950 | Corriere della Sera |
| 12 | The Saucer Has Landed | 1950 | Corriere della Sera |
| 13 | The Survivor's Story | 1950 | In quel preciso momento |
| 14 | The Caliph Awaits Us | 1950 | In quel preciso momento |
| 15 | The Collapse of the Baliverna | 1951 | Corriere della Sera |
| 16 | The Five Brothers | 1951 | Corriere della Sera |
| 17 | The Time Machine | 1952 | Corriere della Sera |
| 18 | The Gnawing Work | 1952 | Corriere d'Informazione |
| 19 | The Walls of Anagoor | 1954 | Corriere della Sera |
| 20 | The Prohibited Word | 1956 | Corriere della Sera |
| 21 | Human Greatness | 1956 | Corriere della Sera |
| 22 | The Plague | 1956 | Corriere della Sera |
| 23 | The Writer's Secret | 1958 | Corriere della Sera |
| 24 | The Late Mistaken | 1958 | Corriere della Sera |
| 25 | The Flying Carpet | 1958 | Esperimento di magia |
| 26 | The Wind | 1959 | Corriere della Sera |
| 27 | Quiz at the Prison | 1959 | Corriere della Sera |
| 28 | Confidential | 1960 | Corriere della Sera |
| 29 | The Colomber | 1961 | Corriere della Sera |
| 30 | The Jacket | 1962 | Corriere della Sera |
| 31 | The Ubiquitous | 1962 | Corriere della Sera |
| 32 | The Elevator | 1962 | Corriere della Sera |
| 33 | The Falling Girl | 1963 | Corriere della Sera |
| 34 | The Eiffel Tower | 1964 | Corriere della Sera |
| 35 | The Scandal on Via Sesostri | 1965 | Corriere d'Informazione |
| 36 | Kafka's Houses | 1965 | Corriere della Sera |
| 37 | The Bogeyman | 1967 | Corriere della Sera |
| 38 | The Scriveners | 1967 | Corriere della Sera |
| 39 | What Will Happen On October 12th? | 1967 | Corriere della Sera |
| 40 | Elephantiasis | 1967 | Corriere della Sera |
| 41 | The Count's Wife | 1967 | Corriere della Sera |
| 42 | A Difficult Evening | 1969 | Corriere della Sera |
| 43 | Alienation | 1969 | Corriere della Sera |
| 44 | A Boring Letter | 1970 | Corriere della Sera |
| 45 | Stories in Tandem | 1970 | Corriere della Sera |
| 46 | A Solicitous Young Man | 1971 | Corriere della Sera |
| 47 | Stefano Caberlot, Writer | 1974 | Il Giornale nuovo |
| 48 | Alfredo Brilli, Accountant | 1975 | Il Racconto |
| 49 | Wladimiro Ferraris, Chief Customs Inspector | 1985 | Il reggimento parte all'alba |
| 50 | Why | 1985 | Il reggimento parte all'alba |
Reception
The Bewitched Bourgeois received generally positive reviews. A starred review from Publishers Weekly described the stories as "captivating", while also praising the quality of Venuti's translation and selection of stories.[3] Valentina Polinci of the Los Angeles Review of Books wrote that it would soon be considered a "must-have volume".[1] The earlier stories, such as "Seven Floors", were generally well received.[7][6][5] Although appreciating "Panic at La Scala" as an example of Buzzati's longer fiction, The Times's John Self considered the short story (and the "very short story") to be his best works.[5]
The New York Times Book Review's Jonathan Lethem was more mixed on the collection as a whole; he praised the early stories, such as "Seven Floors", "The Seven Messengers", "The Bewitched Bourgeois" and "Panic at La Scala", but felt that Buzzati's quality declined over time, and that too many of the included stories were from that late period, suggesting that fifty stories constituted "overexpos[ure]" and that forty stories would have been more appropriate.[7] The Bewitched Bourgeois was still selected as an "Editor's Choice" staff pick by the Book Review, although with an emphasis on the quality of the early stories.[15] Christopher Taylor of Harper's Magazine considered stories like "Panic at La Scala", "Seven Floors", and "The Seven Messengers" to be "working in the vein of" Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, but felt that they lacked the "mind-bending qualities" of their works.[4]
Analysis
Buzzati's work in general has a lengthy history of being compared to Franz Kafka's, which is reflected in this collection as well.[6][7][5] Buzzati had commented that "[s]everal critics denounced my guilty similarities to Kafka even when I dispatched a telegram or filed my income tax return."[5] According to The New York Times Book Review, several stories express some of Buzzati's own "permanent insecurity" about his career in Kafka's shadow.[7] The Times compared him to a mix of Kafka and Roald Dahl.[5] Comparisons to Calvino, Edgar Allan Poe, and Borges are also seen.[7]
The New York Times Book Review considered Buzzati to have a "proclivity for hesitation, insecurity and shame", with him having been called "the bard of nervousness" in the past.[7] He had been criticized for writing works that were "middlebrow", only causing "a bourgeois shudder", being designed to frighten the middle class in Italy.[14][13] Whether or not middlebrow, which is primarily an anglophone term of controversial status, can be applied to an Italian writer's works is not clear or uncontroversial itself.[13] More positively, Venuti described Buzzati's stories as "Poe and Kafka meet [...] The Twilight Zone."[14]
Notes
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Polcini, Valentina (February 8, 2025). "Dino Buzzati's Fantastic Universe". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved April 24, 2026.
- ↑ "Research Guides: Italian Premio Strega Collection in the Library of Congress: Complete List Premio Strega Awards 1947–Present". Research Guides at Library of Congress. October 15, 2019. Retrieved April 21, 2026.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 "The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories". Publishers Weekly. Vol. 271, no. 45. November 25, 2024. ISSN 0000-0019. ProQuest 3131906825. Archived from the original on October 9, 2025. Retrieved April 24, 2026.
- 1 2 3 Tayler, Christopher (January 2025). "A Man Out of Time". Harper's Magazine. Vol. 350, no. 2096. p. 74-78. ISSN 0017-789X. ProQuest 3165157642.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Self, John (December 28, 2024). "Roald Dahl meets Kafka: the forgotten maestro of the short story". The Times. Retrieved April 22, 2026.
- 1 2 3 Naves, Mario (January 30, 2025). "New Release Collects 50 Absurdist Tales From an Italian Writer Often Compared to Kafka, Dino Buzzati". The New York Sun. Archived from the original on February 16, 2025. Retrieved April 22, 2026.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Lethem, Jonathan (August 24, 2025). "The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories". The New York Times Book Review. p. 10-11. ISSN 0028-7806. ProQuest 3242470504, Gale A852986751.
- ↑ "The Seventh Floor". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Retrieved April 25, 2026.
- ↑ "Il fischio al naso". Rivista del cinematografo (in Italian). Retrieved April 25, 2026.
- ↑ Curtin, Adrian (May 2017). "The Absurdity of Denial: Staging the American Way of Death". New Theatre Quarterly. 33 (2): 125-142. doi:10.1017/S0266464X17000045. ISSN 0266-464X. ProQuest 1886874321.
- ↑ Witt, Mary Ann (1982). ""Un Caso Clinico" and "Le Malentendu": Theatres of Translation, Tragedies of Space". The Comparatist. 6. University of North Carolina Press: 40–47. ISSN 0195-7678. JSTOR 44366685. Full access available to users of The Wikipedia Library.
- ↑ Wood, Michael (April 17, 2025). "Clean Machine: On Dino Buzzati". London Review of Books. Retrieved April 22, 2026.
- 1 2 3 Baum, Eli (September 17, 2025). "Betwixt or Bewitched? Rethinking the "Middlebrow" with Dino Buzzati". Public Books. Retrieved April 22, 2026.
- 1 2 3 Venuti, Lawrence (January 6, 2025). "The Bourgeois Shudder: Fantasy, Politics, Race". Reading in Translation. Retrieved April 23, 2026.
- ↑ "Editors' Choice / Staff Picks From the Book Review". The New York Times Book Review. August 31, 2025. p. 19. ISSN 0028-7806. ProQuest 3244908512.