"The bewitched bourgeois" by Dino Buzzati (New York Review Books, 2014)

50 stories in chronological order (1936-1983). The introduction says he was a journalist on Corriere della Sera and had many stories published in it, as well as in many other journals. Every so often he collected stories into a book. He hovered on the realism/fantasy border - Magic Realism perhaps - happy to leave the reader unsure whether the non-realism was the result of the protagonist's madness. Some pieces are spoof articles using a documentary style. Some pieces (e.g. "The Saucer" and "Appointment with Einstein") are very like The Twilight Zone. A few (e.g. "The seven messengers") are Borgesian - they work on the page but would be hard to put on TV.

There's quite a range of lengths too. "Panic at La Scala" is 39 pages long. People (including Cottes, who's worried about where his son Arduino is) are inside La Scala when it's rumoured that the Morzi have provoked a riot/revolution outside. Nobody wants to leave. When Cottes does, the others think he's been killed. The other pieces are much shorter than that - "The Caliph Awaits Us" is only 0.5 pages long.

The ideas? There's quite a range of those too, though similarities emerge. "The shadow of the south" and "Personal escort" both use the idea of a man thinking that he repeatedly (and impossibly) sees the same man from afar in different places. The predictabililty of "Seven floors" and "The gnawing worm" are their point, but I wasn't impressed by the pieces. Some pieces involve someone adopting a temporary disguise or role that gradually becomes a permanent one. There are recursive or iterative stories that avoid infinite regress by ending where they began - an ouroboros structure. There are secret or strange rules.

• "The Bewitched Bourgeouis" is the first piece with an unresolvable ending - a man shot in the chest with an arrow during a country walk returns to his hotel and sees his wife.
• I like "Time Machine", looking at the complications when time goes more slowly in one town.
• In "The writer's secret" a once acclaimed writer says that after early success he deliberate wrote badly so that his rivals wouldn't be so depressed. He says that his good stuff is hidden away in a box. After his death, the box is found to be full of blank pages.
• "The Wind" seems weak

We're in the 1960s now. I think that even when the stories use structures he's used earlier, now there are better twists.

• "Confidential" is a letter from Buzzati to his editor, explaining that for 30 years someone else has been writing his acclaimed stories and has been getting most of the fees. People have been surprised that Buzzati's not rich. The writer keeps asking for more money, so Buzzanti asks for a rise.
• "The Columber" is another story where a character repeatedly sees someone/something. This time a shark is following the main character, and there are 2 twists.
• "The Jacket" falls into a sequence, but unlike some stories written decades before, there's a satisfying twist.
• In "The Falling Girl" (less than 5 pages) a girl jumps from at least the 500th floor of a skyscraper, slow enough to have brief exchanges with people on balconies. Several others are falling. At the end a couple debate the pros/cons of their life on the 27th floor - only old women pass, but at least the couple can hear the thuds.
• In "Kafka's House" Buzzati is fed up being compared to Kafka. He visits Prague.

We're in the 1970s - not the best period

• "A Boring Letter" is weak.
• "Stories in Tandem" has a good plot.

It's difficult writing this genre of story without resorting to phrases like "strangely mysterious", which after a few repetitions lose their power. I think "a yellowish color" (p.141) should just have been "yellowish".

Other reviews

• Karl Straub (The pleasurable frisson a writer like Buzzati creates on the page covers much of the same subtext as the fairytale: the inevitability of death, the mistakes we make in trying to outrun it, and the strangeness we encounter when fate breaks through society’s facade. His stories work seemingly endless variations on plots and settings that accomplish this; his characters become aware of fate early on in a tale, in the guise of a mysterious figure, or a supernatural creature, or a threat that gathers steam outside the building where they try to hide from it. Other times, the building itself becomes the threat, the instrument of fate. Many of his finest stories use the image of the tall building as both setting and metaphor.)
• Valentina Polcini (The idea of being bewitched is one of the threads that links together many of the texts in this collection, including the title story. Bewitchment for Buzzati’s characters means coming into contact with the strange side of human existence (“strange” being a high-frequency word in Buzzati), which we don’t normally see because it lies behind the repetitive yet reassuring facade of our daily routines. Discovering the irrational side of reality results in the realization of some sad truths about life or, alternatively, in the awareness that our existence would be unbearably pointless without fantasy—and this is also where the metafictional aspect of Buzzati emerges. ... Venuti also preserves the author’s attention to important recurring words, usually conjunctions or adverbs, that Buzzati uses to signal the moment when fantasy takes over ... using a variety of fantastic modes and genres: allegory, fairy tale, horror, gothic, the occult, the absurd, science fiction, even dystopian fiction.)
• Mario Naves (As a stylist, Buzzati is dour and dry, though capable of poetic and sometimes jarring turns of phrase. ... Among the finest of the tales and, in a perverse way, the funniest comes early on. “Seven Floors”)