The Tartar Steppe

This is b l e a k. I followed up a stretch of 10 middle grades fiction books with an absolutely upsetting novel about a man marooned for his entire life at a fort of no importance. This is beautifully written though. I'd recommend it if you liked Calvino or maybe Borges.

A fantastic and haunting novel. Written and published at a time, in 1938, right before the onset of WWII, the books perhaps contained a “geopolitical” dimension that would be largely absent for a reader today. But that by no means diminishes its power. A dark and dreamlike story of an officer and his life at a distant desert fortress, with its clockwork, quotidian existence, that beyond the foolish hopes and secret desires, remaining unspoken within the soldiers of the fort, is a canvass for a life empty of meaning. Mindless adherence to labyrinthine guard protocol leads to the death of a young, exuberant soldier. Minute glimpses of hope kindles within the men, and festers into delusions that they allow to sideline their careers and lives, remaining at the Fort when they could leave. And then, when the time comes to leave, it is too late. Modern life is cruel in ways not present in older ages, it drains existence of its meaning and this novel is a stark warning and frightening vision of a life lost to empty hope and the ghastly inertia of believing one “still has plenty of time.”