Catastrophe Quotes

“I knew it,” a character remarks, “trembling a little,” at the conclusion of one of these stories: “I knew it would end badly,” a statement that might almost be taken as the book’s declaration of principle. For what you will find when you read Catastrophe is an assembly of fifteen stories (to which five previously untranslated stories have been added) that are unusually singular in their effect. Do you know that sudden inversion near the end of certain disturbing tales—“The Lottery,” “Royal Jelly,” “Sandkings”—when you intuit the terrible thing that is just about to take place? In each of this collection’s stories, it’s as if Buzzati has zeroed in on that moment and asked himself, What if there was nothing else? This singular instant of dreadful predictive clarity: What if I distended it over a lifetime? He has taken the split-second between the misstep and the fall, when your foot has slipped from the ledge but gravity is still deciding what to do with you, and heightened it to a sort of cosmology.”
― Dino Buzzati, Catastrophe: And Other Stories

“For the first time in years he raised his eyes to the windows and saw, beyond the frozen roofs and under the crystal clear sky, the distant mountains gleaming, white with snow. They looked like silver clouds sailing gaily along, slow-moving, above the worries of the earth. He looked at them: for how long had he been oblivious to their existence? He thought, how different they are from us men, God, how pure and beautiful.”
― Dino Buzzati, Catastrophe: And Other Stories