Every literary critic knows there is no term more overused than Kafkaesque. These days, everything from a root canal to a long line at the DMV apparently evokes the nightmare logic of the Czech master. And yet every now and then the label actually fits. This is the case with Dino Buzzati’s Catastrophe: And Other Stories, a stunning collection of dark absurdist fables originally published in the 1960s and reissued this month by Ecco. Buzzati’s work is Kafkaesque in the truest sense: evoking not only the existential horror of modern life through dreamlogic worlds, but also Kafka’s weird sense of humor about it all.



Take “Seven Floors,” where a man named Giovanni Corte is admitted to a hospital with a unique system: patients are placed on a floor according to their symptoms. The walking corpses are hidden on the ground floor, while those like Corte with only mild symptoms relax on the seventh. through a series of bureaucratic mix-ups and bad luck—overcrowding on one floor, the staff’s holiday week on another—Corte is shuffled lower and lower toward his doom.

Or “The Epidemic,” where Colonel Ennio Molinas, the head of a government agency is harassed by an annoying coworker, Sbrinzel, who has a theory about the flu going around the office: “if you get influenza, it means you’re against the government!” Molinas shrugs off the suggestion, then starts to feel a little ill himself. He keeps trudging to work as his symptoms worsen, fending off increasingly gleeful inquiries about his health from Sbrinzel.