Journey to the Land of the Flies and Other Travels
By Aldo Buzzi
Translated by Ann Goldstein
Random House, 150 pages, $23
More than five years ago, I read in The New Yorker “Chekhov in Sondrio,” now one of the four essays, for lack of a better word, that make up Italian writer Aldo Buzzi’s first book to be translated into English. Back then, I clipped the article, read and reread it, mesmerized by the omnivorous literary imagination on display.
Rereading the essay, I found that the magic continued to work, beginning with the quoted letter from Saul Steinberg to Buzzi (they met as architecture students in Milan before the war): “I have enlarged some early Russian postcards, and looking at them one enters into that world, just before our birth–a most attractive and comprehensible time, with people in uniform, soldiers, students, civil servants, dogs, horses, a tearoom, a printer’s on the second floor, a man in a long overcoat walking with hands clasped behind him.”
Instead of postcards being described, we are reading the version of Russia that has come to Buzzi from books–from memoirs, novels, biographies, poetry, a miscellany of writings read by a civilized person of the old school. The writing is clear, precise, and the telling authenticity does not depend on us knowing anything about the “real” Buzzi.
His opening sentence establishes the tone and the authority of the writer: “In Milan many years ago, among the trees of our `Summer Garden’ there was a Russian isbas (a long house). I remember the great logs of dark wood, the veranda, where an old maidservant (perhaps I am getting this mixed up with Gogol) welcomed guests with a deep bow.”
We are in a country created by Chekhov, Bulgakov, Gogol, Gorky, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Joseph Roth, Celine, Victor Shklovsky. The essay is a heaping of Buzzi’s reading. He is a rummager, a browser, a vandal, a scavenger.
In the course of the essay, totally free of didactic purpose, is a list of all the available types of vodka, ranging from vodka with saffron to a vodka flavored with sorb apples (“Esenin’s favorite,” Buzzi notes). We are also given the 14 categories of state employees, ranging from chancellor of the state down to the collegiate registrar, created by Peter the Great.
To place Buzzi in the English tradition, we think of Isaac Disraeli, John Aubrey, Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, while in America we have Edward Dahlberg and Guy Davenport–all a noble company. Still, the exact charm of Buzzi eludes me. His disposition is certainly sunnier than those of the rather phlegmatic authors just noted, but that’s probably because he’s a Northern Italian, with the cheerful melancholy one reads in Montale.
Always a flesh and blood man, Buzzi never allows the mask to crack, never lets anything really disgustingly peculiar insinuate itself into the essay, which is written in the spirit of a very wise confessor who has heard everything, knows everything.
Buzzi is partial to the odor of human beings. He mentions that Tolstoy is said to have smelled of cypress wood, that Joan of Aragon is said to have had a bosom smelling of ripe peaches, and as far as Buzzi knows, it is a smell that has never been attributed to any other woman. Once, having studied her portrait in the Royal Academy in London, he writes, “I walked along Duke Street and turned immediately into Jermyn Street, heading toward the shop of the famous perfumer Floris. I wanted to ask if there exists, or ever had existed, a perfume of ripe peaches. But then I let it go. The vein of madness that runs in the Spanish branch of the Hapsburgs goes back to Joan of Aragon; and perhaps it is also in those who look at her too intensely.”
Again, the pleasure of Buzzi is in his refusal to be crazy, to be truly obsessional, to be mad, even though he is as taken by feet as he is by human odors. In another essay Buzzi remembers a moment in Djakarta, “A young woman sitting at the next table with some other people was showing off her beautiful feet, at once thin and soft, brown on top and pink underneath, on which no shoe had left the slightest mark. In Indonesia feet are considered the most fascinating part of the female body, and everyone knows what small female feet mean to the Japanese; it is also known that in Vienna around 1910, the tram stops were always crowded with groups of gentlemen waiting to admire the small feet of pretty women poking out from under their skirts for an instant as they boarded the car.”
“Chekhov in Sondrio” is likely to be Buzzi’s masterpiece, with Chekhov finally appearing in the last section. “I was born just in time to see the Russia of Chekhov. It was at the home of my paternal grandmother, in Sondrio, on the Piazzi Prospect. . . .” Rather than quote the rest of the section, I will note just the last line and leave the rest to your imagination: “A response become proverbial, which, now that he is dead, is all that remains of Patato on this earth.”
The other essays are not to be slighted. The “land of the flies” is Sicily, and while Buzzi has not written a novel as great as “The Leopard,” he is an honorable companion of De Lampedusa in his ability to evoke the reality of Sicily. He stays at the house of a famous Sicilian actor, Angelo Musco. “The maidservant appeared. A gentle face, a nice white apron over a work dress of pale blue, a color repulsive to flies but not to man–the ideal person to make a house comfortable.”
In the final essay, travels to Djakarta, Gorganzola and London are conflated with memories of being a student with Steinberg in Milan. After taking particular care in describing a wonderful restaurant visited in Crescenzago on his way to Gorganzola, Buzzi is asked by someone much later if the restaurant still exists, “The sudden question was followed by silence that became more and more embarrassing . . . and also keep in mind that in the earthly paradise–the Garden of Eden–Adam’s happiness lacked only the navel of Eve, who, not being born of woman, like Adam, did not have one–a detail that many painters and sculptors have forgotten. I will say more: for a Turk or an Egyptian–that is, for anyone fanatical about belly dancing–Eve would be lacking something essential; but even for one of the unfaithful, a female belly without the navel would be a terrible disappointment. . . .”
“Journey to the Land of the Flies” will go on my little shelf of books that I take down to dip into, to remember, beside “First Love,” by Turgenev, “The Grandmothers,” by Glenway Wescott, “Pensees,” by Pascal and “The Short History of Decay,” by E.M. Cioran. Please give yourself the pleasure of traveling with Aldo Buzzi in this wonderful, shimmering book.
