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A Love Affair

Un Amore (A Love Affair) was the last novel by Italian journalist, artist and writer Dino Buzzati. It was first published in 1963 and has been translated in English by Joseph Green. Page text.

Connection to earlier works
Dino Buzzati first achieved widespread fame in 1940, following the publication of Il deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe)	Page text.

The main theme of the Tartar Steppe and most of his later books is man’s eternal quest for meaning in one’s life, and his inability to find it. The theme remains central in A Love Affair. However, whereas the quest for meaning is sought through the glory of war in The Tartar Steppe, in A Love Affair, love becomes the driving force of the protagonist’s life.

Plot
Antonio Dorigo is a middle-aged architect living in Milan who falls in love with a young, beautiful prostitute named Laide Anfossi.

As Antonio falls deeper in love with Laide, she starts taking advantage of his kindness. Although he realizes that Laide is lying to him, Antonio is unable to let her go.

Reception
At the time of its publication (1963) the novel shocked the public because it was unlike any other of Buzzati’s previous works. As a result, many critics gave the book scant attention. http://www.jstor.org/stable/477807?seq=1 However, some critics noted that A Love Affair shares some thematic similarities to Buzzati’s earlier works:

“Like in a Wagnerian score, some instances give rise to late motifs that repeat and chase themselves ...: the themes of anticipation, of frustration and of an indistinguishable thirst for hope”.7

Themes
Although the story is ostensibly about the unrequited love of 50-year-old Antonio Dorigo, the author uses their love affair as a medium to delve deeper into the soul of two human beings who are trapped by their environment.

In the novel, both Dorigo and Laide are prisoners. While Dorigo is psychologically imprisoned in his bourgeois world Laide, a poor, youthful prostitute, is constrained to a life of poverty in which becoming a respectable ballerina for La Scala is an almost unattainable goal.

The feeling of being unable to achieve ones goals and being trapped in a world in which the person has no control of their lives, or even of time itself,  is typical of Buzzati’s stories.

In A Love Affair, however, the author proposes love as a way out of life’s shackles:

By falling in love with Laide, Dorigo experiences an epiphany:

“Only now, finally, he had understood what the secret was. It was a very simple secret: love. All that fascinates us in this in-animated world, the forests, the plains, the streams, the mountains, the sea, the valleys, the steppes, and more, the city, buildings, stones, and more, the sky, the sunsets, the storms, and more, the snow, and more, the night, the stars, the wind, all of those things, by themselves empty and insignificant, become endowed with human significance because, although we aren’t even aware of it, they hold a presentiment of love.” Pages 147, 148

Dorigo now understands that the beauty of the world lies in appreciating the wonders of life and sharing them with one’s beloved: “When confronted with nature’s spectacles, how petty would our spiritual exaltation be if it could only concern us and it couldn’t extend toward another human being” Pages 148, 149