Dino Buzzati - Seven Floors PDF

‘Seven Floors’ is a Kafkaesque tale (but more deserving of that epithet; Buzzati has a style all his own) about Giuseppe Corte, a mildly feverish man admitted to the highest floor of a sanatorium where he is told his stay will be brief, the lower floors being reserved for the progressively worse.

Corte observes the ground floor with a gloomy fear. Certain circumstances prevail and he is required – only temporarily, he is assured – to be moved to the sixth floor, to the fifth, to the fourth…, the doctors soothing his anxieties each time. That the reader can see what will happen long before Corte does is partly what makes the story. He ends up, inevitably, consigned to a darkened ground floor room. There could be no other ending.

(As a side note, there is another story in this collection about an influenza virus contracted by people who are disloyal to the government, but perhaps that’s a bit too close to the bone for these times.)

Seven Floors by Dino Buzzati

One morning in March, after a night’s train journey, Giovanni Corte arrived in the town

where the famous nursing home was. He was a little feverish, but he was still

determined to walk from the station to the hospital, carrying his small bag.

Although his was an extremely slight case, in the very earliest stages, Giovanni Corte

had been advised to go to the well-known sanatorium, which existed solely for the care

of the particular illness from which he was suffering. This meant that the doctors were

particularly competent and the equipment particularly pertinent and efficient.........................