The Singularity (1960) by Dino Buzzati

 Book Review

The Singularity (1960) 

by Dino Buzzati

Translated from the Italian Anne Milano Appel

New York Review of Books Edition 2024

    Italian author Dino Buzzati isn't a household name, but his  1940 novel, The Tartar Steppe (f/k/a The Stronghold) is well known to the sort of people who care about the world literary canon (i.e. me) and it serves as a major point of departure for the very well know J.M. Coetzee novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, which was turned into an absolutely insane movie starring Johnny Depp.  I bought The Singularity off the new release pile at an indie bookstore in Exeter, New Hampshire because it looked interesting and promised a prescient look at ethical issues surrounding AI- this from a book published in 1960, when AI was barely a thing.

   Also, it's a novella so it was good for vacation reading.  The story is about an Italian professor who is called away by the government to a mysterious military-type project in the Italian mountains.  There, the protagonist is introduced to an AI that fills an entire valley and a cast of interesting characters.  Everything is not as it seems, perhaps he faces great peril, etc.  If it was published today it would be tame stuff indeed but for 1960, and in Italy, wow.

   At 136 pages, it won't keep you up late, but the pay off is likewise minimal. Fun book to have available if you run into a fellow fan of The Tartar Steppe but probably not a book a general reader would seek out for any reason. The Singularity is also a good example of the type of books I'd like to be reading constantly but I just can't string them together in any meaningful way, in a way that relieves the incessant burden of deciding what to read next.