For this editorial project we had to redesign the book “The Tartar Steppe” by Dino Buzzati.
Through the analysis we selected three key elements in the story: Time passing by, light/shadow and heaviness. Accordingly we started to build a series of metaphors and contrasts, helped by some relevant quotes from the book.
The first sensory gap that the book gives you it is between its small dimensions and its heavy weight (around 2 kg): the cover in fact has been filled with lead as an invisible but direct metaphor to the solid military world of the book and the general sense of the unconscious burden of life carried by the protagonist.
The image on the cover rappresent a calendar without months and weekdays with numbers crossed which it symbolize the losing ot the notion of time and the infinite waiting
The whole book inside is transformed in a flip book, which is a little game meant to show a short animation which si in fact a time-lapse of a dry plain sky, from the early morning to the night, which are the times when the story of the protagonist starts and finishes.
Many years have passed in the book in such a short narration, and the concept of time abstracts itself from the concept of existence. The fast and neat animation of the timelapse it is the shortest and clearest representation of the cycle of life, while Buzzati’s novel tells a lifetime story.
