Seven Floors by Dino Buzzati, 1966
The magic trick:
Maintaining believable logic even through a surreal premise
What a story. Drop everything and read this one right now if you haven’t already. It’s a famous one. Perhaps you’ve read it 10 times. I had not. It’s one that had slipped through my reading lists. So glad I rectified that finally, though.
You know from the moment you grasp the premise – patients start on the seventh floor and gradually move down a floor every time their condition worsens – what fate awaits our protagonist.
What’s amazing, though – and truly sinister – is how the story executes this plot systematically and relentlessly. He keeps moving down, as expected. And you’d think surely he’ll put up a fight. But the doctors are just logical enough with their explanations that he keeps following orders and we, as readers, keep on believing the plot as realistic.
It’s death by bureaucracy.
And that’s quite a trick on Buzzati’s part.
The selection:
Giuseppe Corte didn’t need anything, but he began to chat freely with the young woman, asking for information about the clinic. In this way, he learned about the hospital’s unique practice of assigning its patients to different floors in accordance with the gravity of their illness. On the seventh floor, the top floor, only the very mildest cases were treated. Those whose forms of the illness weren’t grave, but who certainly couldn’t be neglected, were assigned to the sixth floor. More serious infections were treated on the fifth floor, and so on and so forth. Gravely ill patients were housed on the second floor; and on the first floor, those for whom all hope had been abandoned.
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