Antonio Tabucchi was an Italian writer and academic deeply in love with Portugal. His work is profoundly influenced by Portuguese literature, particularly the conceptions of 'saudade,' fiction, and heteronyms drawn from Fernando Pessoa. As an expert, critic, and translator of Pessoa, Tabucchi infused his own writing with this fascination, offering readers a unique exploration of Portuguese culture and literary tradition.
In the sweltering summer of 1938 in Portugal, a country under the fascist shadow of Spain, a mysterious young man arrives at the doorstep of Dr Pereira. So begins an unlikely alliance that will result in a devastating act of rebellion. This is Pereira's testimony.
The much lauded modern classic is now being canonised.
'A funny, sad novella about how we got here from there, and how, in our youth, "our eyes saw things differently"' The Times A private meeting, chance encounters and a mysterious tour of Lisbon haunt this moving homage to Tabucchi's adopted city In the city of Lisbon, Requiem's narrator has an appointment to meet someone on a quay by the Tagus at twelve. Misunderstanding twelve to mean noon as opposed to midnight, he is left to wait. As the day unfolds he has many unexpected encounters - with a young drug addict, a disorientated taxi driver, a cemetery keeper, the mysterious Isabel and the ghost of the late great poet Fernando Pessoa - each meeting travelling between the real and illusionary. Part travelogue, part autobiography, part fiction, Requiem becomes an homage to a country and its people, and a farewell to the past as the narrator lays claim to a literary forebear who, like himself, is an evasive and many-sided personality. 'Tabucchi is a master of illusion and allusion, and this is a literary puzzle that teases, amuses and provokes' Sunday Telegraph
A short story collection pivoting on life's ambiguities and the central question they pose in Tabucchi's fiction- is it choice, fate, accident, or even, occasionally, a kind of magic that plays a decisive role in the protagonists' lives? Set in Paris, Lisbon, Madras and New York and blended with the author's wonderfully intelligent imagination, Tabucchi reflects on the elemental aspects of the human experience, exploring grief, uncertainty, adventure, memory and love.
A masterful collection about intimacy, loneliness, and time, each inspired by different works of art, spanning the entirety of the great Italian writer's career. In Stories with Pictures, Antonio Tabucchi responds to photographs, drawings, and paintings from his dual homelands of Italy and Portugal, among other European countries. The stories in this collection spring forth from the shadows of Tabucchi's imagination, as he steps into worlds just hidden from view. From inscrutable masks of pre-Columbian gods, stamps of bright parrots and postcars of yellow cities, portraits of devilish Portuguese nuns, the way to these remote landscapes appear like a "train emerging from a thick curtain of heat." As we peer through the curtain, what we find on the other side rings distinctly human, a world charged with melancholic longing for time gone by. "Sight, hearing, voice, word" Tabucchi writes, "this flow isn't in one direction, the current is back and forth." Reading these stories, one feels the pendulum current, and the desire in this remarkable author to hold the real in the surreal.
A prize-winning international classic, first published in English in 1993, now with a new foreword by William Boyd.
Storie di viaggiatori tra decisioni e casualità, nel tentativo inquieto di scoprire cosa si cela tra le pieghe della vita. Una Toscana segreta e stregata, una stazione della Riviera, una Lisbona baudelairiana, un rallye di automobili d'epoca, un persecutore implacabile dall'aria distinta in un treno da Bombay a Madras. I racconti di Tabucchi sembrano, a una prima lettura, avventure esistenziali, ritratti di viaggiatori ironici e disperati. Poi l'apparente sintonia fra il reale e il narrato diventa all'improvviso turbamento e sconcerto. Come degli obliqui "racconti filosofici", le storie di Tabucchi si trasformano in una riflessione intorno al caso e alla scelta, un tentativo di osservare gli interstizi che attraversano il tessuto dell'esistenza. Nelle pagine di Tabucchi aleggia un'inquietudine metafisica che evoca la migliore tradizione italiana da Piero della Francesca a De Chirico, a Pirandello. Ma questo scrittore, che ama i personaggi eccentrici e le vite sbagliate, carica i suoi enigmi di una luce strana; i suoi geroglifici "polizieschi" sono le ricerche di un investigatore che non cerca risposte, ma un messaggio, un segnale, un'apparizione.
Dieser Band sammelt die schönsten Geschichten Tabucchis von den Abenteuern der Liebe, der Sprache, der Zeit. Innerhalb der heutigen italienischen Literatur zeichnet sich die Prosa Tabucchis durch die Fähigkeit aus, die Veränderungen von Stimmungen und Tonarten wahrzunehmen; sie vermag deswegen auch wie kaum eine andere, Gefühle, zarte Sehnsüchte und ratlose Leidenschaften zu portraitieren.
"La apariencia calmada de la ciudad y su vida tranquila, no le permiten a Pereira ver el aumento de la violencia contra los que se niegan a colaborar con el regimen en el Portugal de los anos treintas. La tragica muerte de Monteiro y su encuentro inesperado con el Dr. Cardoso hacen que Pereira plantee su propio papel en la situacion que vive su pais" empaque.
