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.
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.
Message from the Shadows is a new collection featuring Antonio Tabucchi's finest short stories, spanning the breadth of his career. These playful tales explore Tabucchi's signature themes, from his inventive, lyrical meditations on language, art, and philosophy, to his fascination with the passage of time, and the mystery of storytelling.
Winner of the 2018 Italian Prose in Translation Award A metaphysical detective story about love and existence from the Italian master, Antonio Tabucchi. When Tadeus sets out to find Isabel, his former love, he soon finds himself on a metaphysical journey across the world, one that calls into question the meaning of time and existence and the power of words. Isabel disappeared many years ago. Tadeus Slowacki, a Polish writer, her former friend and lover, has come back to Lisbon to learn of her whereabouts. Rumors abound: Isabel died in prison under Salazar's regime, or perhaps wasn't arrested at all. As Tadeus interviews one old acquaintance of hers after the next, a chameleon-like portrait of a young, ideological woman emerges, ultimately bringing Tadeus on a metaphysical journey across the continent. Constructed in the form of a mandala, For Isabel is the spiraling search for an enigma, an investigation into time and existence, the power of words, and the limits of the senses. In this posthumous work Tabucchi creates an ingenious narration, tracing circles around a lost woman and the ultimate inaccessible truth.
The much lauded modern classic is now being canonised.
As the collection's title suggests, time's passage is the fil rouge of these stories. All of Tabucchi's characters struggle to find routes of escape from a present that is hard to bear, and from places in which political events have had deeply personal ramifications for their own lives. Each of the nine stories in Time Ages in a Hurry is an imaginative inquiry into something hidden or disguised, which can be uncovered not by reason but only by feeling and intuition, by what isn't said. Disquieted and disoriented yet utterly human in their loves and fears, the characters in these vibrant and often playful stories suffer from what Tabucchi once referred to as a "corrupted relationship with history." Each protagonist must confront phantoms from the past, misguided or false beliefs, and the deepest puzzles of identity--and each in his or her own way ends up experiencing "an infinite sense of liberation, as when finally we understand something we'd known all along and didn't want to know."
The story unfolds with a young man's mysterious death during a police raid, sparking the curiosity of Spino, the morgue attendant who seeks to uncover the truth behind the false identity of the victim. His quest for identity leads to profound reflections on life and death, prompting existential questions about existence and the elusive nature of understanding. Tabucchi weaves a cautionary tale that explores the unattainable nature of knowledge and the idea that some individuals embody hope and possibility within themselves.
Set in the sultry August of the late twentieth century, the story revolves around Tristano, a dying hero of the Italian Resistance. He invites a writer to his bedside to recount his life, exploring themes of love, war, devotion, and betrayal. The narrative delves into the fleeting nature of existence and the complexities of storytelling, questioning the essence of heroism and how experiences slip away even as they are lived. Antonio Tabucchi's novel is a poignant reflection on memory and the human condition.
Set against the backdrop of the Azores Islands, this collection weaves enchanting and hallucinatory tales through the eyes of an Italian writer exploring local legends and histories. The narrative delves into themes of love and loss, showcasing the poignant relationship between a restaurant owner and an Azorean fisherman during WWII. It also captures the thrill of historical whaling expeditions, the impact of shipwrecks, and offers a whimsical perspective on humanity through the lens of a whale.
THE PRIZEWINNING MODERN MASTERPIECE BY THE AUTHOR OF PEREIRA MAINTAINS