Antonio Tabucchi Books

Antonio Tabucchi (1943) is the most European and international of modern Italian writers, comparable only to Umberto Eco, with whom he has an ongoing literary discussion on the intellectual's role in society. Eco is convinced that the artist/intellectual should only organize knowledge, while Tabucchi stands up for the right of the artist, in presence of preoccupying political evolutions, to ring the warning bell when necessary. This ringing of the bell is only one of the many keys to use when reading Tabucchi's 1994 novel "Pereira declares".
This lyrical short book, probably inspired by the life of a true Portuguese journalist, narrates in an unusual testimonial third person style (maybe a police officer?), an apparently insignificant (?) episode that happened in Lisbon in the summer of 1938. Pereira, the editor of the cultural page of an afternoon newspaper, meets and befriends a young anti-regime political activist Monteiro Rossi that is willing to do anything (also write beforehand necrologies of famous authors) for a little bit of money. Monteiro Rossi, naturally gets into trouble dragging with him the at first reluctant and then convinced Pereira. The book's plot, that is the true driving force because of its fast and at the same time deep pace, is only the excuse to face the real topic. This is Pereira, his personality, his times, freedom of press, the author's love of Lisbon (where he lives for half of the year, being a professor of Portuguese literature in an Italian University), Portuguese history during the last years under the Salazar regimen, Europe's plight when dealing with fascism then and now.
All these themes are precisely the reason that determined the selection of this book of Antonio Tabucchi, among his many other beautiful works, as the intellectual flag of political opposition in 1994, against the press tycoon Silvio Berlusconi's entry in the political arena.
However, even if this made the book famous twelve years ago, and history has gone overrunning its the apparent actuality, as all works of art this novel is still enchanting to read and its subtler merits constantly emerge.
First of all we must consider modern Italian literature, greatly unknown or not translated for the English speaking public, that has most of the characteristics of postmodernism. Italy is a country culturally and sociologically removed (that considers itself as backwards) from the rest of Europe and the U.S. Italian literature reflects this belief and Italian authors think that all has been already written, so they privilege citations, irony, satire, mingling of literary types, "pastiches" and they reach their best satisfaction when "found out" or "discovered" by their cult readers that appreciate their citation abilities. "Pereira declares" is full of these citations, beginning with the authors Monteiro Rossi writes obituaries for (in Italian these are called "crocodiles", like crocodile tears) like for example Garcia Lorca, who at the time of the novel hadn't yet been killed, but would be soon, up to the French novelists of the Nineteenth Century Pereira loves and translates picking out their present meaning. The short story of Daudet's "Contes du lundì" on the Franco-Prussian War is the emblem of political frontiers and intestinal war in Europe and retains its actuality for Pereira at the moment he is speaking (1938), for the Author (1944), and for us reading now in 2006. All the Authors Tabucchi cites, Balzac, Bernanos (now long forgotten for many), Maupassant have some eternally true intuitions, but we must know them well to fully appreciate what Tabucchi wants to convey. The same must be said for Pessoa (1888-1935), the great Portuguese poet, studied by Tabucchi, which introduced the great season of poetical "avanguard" and sang of the all Portuguese sentiment of "Saudade" a yearning or nostalgia made up of suffering and sweatness, a longing for the past and the future together, a category of the spirit "that is at the same time a form of suicide" (Tabucchi). Pereira longs for and constantly relives his love for his wife and his youth in Coimbra and finds them again in Monteiro Rossi and Marta, his girlfriend.
Tabucchi, like in other novels of his, utilizes a journalist, police like approach and with this literary technique he remembers Leonardo Sciascia and Frederich Durrenmatt, that have explored this literary stile before him with great results.
If you can find it watch the 1995 movie "Sostiene Pereira" directed by Roberto Faenza with Marcello Mastroianni as Pereira and Daniel Auteuil as Doctor Cardoso, that faithfully follows the book and helps to visualize Tabucchi's poetry.
Read this book to have an idea of the best of modern Italian literature and to taste some of the greater European problems of yesterday and today.

Tabucchi has created a monumental work: how conscious are we of our actions and our motives, how do we experience our everyday life and what awareness do we have of it versus the inner sense of ourselves.It measures up to Anna Karenina.
Tabucchi deserves the Nobel prize.

This tale, told as though it were a documented testimony resulting from some unidentified investigative process, is a complete and believable characterisation of a very dull but gentle man, Dr. Pereira. While an editor of a no-hum local newspaper in 1938 Lisbon, he struggles to maintain his invisible and intentionally unexpressive life by ignoring the political repression and censorship mounting around him. He takes pride in the fact that his paper is apolitical.

Through the subtlest of facts and inferences, all easily grasped, this book enables readers to feel that they're discovering Pereira all by themselves, with almost no assistance from the unseen narrator or author. It's as though Tabucchi has the map but you're the driver. This style is delicate and unobtusive yet it delivers a sense of realness and a rich atmosphere unexpected in a story of just 136 pages. You feel the breeze rolling in off the Atlantic and along those streets. To the same degree, something so trivial as the presence of sugar in lemonade informs us exactly of the level of frustration Pereira experiences vis-a-vis his own new and atypical responses to people and events. He can't comprehend a rationale for his behaviour but he's painfully aware of the danger he's posing to the safe life he's made for himself.

This is Tabucchi's most famous book. I was introduced to it by a friend in northern Italy who's read every book he's written, including his later 2001 book, "Si Sta Facendo Sempre piu Tardi" ("It's Getting Later all the Time"). This hasn't yet been released in North America but Amazon lists it as orderable.

Pereira is a reluctant hero of our time: an inadequate, faintly absurd man who tries to live a decent personal life in a political setting that allows little room for such illusions. Fascist Portugal in 1938, like some other "civilized" nations closer to our own day, is poisoned by false certainties and the corrupt exercise of vindictive power. Only proclamations of pious conformity are allowed. Pereira, himself a pious and harmless man, finds himself gradually forced, through circumstances beyond his control, to assume the role of a full human being, and to stand up, however briefly, for what is right. Pereira's moral resurrection is handled with great delicacy by Tabucchi. The English translation is another plus: Patrick Creagh is one of the finest translators working today, and here does full justice to Tabucchi's restrained and thoughtful prose. The cumulative effect is remarkable. If they read English over in Stockholm, this book could put its author in contention for the Nobel Prize.

What was going on in Tabucchi's mind while writing this gem of a novel? Pereira won't say, but certainly he was trying to investigate the deepest feelings of a man traveling to his freedom, he declares. A tiny book with great implications.

Tabucchi's works are settled on the margins that are not a limit, but instead carry within possibilities, they allow characters, events and situations to turn into their opposites in accordance to the dim and creative field of his fantasy. During an ingenuous first reading, his books are infinitely enjoyable, but yet much more joyful for those who accept sharing Tabucchi's position on the margins of literature and philosophy in a fruitful and co-creative dialogue with the author.

This book is one of the more enigmatic of Tabucchi's. Spino, who works for a morgue, is a man unwilling to make a commitment to marriage while enjoying a long-term relationship, a man unwilling to finish his medical degree and "make something of himself". On evening, a young unidentified body "Carlo Nobodi" is brought to the morgue - the victim of a police raid / shootout. Spino becomes obsessed with identifying the person and traces Carlo back to his school days without truly succeeding at putting a person or family behind the name.

The story is part detective story - tracing an identity through a priest that befriended Carlo, through the jacket he wore that had been given to his father (uncle?), through the small boarding school in which Carlo resided, and through Spino's connections in the seamy underside of the port. Memory, dreams, death and commitment all wind their way through the plot.

This is another fine book by Tabucchi which forces one to consider connections, life, death and identity. I recommend it.

Tabucchi's works are settled on the margins that are not a limit, but instead carry within possibilities, they allow characters, events and situations to turn into their opposites in accordance to the dim and creative field of his fantasy. During an ingenuous first reading, his books are infinitely enjoyable, but yet much more joyful for those who accept sdharing Tabucchi's position on the margins of literature and philosophy in a fruitful and co-creative dialogue with the author.

The first time I read this book was when I also read for the first time Carrere's The Mustache - a fortunate accident as they both pose a question of identity. Tabucchi sets his tale in India in the form of an unnamed man trying to find a man, perhaps his brother, who has been missing for about a year. His search takes him to a brothel in Bombay, to a Bombay hospital, to the Theosophical Society in Madras, to the library of a religious order in Goa ... Along the way he encounters a dying Jain, a deformed saddhu/fortune teller, a former Philadelphia mailman, a photographer of human misery ... An interesting story, well written, with an unexpected ending. A movella well worth your time.

This Medicis Prize('89) winning book is an exploration of the frontiers of identity within very ancient India. It may all be a dream as the "Author's Note" which precedes this 100 page text describes the narrative as an "insomnia" and a "search for a shadow". You can make of that what you like but those evocative sentences only partially set the tone for Tabucchi's book is a playful series of encounters that his unnamed narrator-protaganist has with fellow travelers and interesting Indian characters along the way to finding a missing friend. The several encounters read like enquiries, but pleasant ones, and ones with philosophical as well as humorous overtones(in one encounter identity is compared to a suitcase). Some of the sequences are so strange you think it all must be a dream as when a female thief breaks into the narrators hotel room only to be invited to stay the night. Other meetings are full of a very engaging and speculation rich kind of conversation as in the meeting with the Hugo and Pessoa quoting eastern intellectual. If it is all a dream it is a very literate one. The last meeting takes place in the old Portugese port of Goa and there the narrator meets a lovely charming stranger to share a dinner with as he waits for a chance to spy a glimpse of his old searched for friend. But as they eat the narrator relates his "story' in a way that makes one suspect there was no one and nothing to search for after all(modern fiction indeed it is). But you are left after putting this book down with a feeling of having had several intriguing conversations and having met a lovely woman. Not at all a bad feeling. An insomnia well spent.

The traveller is someoene who is looking for a friend who got lost in India, but we realize very soon that he's actually looking for himself. A trip full of incredible encounters with people who are the soul of India, and places described in such a way that we could almost smell, hear and see what the author felt while he was there.

This small little book is a clever idea. The book is a wonderful photographic biography of the great Portuguese poet from the 20th century - Fernando Pessoa. Even if one does not know anything about Pessoa, this book provides a wonderful pictorial view of what his life was. Here, one will find pictures on almost every aspect of the poet's life, from his birth certificate, to family pictures, including pictures of letters, his typewriter, and terrific pictures of Lisbon in the early part of the 20th century.

Antonio Tabucchi introduction gives us a clear and well written explanation of Fernando Pessoa's importance for the literature of the 20th century. I highly recommend this book. This is an excellent introduction to Pessoa.

Lovers of experimental literary fiction will celebrate this newly translated novel by "the most respected name in Italian fiction of the past twenty years." Antonio Tabucchi, winner of numerous European prizes and translated into eighteen languages, stretches the limits of narrative as he traces his characters' searches for meaning, especially through their relationships with other people. Episodes from his own life provide inspiration and narrative context for those timely moments which reveal his characters' emotional crises.

Seventeen different men write letters to the women who have dominated their lives, and as each man reminisces about his life and love, he reveals the circumstances of the inevitable breakup and how the broken relationship has haunted him for years ever after. The eighteenth letter is written by a woman, a grand finale addressed to the men severally, which offers advice and puts their experiences into a wider context.

The speakers live throughout Europe--on a Greek island, along a river in Italy, and in Paris (with a side trip to Brazil), and one speaker has "not made" a journey to Samarkand (Uzbekistan). They include a theatre director, a dying man, an architect, a faculty member, a Jewish harpist who escaped the war, a character actor, a composer, and a widower with two children. Each wrestles with a love story from the past and its continuing effect on his present.

Impressionistic and poetic, this novel is not a narrative in the traditional sense. Abstract ideas and images, sometimes dream-like and sometimes nightmarish, reveal life's suffering. More a series of memoirs or first-person stories than a novel, the book examines our differing concepts of time and our different reactions to the past at various points in our lives. Most of the speakers are involved in creative arts, and the novel also celebrates their creativity and the uniqueness of their individual creations. Sometimes humorous, especially in the episode involving a 1980's interpretation of Hamlet, the novel is also self-conscious and philosophical. Free form prose takes the reader into a world of circular stories and repeating motifs.

European in its literary focus, this novel considers serious questions of identity, and it does not hesitate to flout literary convention to accomplish the emotional effects for which the author obviously strives. Providing a detailed Postscript, in which he explains the events from his own life which inspired the episodes in this book, the author also provides an intimate view of the creation and development of this work of literary fiction. An experimental "novel" for which a star rating is not appropriate. n Mary Whipple

Pereira, periodista dedicado a la página cultural de un periódico de "medio pelo", con una vida monótona, solitaria y sin mucha vibración, conoce repentinamente a un joven llamado Monteiro Rossi, quien entra a colaborarle escribiendo necrológicas anticipadas. El tema de la muerte ronda la mente de Pereira de manera distante, fría, casi que académica. Con la llegada de Monteiro Rossi, a través de la escritura sobre la muerte comienza la apología hacia la vida. Pereira termina conviertiendose en un protector para Monteiro, cuya vida es un total misterio para su jefe y amigo. Sostiene Pereira que usted se lo va a leer en un abrir y cerrar de ojos.

"Requiem" is Antonio Tabucchi's praise for Lisbon. It describes the journey of one man through the Portugalise city, where he meets some people, dead and alive, in the otherwise deserted city.

The peculiarity of the character is the fact that he has lost his superego, with the consequences of his id, the subconscious fludding his contious mind, hence makim him live in a sort of dreamworld. And from that world come the dead of his past.

The book is slightly semi-artistic, and it's message is left to be speculated about. And even if the basic premise of the story is intriquing, it fails to measure up to the potential it contains.

A short, nice read, wich doesn't offer anything to think about.

The lightness of Tabucchi's Requiem makes it a very easy book to like. It helps to be at least a little bit familiar with the Portugese poet and author Fernando Pessoa who is the figure Tabucchi is to meet. The novella is very short (107 pages but lots of chapters so lots of white space and big print) and really more on the amusing than philosophical side. The little conversations read like little asides but soon one realizes that is what the book is, a little aside. There are some amusing references made about modern literature that could very well apply to the book we are reading and also a very interesting reference to a story written that later came true(a kind of mini meditation on how fact and fiction mimic each other or follow the same laws, the same could be said for life and dreams) but the book purposely stays on the surface of things. Food is the real center of the book. That is the most substantial and sustaining ritual at the heart of life, at least that apsect of life that is most real it seems to Tabucchi. So the books pages pass, each meeting a chance for conversations and most of the conversations are just small talk. Kind of like life. It is clear the events are all dreamed and so Tabucchi is free to talk to both friends and relations living and dead. But they say the same kinds of things to each other in the dream world that they did in real life. And the dream world is little different than the real world. That is the charm of the book. Life is a dream, so eat.

Requiem: A Hallucination is a book in which the narrator is obviously a persona of the author. The action takes place within a single day - the action being a dream, an hallucination of the narrator. The narrator is introduced as he is annoyed that the person he is to meet has missed their appointment at 12 noon - only to realize that 12 to a ghost is more likely midnight. The person he is to meet is not explicitly identified but is most likely the poet Pessoa.

The narrative then covers the time until the midnight meeting. In this time the narrator meets a drug addict in the park, a seller of lottery tickets, a gypsy who reads his fortune, a dead friend, a madame of an unsavory hotel, his deceased father, a barkeeper, a painter of details from the Temptation of St. Anthony, a lighthouse keeper's wife who is caretaker for a house in which he once lived, a former lover, a seller of stories, and finally the intended guest. Along the way one gathers recipes, literary history, a bit of philosophy ...

I highly recommend this book; it is an excellent text to first encounter Tabucchi.

This book suplies a very rich mix of portuguese culture, Lisbon City and a strugle of a narator to find meanings in his subconcient. The author takes the reader in a journey thoug Lisbon and at the same time in a journey to his memories, doubts and feelings, meeting people from his past, and characters that represent parts of him self, like the "seller of stories". All of wich is seasoned by the narrators love of the food of Portugal. Finally he gets to confront some realy important characters in his unconcient and ends up arguing whiht who we can supose to be Fernando Pessoa -a poet- or Sigmund Freud -a Psychiatrist- Reading this book gives me the feeling that the best things in life are the simple things, not meaning that all the rest must not be dealt with. If you like stories abuot the inside world of characters, you wil ask yourself how could so much be put in few pages, and at the same time be a special 'travel giude` to Lisbon.

The lightness of Tabucchi's Requiem makes it a very easy book to like. It helps to be at least a little bit familiar with the Portugese poet and author Fernando Pessoa who is the figure Tabucchi is to meet. The novella is very short (107 pages but lots of chapters so lots of white space and big print) and really more on the amusing than philosophical side. The little conversations read like little asides but soon one realizes that is what the book is, a little aside. There are some amusing references made about modern literature that could very well apply to the book we are reading and also a very interesting reference to a story written that later came true(a kind of mini meditation on how fact and fiction mimic each other or follow the same laws, the same could be said for life and dreams) but the book purposely stays on the surface of things. Food is the real center of the book. That is the most substantial and sustaining ritual at the heart of life, at least that apsect of life that is most real it seems to Tabucchi. So the books pages pass, each meeting a chance for conversations and most of the conversations are just small talk. Kind of like life. It is clear the events are all dreamed and so Tabucchi is free to talk to both friends and relations living and dead. But they say the same kinds of things to each other in the dream world that they did in real life. And the dream world is little different than the real world. That is the charm of the book. Life is a dream, so eat.

Like many of Tabucchi's other works, this book is set in Portugal, and this time most of the action takes place in the more provincial northern city of Oporto. The novel opens there as Manolo the gypsy finds a headless body.

The Lisbon journalist, Firmino, working for the tabloid O Acontecimento, and a man of literary ambitions of his own, is sent to Oporto to follow the unfolding story. This book follows his investigation as he discovers the identity of the dead man, why the crime was committed and the perpetrators. Tabucchi, never one to write a simple and straightforward story, doesn't begin to do so here. Although the reader can learn the identity of the dead man without even opening the book and the crime is solved with very little effort, there are undercurrents that wend their way through every page of this novel.

Two people assist Firmino in his quest: Dona Rosa, the woman who runs the pension where Firmino stays in Oporto, and Don Fernando, a lawyer who is better known as Attorney Loton because of his strong resemblance to the actor Charles Laughton. Both Dona Rosa and Fernando seem a little too sure of themselves, a little too well-connected, to be genuine, but Tabucchi manages to pull this off without resorting to cliches.

The crime is based on an actual event that occurred in 1966, during the time of the Salazar dictatorship, although the novel is set in present-day Portugal. However, the fact that much has remained unchanged in Portugal is a point not to be missed. The crime, itself, involves drug smuggling and police corruption and brutality by the Guardia National.

The characters seem to be, for the most part, outsiders, from Firmino, himself, to the luckless Damasceno Monteiro, to the gypsies, to the transvestite who actually witnessed the killing.

Firmino, who files one story after the other regarding this crime, is finally handed all the evidence he needs on a silver platter...right along with the head of Damasceno Monteiro. It is at this moment that Firmino realizes that he is a pawn and that Don Fernando, huffing and puffing, is leading him on.

As is usually the case, the police do not make certain relevant facts public, but these are just the facts the public needs to know in order to ensure that justice prevail. It is up to poor Firmino to reveal these bits of hidden information, to make sure the whole affair is not swept under the rug and neatly forgotten. Tabucchi does not provide us with an altogether satisfactory ending, but he does hold open the small possibility that justice will be done.

This is a thoughtful novel. The characters are well-drawn, the descriptions of Oporto are engaging and the prose is smooth and even. The book is also rich in detail. Firmino's driving ambition is to write about Elio Vittorini and his influence on the Portuguese novel and he speaks of finding Lukacs's methods useful to his studies. Don Fenando speaks extensively of being greatly influenced by the legal scholar Hans Kelsen, even having gone so far as to follow him to Berkeley and Geneva as a student. "His theories about the Grundnorm had become my obsession," Don Fernando says.

This is heady stuff, but Tabucchi handles it well. Don Fernando often speaks of others, including Freud, Mitscherlich and Jean Amery as well. Fernando, though, finally chooses to leave theory behind and opt for action instead, defending those who had suffered unnecessarily in courts of law. Don Fernando's choice of action-over-words has a profound influence on Firmino.

For a book about such a heinous crime, The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro is surprisingly gentle. Thoughtful and extremely well-written, it echoes lightly long after one has finished the last page.

I am a die-hard Antonio Tabucchi fan and had ordered The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro prior to its release by the publisher. Read my review in this context.

The novel begins with a gypsy finding a corpse ... the initial scene is interesting in terms of the socio-political critique of the Portugese/Spanish treatment of the gypsies. Like Tabucchi's previously published Fernando Pessoa, the main character is a journalist; the story moves in a direction different than that implied by the opening scene. However, the expectation of the exploration of socio-political nature is met.

While I prefer Tabucchi's work outside of the "thriller" genre of the last two novels, his writing (and its translation) are so well done that the genre is unimportant - in any genre, he writes stories that make you think as well as making you loath to set the book down.

If you like literary thrillers, The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro is certainly in the same category as Canone Inverso, Class Trip, and The Name of a Bullfighter all of which are in some way masterful.

Letter from Casablanca is a collection of unrelated short stories. While Tabucchi shows the same skill and control that he shows in his novellas, I'll admit to a preference for the latter. However, the title story of this collection is not to be missed - it purports to be a letter written to a sister whom the letter's author has not contacted for 18 years. They had been split - the boy to Argentina, the girl to "up North" after a family catastrophe.

"Voices" is a tale told from the perspective of an individual who mans a "crisis clinic line". "Theatre" is set in colonial Africa where an Englishman entertains a young Portuguese colonial functionary with weekly theater.

If you enjoy short stories or have read Tabucchi's novellas, you should read this collection - and everyone should read the title story, "Saturday Afternoon" is a family tale, again of loss and separation, of "hiding your head under the sand". The boy in a family that has suffered the lost of the father, hides himself in his Latin lessons.

"Heavenly Bliss" is of an artistic young woman accepting a job as a personal secretary who serves more as a companion to an older woman with an interest in all things Japanese.

Yes, boring guy is right. If you've never been on a real vespa, or is you've only driven one on the freeway in Houston, this may be boring, but anyone who's ever taken to the road on a proper bike will love the photos alone. It chronicals a lifestyle and trying to advertise for something that everyone's already doing is easy. Indispensibly cool when trying to explain to people what you ride.

People trying to artsy about their memories of Vespa's, it's a non-electric yawn machine...pass it by.

I don't know what that other review is all about. If you own a vespa you'll love this. TONS of old ads, calendars, factory shots etc give a great overview of the vespa legend.