Antonio Tabucchi was een Italiaanse schrijver en academicus, die diep verliefd werd op Portugal. Zijn werk is diepgaand beïnvloed door de Portugese literatuur, met name door de concepten van 'saudade', fictie en heteroniemen ontleend aan Fernando Pessoa. Als expert, criticus en vertaler van Pessoa, verwerkte Tabucchi deze fascinatie in zijn eigen schrijven, waarmee hij lezers een unieke verkenning van de Portugese cultuur en literaire traditie bood.
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
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.
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."
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.
Hypochondria, insomnia, restlessness, and yearning are the lame muses of these brief pages. I would have liked to call them Extravaganzas . . . because many of them wander about in a strange outside that has no inside, like drifting splinters. . . . Alien to any orbit, I have the impression they navigate in familiar spaces whose geometry nevertheless remains a mystery; let’s say domestic thickets: the interstitial zones of our daily having to be, or bumps on the surface of existence . . . In them, in the form of quasi-stories, are the murmurings and mutterings that have accompanied and still accompany me: outbursts, moods, little ecstasies, real or presumed emotions, grudges, and regrets. —Antonio Tabucchi on The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico
THE PRIZEWINNING MODERN MASTERPIECE BY THE AUTHOR OF PEREIRA MAINTAINS
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.
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.