Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Review of Contemporary Fiction, published by Thomson Gale on March 22, 2007. The length of the article is 537 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Antonio Tabucchi. It's Getting Later All the Time.(Book review)
Author: Irving Malin
Publication: The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 27Issue: 1Page: 169(1)

Article Type: Book review

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Siempre!, published by Edicional Siempre on April 20, 2000. The length of the article is 1010 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Antonio Tabucchi: "El misterio: ser uno y ser muchos".(escritor Italiano)(TT: Antonio Tabucchi: "The mystery, be one and be many".)(TA: Italian writer)(Entrevista)
Author: Adriana Cortés
Publication: Siempre! (Refereed)
Date: April 20, 2000
Publisher: Edicional Siempre
Volume: 46Issue: 2444Page: 65

Article Type: Entrevista

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Proceso, published by CISA Comunicacion e Informacion, S.A. de C.V. on March 31, 2002. The length of the article is 3688 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: "Se está haciendo cada vez más tarde": novela epistolar de Tabucchi en defensa de la palabra.(Antonio Tabucchi, autor)(Entrevista)
Author: Sanjuana Martínez
Publication: Proceso (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 31, 2002
Publisher: CISA Comunicacion e Informacion, S.A. de C.V.
Issue: 1326Page: 68(4)

Article Type: Entrevista

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Proceso, published by CISA Comunicacion e Informacion, S.A. de C.V. on March 24, 2002. The length of the article is 632 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Antonio Tabucchi: "En Italia vivimos un totalitarismo".(escritor)(TT: Antonio Tabucchi: "in Italy we are living a totalitarianism".)(TA: writer)(Artículo Breve)
Author: Sanjuana Martínez
Publication: Proceso (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 24, 2002
Publisher: CISA Comunicacion e Informacion, S.A. de C.V.
Page: 47

Article Type: Artículo Breve

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on March 22, 1997. The length of the article is 3165 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the supplier: Antonio Tabucchi is often dubbed as Italy's most celebrated novelist since the 1970s. Tabucchi is classified as a postmodern writer since his writings reflect his doubt of the continuing dynamism of the literary forms that prevailed during the time of his predecessors even as he himself still engages in these types of writing. On the other hand, the very ethical nature of his fiction also shows Tabucchi to be a contemporary Catholic writer. His novels, which include 'Piazza d'Italia,' 'Requiem,' 'Sostiene Pereira,' and 'Il filo dell'orizzonte,' reveal his postmodern, Catholic type of writing.

Citation Details
Title: Antonio Tabucchi: postmodern Catholic writer.(Italian Literature Today)
Author: Charles D. Klopp
Publication: World Literature Today (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 1997
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: v71Issue: n2Page: p331(4)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Italica, published by Thomson Gale on September 22, 2006. The length of the article is 13877 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Si sta facendo sempre piu tardi, Autobiografie altrui, e Tristano muore di Antonio Tabucchi: dove va il romanzo?(Contemporary Prose Fiction)
Author: Flavia Brizio-Skov
Publication: Italica (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 83Issue: 3-4Page: 666(25)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Not just shorter, but lesser Tabucchi
I am more interested in the fiction by Antonio Tabucchi touching on sociopolitcal issues (notably police corruption) such as PERIERA DECLARES and THE MISSING HEAD OF DAMASCENO MONTEIRO than in the wispier tales of domestic and romantic misunderstandings. The stories in this collection I like best are those with a backdrop of terrorism and revenge, the title story and "The Trains that Go to Madras." Both have substantial accretions of irony and very apolitical, conventional male narrators. "Bitterness and Clouds" also touches on politics, though focused primarily on politics within academia (Tabucchi IS a professor--of Portuguese literature at the University of Siena).

Many of the other stories are slight and unengaging, including one set in Manhattan, "Sleight of Hand" (which like MISSING HEAD features a crime reporter. The only one of the stories in the collection that I actively dislike is "Anywhere Out of the World," a drab ghost story with one very long run-on paragraph (taking six of the eleven pages of the story). "Waiting for Winter" strikes me as way too pat an homage to THE SPOILS OF POYNTON. "Cinema," the story that closes the collection, is also disappointing, not to mention very oblique. If it is supposed to be a fable, the point was not made.

In a two-page "Author's Note," Tabucchi expounds on ambiguity. Stories simplify the flux and complication of life. Riddles without solutions fail as stories--which is not to contend that stories must explain everything. Indeed, the two stories I like best in the collection require the reader to do work of inference/interpretation.

Little Ambiguities
Tabucchi writes both novellas and short story collections. He's a minimalist but one who chooses his few words well. His writing seems slight at first and his plots almost nonexistent but there is a momentum that builds as you get to know him from story to story, his deceptively simple words and stories are like queries as to what the nature of life might be. This collection is just eleven short(10 pgs each) attempts to show how life might occur .The first story ,"Little Misunderstandings..."is about a group of friends. Each fall into roles chosen for them by the accidents of circumstance and all seem helpless to be able to participate in their lives except as observers who find themselves mildly amusing."Waiting for Winter" is a story Tabucchi himself says he wishes Henry James would have written. As Tabucchi tells it we see the widow of a great man of letters going through the motions of mourning. But there is at stories end a twist. James would have filled in the story with sufficient nuance and detail to give the reader a clear picture of a particular psychology and at least give us as readers a chance at understanding a characters motive for doing a certain thing. Tabucchi only gives you the barest amont of information. The last event of the story therefore remains an inexplicable one, the story remains an unsolved ambiguity. Tabucchi is interested in the interior lives of his characters but everything that happens there remains unclear, not really describable except in the most cursory way. His characters do not have psychologies in the traditional sense, "psychology" implies certain identifiable attributes and a certain consistency of character. The strongest thing a Tabucchi character has is perhaps a vague and growing suspicion or a never quite articulated emotion. "Things" have special importance in these stories or sometimes seem to because they seem to have a more stable existence than the characters themselves.In "The Riddle"an automobile that may have belonged to Proust is only one uncertainty in a story where nothing is certain, the car is the dominant image of the story, it is the central thing which draws our attention, it seems to tie the various aspects of the story together.Everything about the unlikely events related in the story is shady and shadowy and perhaps nothing more than a dream. Only the car seems to hold some significant meaning, carry some symbolic weight but ....but it doesn't. Its just a riddle after all.
Tabucchi's point in these stories is that the only way to make sense of ambiguous reality is to simplify it for ourselves. So the story crafting process for him is a playful one. The reader may want a solution or think he is supposed to look for one but there is not necessarily one there to be found. Not all the stories work in the same way. He has more than one tactic. Some are more conventional and some more fantastic. But all refuse to simplify, and so remain in the end ambiguities or complex puzzles for which there are no solutions.
An intriguing aesthetic.

Tabucchi fits in with Kafka and Nabokov and Borges and Cortazar & Calvino, like them he could be called a "fabulist", and fables are powerful because they remain ambiguous like parables or myths.Tabucchi's touch however is particularly appealing because of its lightness. He seems at times to revel in the ambiguities he describes, perhaps in the way a surrealist revels in the anarchy of aparticularly unusual dream.

More short stories by a master of ambiguity
These is my least favorite of Tabucchi's books; however, it is stillsufficiently good that I recommend it.

In his notes preceeding thestories, Tabucchi states: "Misunderstandings, uncertainities, belatedunderstandings, useless remorse, treacherous memories, stupid andirredeemable mistakes, all these irresisibly fascinate me ..."Thatfascination is the basis for several of these stories.

The title story isbegins as a court scene in which the judge, the defendent and the narratorwere good friends in the past and discover what roles they must play in thepresent.

"Waiting for Winter" follows the widow of an importantliterary figure as she does what is expected of her and what her emotionslead her to do.

"Spells" tells of a summer holiday with an auntand a cousin whose dislike of her step father and her interest in magic mayhave gone a bit too far.

"The Trains That Go to Madras" followsa narrator whose cabin mate is Peter Schlemihl (of literaryfame).

"Sleight of Hand" follows an organized crime courier whoknows he is growing too old and tire for his job.

The remaining storiesshow equal diversity and equal interest in life in some sense out of focus,uncertain, ambiguous. As usual, Tabucchi is well worth reading but if youare unfamiliar with him, I'd suggest that you read Letter From Casablancafirst if you prefer short stories or Requiem if you prefer novellas. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

First work of Tabucchi to be translated into English
Letter from Casablanca is a collection of unrelated short stories.WhileTabucchi 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 ofthis collection is not to be missed - it purports to be a letter written toa sister whom the letter's author has not contacted for 18 years.They hadbeen split - the boy to Argentina, the girl to "up North" after afamily catastrophe.

"Voices" is a tale told from theperspective of an individual who mans a "crisis clinic line"."Theatre" is set in colonial Africa where an Englishmanentertains a young Portuguese colonial functionary with weeklytheater.

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

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

Customer Reviews (1)

Creative Idea
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, thisbook provides a wonderful pictorial view of what his life was.Here, onewill find pictures on almost every aspect of the poet's life, from hisbirth certificate, to family pictures, including pictures of letters, histypewriter, and terrific pictures of Lisbon in the early part of the 20thcentury.

Antonio Tabucchi introduction gives us a clear and well writtenexplanation of Fernando Pessoa's importance for the literature of the 20thcentury.I highly recommend this book.This is an excellent introductionto Pessoa. ... Read more