It's Getting Later All the Time:

From Italy, an epistolary novel like no other, full of Tabucchi's special "enchantment, which trans-figures even as it captivates" ("TLS"). <BR>In "It's Getting Later All the Time," an epistolary novel with a twist, Antonio Tabucchi--"internationally acclaimed as the most original voice in the new generation of Italian writers" ("The Harvard Book Review")--revitalizes an illustrious tradition, only to break all its rules. Seventeen men write seventeen strangely beautiful letters--tender or rancorous--lonely monologues which move in circles, each describing an affair, and each desperate for a reply which may never come. The letters plunge the reader into an electric, timeless no-man's-land of "this past that is always somewhere, hanging in shreds." And at last, collecting all their one-sided, remorseful adventures into a single polyphonic novel, an 18th letter startlingly answers the men's pleas: a woman's voice, distant, implacable, yet full of sympathy. "It's Getting Later All the Time" captures destinies which, though so varied in appearance, are at rock bottom all the same: broken. This is an anti-Proustian novel--time lost is lost forever: it is impossible to get back to the past no matter how it haunts the present. As Tabucchi remarked, "Broken time is a dimension you find lots of men living in...an ambiguous, impossible situation, because they are faced with a kind of remorse, a choice they never made."

"This epistolary novel is composed of 18 love letters; the fictional authors are 17 men and one woman, whose sweeping, summative voice closes the collection abruptly. Are all the letters addressed to her? Does she even exist? There are no names — she is, variously My dear; My love; My sweet Ophelia (a nickname), among other second-person addresses. Written from places all over Europe, the letters are intimate and often exquisite, lingering over transcendent details of landscape, or ruefully soliloquizing on memory. One rancorous letter, 'A Good Man Like You,' recalls a betrayal seven years in the past, while another contemplates a journey never taken: 'Do you remember when we didn't go to Samarkand?' The whole makes for delicious voyeurism, leavened with pointed bafflement at these partially rendered relationships: just as the reader wishes for all the gaps to be filled in, the letter writers wish to re-compose fractured relationships." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)