Synopses & Reviews
"Elegant, cosmopolitan, inventive, ambitious, and disquieting; his writing is, paradoxically, sensual and economical."Boston Review
"Triumphs of nuance and suggestion."Chicago Tribune
In this superbly imaginative collection of quasi-stories by the award-winning author of Indian Nocturne, the reader meets a flying creature of ambiguous species in a priest's vegetable garden, and a revolutionary who is told her incredible future by Mademoiselle Lenormand, a fortune teller from the shadow world.
Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa, Italy, in 1943. His works have been translated into over forty languages and have won prestigious prizes including the Aristeion, the Hans-Erich-Nossak-Preis, the Osterreichischer Staatspreis, and the Prix Médicis étranger.
Review
"Readers...are rewarded with a fluent translation by Tim Parks of stories whose intelligence, narrative flair and melancholy wit deserve to send VANISHING POINT -- if only literary excellence were any criterion -- straight into the bestseller lists."
--Sunday Telegraph
"By now the appearance of a new novel by Antonio Tabucchi is a literary event."
-- Charles Klopp, World Literature Today (Winter, 1998)
"Tabucchi now takes his place alongside Irène Némirovsky, Sándor Márai and Stefan Zweig as one of the great Continental rediscoveries for English-speaking readers of recent years. Unlike those others, though, he is happily still around to enjoy the plaudits."
--Michael Arditti (The Telegraph)
PRAISE for TABUCCHI'S STORIES
"...triumphs of nuance and suggestion."
--Chicago Tribune
"...meticulously crafted...marked by wit, emotion, memory, and lost grandeur."
--Publishers Weekly
"There is in Tabucchi's stories the touch of the true magician, who astonishes us by never trying too hard for his subtle, elusive, and remarkable effects."
--Tom Dowling, San Francisco Examiner
"The indirection of Tabucchi's technique goes beyond ironic characterization to produce something much more profound and disquieting, an involvement of the reader in a narrative consciousness that can test his assumptions about reason and the imagination, love and sexuality, social prestige and political commitment."
--Lawrence Venuti, The Philadelphia Inquirer
PRAISE FOR REQUIEM
"For those very unfortunate readers who haven't yet read Tabucchi's fiction, Requiem is a good book on which to focus. It contains all of the author's obsessions and virtues, is beautifully translated, and is perhaps his most accessible work to date."
--The Nation
Synopsis
A gorgeous, fantastical collection of sketches--"outbursts, moods, little ecstasies, real or presumed emotions, grudges and regrets."
Synopsis
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; lets 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
About the Author
One of the most beloved writers of his generation, Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa in 1943 and died in Lisbon in 2012. A master of short fiction, he won the Prix Médicis Etranger for Indian Nocturne, the Italian PEN Prize for Requiem: A Hallucination, the Aristeion European Literature for Pereira Declares, and was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Together with his wife, María José de Lancastre, Tabucchi translated much of the work of Fernando Pessoa into Italian. Tabucchi¢s works include Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, Letter from Casablanca, The Edge of the Horizon, and The Woman of Porto Pim.
Tim Parks teaches literary translation at IULM University in Milan. He is a literary critic and the author of An Italian Education, The Server, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, and Teach Us to Sit Still. Twice winner of the John Florio Prize for translation, Parks has translated works by Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Roberto Calasso, Niccolò Machiavelli, Fleur Jaeggy, and Antonio Tabucchi.