Requiem
A Hallucination
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On a sweltering Sunday in July, an Italian writer awaits a midnight rendezvous on a Lisbon quay with the spirit of a dead poet. The nameless narrator of this surreal dreamscape, who anxiously anticipates the appearance of his deceased friend and literary forebear, is Tabucchi himself, and the poet, though never named, is probably Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa, whose works Tabucchi, a champion of Portuguese literature, has translated. Chance encounters, ambivalent symbols, black humor and nonrational events pervade the narrative as Tabucchi's alter-ego meets his father as a young sailor; the ghost of Isabel, a former lover who committed suicide; Tadeus, who may have been the father of the child Isabel was carrying; and other colorful figures, alive and dead. Finally, Tabucchi meets his revered poet friend to discuss Kafka, postmodernism and the future of literature. Winner of the 1991 Italian PEN Prize, this playful bagatelle, translated from the original Portuguese, is partly an homage to Portuguese culture, partly a mellow autobiographical fantasy.
