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Requiem

A Hallucination

Antonio Tabucchi author Margaret Jull Costa translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd

Published:1st Jul '21

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Requiem cover

'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

Tabucchi is a master of illusion and allusion, and this is a literary puzzle that teases, amuses and provokes * Sunday Telegraph *
A funny, sad novella about how we got here from there, and how, in our youth, "our eyes saw things differently" . . . a light summer read with enough weight to stop it blowing away -- John Self * The Times *
Reading this is like having a buzzed after-dinner conversation with a mind too brilliant to get into nuts and bolts. And yet the streamlike writing, spliced by endless commas, contains a charm that shines through the monochrome * Kirkus Reviews *
Beautifully translated ... perhaps his most accessible work to date * The Nation *
In the narrator's conversations and in his memories of the past, there is created a personal requiem for the old Lisbon, Tabucchi's Lisbon, not the traditional, solemn celebration of the mass for the dead, with its organ music and cathedrals, but the street music of mouth-organs and barrel-organs -- Jack Byrne * Review of Contemporary Fiction *
Elegant, cosmopolitan, inventive and disquieting; his writing is, paradoxically, sensuous and economical * Boston Review *
This imagined world is created with elegance and complexity -- Robert Gray * Publishers Marketplace *
Tabucchi's books are economical surreal-comic novellas. There's a cosmopolitan eeriness here -- Amit Chaudhuri * Times Literary Supplement *
Winner of the 1991 Italian PEN Prize, this playful bagatelle translated from the original Portuguese, is partly homage to Portuguese culture, partly a mellow autobiographical fantasy * Publishers Weekly *
A wonderful, enchanting tribute to the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa ... aptly subtitled, this book brilliantly creates a story that, like a delicious cocktail, most readers will finish in one gulp and will return to savor * Library Journal *

ISBN: 9780241519318

Dimensions: 198mm x 130mm x 6mm

Weight: 81g

96 pages