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A career-spanning story collection from Tabucchi (1943-2012; For
Isabel: A Mandala, 2017, etc.) exploring the liminal spaces between dream
and waking, fact and fiction.
All but one of the 22 stories here have appeared in earlier books,
and taken together they make for a substantive overview of the obsessions that
marked Tabucchi’s work. “The Reversal Game” and “Night, Sea, or Distance,” both
set in Portugal, evoke his admiration for Fernando Pessoa, particularly his
interest in the slippery melancholy state of “saudade.” “Clouds” and
“The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico” are elliptical evocations of the
subconscious; in the latter story, a monk’s vision of a trio of insectlike
beings can be read as magical realism or a hallucination of a cloistered mind.
“Cinema” is a noir satire about two movie actors who attempt to turn their
roles as World War II resistance fighters into reality. “The phrase that
follows this is false…” and “Little Gatsby” are arch metafictions that weave
the author himself into the story. At once modern (fragmentary, interior
rhetoric) and postmodern (satirical, suspect of narrative), Tabucchi possessed
a lively and inimitable sensibility; “imagination gave him a reality so alive
that it seemed more real than the reality he was living,” he writes of one
character, a notion that guides many of these stories. Not all of these
high-concept stories succeed; some are overly digressive, and Tabucchi has a
habit of introducing a stray memory or reverie in a story the way a hack crime
writer introduces a thug with a gun. But in magical stories like “Clouds” and
“Letter from Casablanca,” he creates somber vignettes that are playful in
structure and imagination. The latter is narrated by a man who discovers his
capacity to impersonate a woman singer, a fulfillment of Tabucchi’s feeling
that we can inhabit any environment, however foreign, if we pay close enough
attention.
A fine tribute to a writer defined by his singular command
of mood and mystery.
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