VANISHING POINT

Tabucchi, Antonio

RANDOM HOUSE UK

The short story collection that launched Tabucchi to fame, reflecting on the uncertainties, memories, mistakes and mysteries of life\nEleven short stories pivoting on life's ambiguities and the central question they pose in Tabucchi's fiction: is it choice, fate, accident, or even, occasionally, a kind of magic that plays a decisive role in the protagonists' lives? Set in Paris, Lisbon, Madras and New York and blended with the author's wonderfully intelligent imagination, Tabucchi reflects on the elemental aspects of the human experience, exploring grief, uncertainty, adventure, memory and love.\n'One of the most admired Italian writers of his generation' The Times

Little Misunderstandings of No Importance: And Other Stories (Penguin Modern Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Penguin Classics

'Subtle, skillful, and clear. It's so clear, in fact, that you can see a very long way down, into the heart of a flawed but valiant human being, into the sickness of a nation, into the depths of political evil. It's the most impressive novel I've read for years, and one of the very few that feels truly necessary' - Philip Pullman\nIn the sweltering summer of 1938, with Lisbon in the grip of Portugal's dictatorship of António Salazar, a journalist is coming to terms with the rise of fascism around him and its insidious impact on his work. Consumed by the passing of his wife and the child he never had, Pereira lives a quiet and lonely existence. One day, the young and charismatic Monteiro Rossi enters his life, changing everything. A man who once shied away from criticizing Portugal's authoritarian regime finds himself unable to stay quiet any longer, resulting in his political awakening and a devastating act of rebellion.\nTabucchi's celebrated masterpiece is an ode to courage and solidarity in the face of political oppression.\n'A stunningly good novel, and it goes on getting better in one's head after one has stopped reading it - it works as an experience - something that has happened to one, which is of course the proof of great writing' Diana Athill

Pereira Maintains: A Testimony (Penguin Modern Classics)

'A funny, sad novella about how we got here from there, and how, in our youth, "our eyes saw things differently"' The Times\nA private meeting, chance encounters and a mysterious tour of Lisbon haunt this moving homage to Tabucchi's adopted city\nIn 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.\n'Tabucchi is a master of illusion and allusion, and this is a literary puzzle that teases, amuses and provokes' Sunday Telegraph

Requiem: A Hallucination (Penguin Modern Classics)

Indian Nocturne

Chatto&Windus

Short stories deal with topics including a mother's reminiscences of her son, life in a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and the reversal of art and life

Letter from Casablanca (English and Italian Edition)

World Literature

New Directions

The eight stories contained in Antonio Tabucchi's Letters from Casablanca introduce to an American audience a rising Italian writer (born 1943) whose intriguing narrative strategies make the reader an active participant in his work. Each story can be seen from at least two perspectives, and each protagonist can be seen as experiencing an objective "reality" or having his own imagined and quite possibly distorted view of events.Almost like a detective, the reader must try to puzzle out what has happened, what relationship X "really" has to Y. In "Dolores Ibarruri Sheds Bitter Tears," is the mother's report of her son's happy childhood just a remembered mirage? Is life inside a Fitzgerald novel a game invented by the narrator of "The Little Gatsby," or has the game indeed replaced any other reality? From the title story "Letter from Casablanca," with its double and triple inversions of our expectations, to the final thoughts of "The Backwards Game," where the author plays with the idea of reversing life and literature, the haunting theme of this remarkable and rewarding debut is: "Reality is unpleasant and you prefer dreams"––but modified in teasing counterpoint by the observation that "sometimes reality surpasses the imagination." The author implies that many of the stories are "true," but it is the reflecting and refining power of art and language which focuses seemingly random events into patterns of inevitability.

Letter from Casablanca

NY 1987 first edition. New directions. Translated by Frances Frenaye. Hardcover sm octavo. Fine in Fine DJ. Like New.

Little Misunderstandings of No Importance (English and Italian Edition)

Frenaye, Frances

Short Stories & Anthologies

The narrator describes an overwhelming encounter with the mystery, sensuality, and oppressiveness of India

Indian Nocturne (English and Italian Edition)

Literary

"An enjoyable, well-crafted little book."―The Complete Review Translated from the Italian, this winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger for 1987 is an enigmatic novel set in modern India. Roux, the narrator, is in pursuit of a mysterious friend named Xavier. His search, which develops into a quest, takes him from town to town across the subcontinent.

Indian Nocturne (New Directions)

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