'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

About the Author
Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa, Italy in 1943. His critically acclaimed novels and short story collections include Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, Requiem: A Hallucination and Pereira Maintains, which won the Premio Campiello, Premio Viareggio and the Aristeion Prize amongst others. Tabucchi was professor at the University of Siena, and also taught at Bard College in New York, the Ecole de Hautes Etudes and the College de France in Paris. He died in Lisbon, his adopted home, in 2012. Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, among them novelists: Javier Marias, Jose Saramago and Eca de Queiroz, and poets: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Mario de Sa-Carneiro, Fernando Pessoa and Ana Luisa Amaral. Her work has brought her numerous prizes, among them, the 2018 Premio Valle-Inclan for On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes. In 2013, she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in 2014, she was awarded an OBE for services to literature.

Reviews
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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780241519318
Author Antonio Tabucchi
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Penguin Classics
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 78g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 5mm