Requiem

Reviews / Votes

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 *