A short life of the author
Antonio Tabucchi (1943–2012) was born on 24 September 1943 in Vecchiano, Tuscany, Italy. He studied literature at the University of Pisa and at the Scuola Normale Superiore. He was a professor of Portuguese literature at the University of Siena. He lived part-time in Lisbon and was the foremost Italian translator and scholar of Fernando Pessoa.
Life and Career
Tabucchi’s lifelong engagement with Portugal — its literature, history, and atmosphere — gave his fiction a distinctive character. He translated Pessoa into Italian and his fiction shares Pessoa’s preoccupation with heteronyms, fragmented identity, and the impossibility of knowing oneself.
Notturno indiano (1984, Indian Nocturne) — about a man traveling through India in search of a disappeared friend — was adapted into a 1989 film by Alain Corneau. Il filo dell’orizzonte (1986, The Edge of the Horizon) was a metaphysical detective story.
Sostiene Pereira (1994, Pereira Maintains) — about Dr. Pereira, a fat, aging cultural editor at a Lisbon newspaper in 1938 who gradually awakens to the reality of the Salazar dictatorship through his friendship with a young political activist — was his masterwork. It won the Premio Campiello, the Premio Scanno, and the Prix Médicis étranger.
Si sta facendo sempre più tardi (2001, It’s Getting Later All the Time) — an epistolary novel composed of letters that may or may not have been sent — was his most formally adventurous work.
He died on 25 March 2012 in Lisbon.
Key Works
- Pereira Maintains (1994)
- Indian Nocturne (1984)
- It’s Getting Later All the Time (2001)
Collecting Tabucchi
Italian firsts (Feltrinelli) are the true editions. Pereira Maintains (1995, New Directions English) brings $10–$25.