Frustratingly Oblique Narratives: By Antonio Tabucchi

Letter from Casablanca was the first book by Antonio Tabucchi (1943-) published in English (in 1986). Had it been the first Tabucchi book I read, it would have been the last. The title story of the English edition elides some crucial information, but that is easy to fill in, and the story goes somewhere (doesn't just stop like the typical story from the New Yorker). What the employer of the narrator does in the way of fraud is not especially important, and the specifics are not known to the narrator, so that "Heavenly Bliss" can be enjoyed. And the narrator of "The Little Gatsby," who knows the openings of some Fitzgerald novels (and of To the Lighthouse) is mildy amusing. "Theatre" actually provides some specification at the end

The title story of the original (1981) Italian edition, placed last in the English translation, "Backward Glances" leaves an inordinate amount for the reader to supply or guess, but provides some enjoyment. There is some nourishment of character development, including some more female narrators in the other stories, but I was more often frustrated than tantalized by what Tabucchi hinted at without specifying. Being the longest, "Saturday Afernoons" was the most frustrating, all atmosphere and preparation with no payoff. "Dolores Ibarruri Sheds Bitter Tears" was just opaque, "Voices" contrived.

The three Tabucchi novels I have read are all set in Lisbon, where Tabucchi spends half of his time (the other half he spends teaching Portuguese literature at the University of Siena). The first six stories in Letter from Casablanca are Italian in location, albeit two also show Italians in Argentina. The penultimate one is narrated by a Portuguese colonial officer in late-1930s Mozambique, primarily about an eccentric English expat.The final story starts in Madrid and ends in Lisbon, with mention in passing in conversations of some Spanish and Portuguese poets (mostly baroque eras, plus Pessoa, a special interest of Tabucchi... along with rejection of the desirability of resurrection of the body at the Last Judgment, something of an obsession of the unlikely hero of Pereira Declares).

It seems to me (an admirer of Pereira Declares) that Letter from Casablanca is of minor interest even for Tabucchi aficionados and that only the title story and "Theatre" tell stories. The rest are fragments of narratives that leave it to the reader to make a story of or around them.

Though I am not quite as harsh as Stephen Koch, I can't really disagree with him that "Tabucchi's stories are gracefully written, elegantly contrived barriers to the reader's interest. Their voice is confiding and cultivated and has this trait above all: it would rather die than tell us what it is saying.... Each story is a very ingenious little frustration machine."

I don't think that Tabucchi is a major writer. He is definitely short-winded: eight stories in this volume are dispatched in 116 pages and the three Tabucchi novels I've read are short: the longest, The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, a thriller of sorts, only runs 186 pages, the shortest (Requiem) little more than 100 pages, the best (Pereira Declares) 136; the Prix Medici-winning IndianNocturne (which I have not read) runs only 88 and includes statement that "it's not a novel . . . it's a bit here and a bit there, there's not even a real story, just fragments of a story" (quoted by Amy Johnson in a review that found the book undernourishing). Though only Portuguese by marriage, inclination, and half-time residence, and writing mostly in Italian (he wrote Requiem in Portuguese) with the death of José Saramago, Tabucchi is the only living "Portuguese writer" I've read... and one of the best Italian ones, too (though primarily for Pereira Declares).