Requiem: A Hallucination - Hardcover

Beautifully translated...perhaps his most accessible work to date.

Elegant, cosmopolitan, inventive and disquieting; his writing is, paradoxically, sensuous and economical.

Winner of the 1991 Italian PEN Prize, this playful bagatelle, translated from the original Portuguese, is partly an homage to Portuguese culture, partly a mellow autobiographical fantasy.

[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.

This imagined world is created with elegance and complexity.--Robert Gray

[Tabucchi's books are] economical surreal-comic novellas. There's a cosmopolitan eeriness here.--Amit Chaudhuri

Antonio Tabucchi's novel Requiem is set in Lisbon on a torrid July day. The unnamed narrator - clearly a persona of Tabucchi himself - awaits a midnight appointment on a quay of the Tagus. His time is filled with a succession of encounters with residents of the Portuguese capital, and with late friends and relations. Part travelog, part autobiography, part fiction, Requiem at once becomes a homage to a country and a people and a farewell to the past; requiescat in pace. In all this, the narrator himself remains shadowy, walking in a dream atmosphere. The midnight appointment approaches. The narrator meets at last with another unnamed writer, now long dead, though the evidence points to the great poet Fernando Pessoa. Requiem thus ends as an act of succession, the narrator's claim to a literary forebear who, like himself, is of evasive and manifold personalities.