The case of Antonio Tabucchi It is that of a biographer fascinated by his character and who ends up discovering, in his search for the idol's interiorities, a fertile field for his own creation.
Of course, whoever approaches a good tree... Because that tireless devotion to Fernando Pessoa. it would end up awakening in him some of the best creative connections, in the manner of a great teacher and an outstanding student who always end up tuning in.
Except that the coincidence of Tabucchi and Pessoa it took place within the imaginary space of so many books and so many interpretations about the Portuguese genius.
As always happens to me, the case of writers capable of summarizing lyrical and prose appears before me as a limited field in which I only manage to value the merely narrative and leave the foray into the brilliant world of images and symbols for others. with rhythm, cadence and musicality.
The question is that Tabucchi wrote good novels and I'll focus on this in this post ...
Top 3 recommended books by Antonio Tabucchi
Sostiene Pereira
The manifest Portuguese spirit of this Italian author seems to evoke some type of reincarnation that led Pessoa to the Mediterranean Pisa. But in the end each heart and each soul tends to its origins.
This great novel discovers the most authentically Portuguese Tabucchi through a story set in that endless conflict in old Europe that began with the First World War back in 1914 and that lasted until the Balkan War in 1991. I know I have piled years and decades under the shadow of war.
But if you think about it coldly, the 20th century was that in Europe. And this is how we found Pereira, representative of a journalism that told the forgotten intrastories between the great conflicts, the experiences of that people always used to stir up and revolutionize, to bleed to death and end up losing.
Pereira lives in Lisbon in 1938 with many years of dictatorship behind him and many more ahead. Pereira has that melancholic notion of the world, the essence of the Portuguese soul that sings fados to the Atlantic and that denies its own future because it knows that it still has a lot to suffer as in a finally self-fulfilling prophecy until the end of the dictatorship in '74.
Pereira is made of all that fatalistic essence and Monteiro Rossi accompanies him in his nostalgic journey, composing a journalistic team that ends up intertwining their lives and the existence of an entire country.
Requiem. a hallucination
The truth is that having a place like Portugal so close, we never get to know enough all the wealth that its people and places harbor.
On a walk through Lisbon, among its steep streets and with a drizzle falling on us, a traditional Portuguese man masterfully answered a question that I no longer completely remember about the differences between Spaniards and Portuguese. He simply told me: It's just that... being Portuguese is difficult.
I never knew if he was referring to a difficulty because of its harshness or because of its sophisticated idiosyncrasy. The point is that this novel places you in a Lisbon as strange as the phrase of my Portuguese friend.
The fiction proposed is alienating and at the same time it feels like very much from there, very missed, like a lonely sunset watching the Atlantic from a Plaza del Comercio from which no ship leaves for new worlds.
Lisbon is that magical feeling of loneliness among people. And this diary ends up convincing you of the magic that bathes Lisbon, of the intense feelings of longing and of impossible encounters ...
The lost head of Damasceno Monteiro
When I started this book, the beheading as an unsolved case that founded the novel reminded me of an old case from my town. So some of the scenes and the notion of a justice postponed for a thousand and one reasons became closer to me.
The first idea of ​​the journalist Firmino is none other than to recover a sinister case from his own city with which to capture those morbid readers that we can all be. Despite his young age, Firmino still has a slight memory of what happened to the deceased whose head never appeared. Only now he is only looking for a good report with which to grow in his newspaper.
As in other works by Tabucchi we discover the most intense Lisbon in its interiors, this time Oporto acquires that prominence among its silences, its lies, its condescension to power and even its justification of violence.
But there are always those who seek the truth in front of everything. You just need to wake up from general unconsciousness to discover what is certainly always worthwhile: dignity.
Firmino is the youth and the lawyer Loton is the veteran who is still angry and in need of getting his hands on life to give him a resounding slap of truth and justice.
