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A review by tomwootton
The Edge Of The Horizon by Antonio Tabucchi
4.0
great opening.
“To open the drawers you have to turn the handle and press down. This disconnects the spring, the mechanism is set off with a slight metallic click, and the ball bearings automatically begin to slide. The drawers are stacked at a slight angle and run out of their own accord on small rails. First you see the feet, then the stomach, then the chest, then the head of the corpse.”
this is a book of absences, the dead man being the central absence, and of projection into those absences by the main character, Spino (tho also by the reader). It is about how a dead man becomes a self-elected locus of objects and events that pertain to Spino, and how he seems to those around him, to drift further and further from the world, as he projects more and more into an empty space that may not by an empty space but the only perspective on the world that correlates the objects in it.
v short, spare, well done, with nice brush strokes of the italian city environment and hinterland in which it takes place.
“To open the drawers you have to turn the handle and press down. This disconnects the spring, the mechanism is set off with a slight metallic click, and the ball bearings automatically begin to slide. The drawers are stacked at a slight angle and run out of their own accord on small rails. First you see the feet, then the stomach, then the chest, then the head of the corpse.”
this is a book of absences, the dead man being the central absence, and of projection into those absences by the main character, Spino (tho also by the reader). It is about how a dead man becomes a self-elected locus of objects and events that pertain to Spino, and how he seems to those around him, to drift further and further from the world, as he projects more and more into an empty space that may not by an empty space but the only perspective on the world that correlates the objects in it.
v short, spare, well done, with nice brush strokes of the italian city environment and hinterland in which it takes place.