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A review by lizlalettrice
Requiem: A Hallucination by Antonio Tabucchi
3.0
When I was in school in Italy, my professor at the University of Florence was a raging bitch (excuse my language). She hated the group of us in her class that were American. She had no reason not to like us. We were quiet throughout class, unlike the other (native) students, and spent the entire lesson with our heads down scrambling to write down every word she said – in a foreign language – down in our notebooks. On our walks home from class, we “got her back” by gossiping about her, imagining scenarios in which her weirdness and bitchiness and that freakish blue pullover + zip-drive-on-a-necklace outfit she wore every day would come back to haunt her tenfold. Karma.
Somewhere along the line, we heard a rumor that she had a particular fondness for Antonio Tabucchi. She knew him. Was friends with him? More than friends? I don’t know where the original story spawned (did we make it up?), but rumor has it – they were doin’ it at some point. A secret relationship? And all the while, we sat like snobby literary geeks imagining how it all went down with the literature professor and the writer.
The other day I was reading the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica , and something caught my eye. An obituary. Antonio Tabucchi è morto.
I was actually sad for my bitchy professor. I scoured the death notices for one she may have written but alas, no clues. I imagined her secretly crying about her clandestine lost love alone in her dingy apartment surrounded by the dusty tomes of dead Italian poets. She sits disgusted by the literature that once consoled her, reminded of the times they shared debating everything from the circles of Dante’s hell to the sins of Sandro Penna – and where the old and new legends of Italian lit might meet.
For his memory and the memory of their secret trysts, I decided to give Tabucchi a try. With Requiem: A Hallucination, I received exactly the easy-reading story that I needed to accompany the stressful week I was having. It’s a tiny little novel and reads like a dream (well – that’s pretty much what it is, really). For those who are irked by run-on sentences or lack of punctuation, this would not work for you. But it’s short. It’s cute. And I left it ready to read another Tabucchi story just to get to know him a little better. Because I feel like I know him even if my knowledge of his secret love affair might not be very factual at all… ;)
Somewhere along the line, we heard a rumor that she had a particular fondness for Antonio Tabucchi. She knew him. Was friends with him? More than friends? I don’t know where the original story spawned (did we make it up?), but rumor has it – they were doin’ it at some point. A secret relationship? And all the while, we sat like snobby literary geeks imagining how it all went down with the literature professor and the writer.
The other day I was reading the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica , and something caught my eye. An obituary. Antonio Tabucchi è morto.
I was actually sad for my bitchy professor. I scoured the death notices for one she may have written but alas, no clues. I imagined her secretly crying about her clandestine lost love alone in her dingy apartment surrounded by the dusty tomes of dead Italian poets. She sits disgusted by the literature that once consoled her, reminded of the times they shared debating everything from the circles of Dante’s hell to the sins of Sandro Penna – and where the old and new legends of Italian lit might meet.
For his memory and the memory of their secret trysts, I decided to give Tabucchi a try. With Requiem: A Hallucination, I received exactly the easy-reading story that I needed to accompany the stressful week I was having. It’s a tiny little novel and reads like a dream (well – that’s pretty much what it is, really). For those who are irked by run-on sentences or lack of punctuation, this would not work for you. But it’s short. It’s cute. And I left it ready to read another Tabucchi story just to get to know him a little better. Because I feel like I know him even if my knowledge of his secret love affair might not be very factual at all… ;)