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As a student travelling through Paris following the footsteps of his favourite authors, Antonio Tabucchi bought a book that changed his life. Outside the Gare de Lyon, young Tabucchi selected a slim volume of poems from a simple bookstall and read:

“I'm nothing.
I'll always be nothing.
I can't want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world . . .
Today I'm torn between the loyalty I owe
To the outward reality of the Tobacco Shop across the street
And to the inward reality of my feeling that everything's a dream.”

“Tabacaria” by Alvaro de Campos, one of the literary personas of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, set Tabucchi’s creative heart on a quest to discover the climate that produced such a work and such a poet. Tabucchi returned to the University of Pisa, enrolled in Portuguese language courses, and produced a thesis on surrealism in Portugal.

Tabucchi: The Eccentric Genius

Tabucchi, who died on the 25th of March in Lisbon, Portugal, was both one of the most celebrated contemporary Italian writers and one of the most misinterpreted. Called the most important Italian prose writer since Italo Calvino by some scholars, his works have received wide critical acclaim, including an Italian Campiello award, the Spanish Francisco de Cerecedo journalist prize, the Portuguese title Do Infante Dom Henrique, an appointment as Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France, and nominations for the Man Booker Prize.

Yet Tabucchi’s works, which have been translated into 40 languages, have not always been well-received publically. The non-linear narratives, sometimes even called “nonstories” due to their lack of plot continuity and conclusion, typically transpire in a space somewhere between reality and imagination, heavily bleeding through the line between the two.

His first widely acclaimed work, Indian Nocturne, published in 1984, tells the story of an unidentified man who lands in India in search of a friend who has disappeared. Though it’s ostensibly structured like a detective novel following the protagonist’s search for clues to his friend’s disappearance, the friend never appears and the story doesn’t conclude with a solution to the mystery.

Tabucchi focuses instead on the mystery of the situation—the space between what really happened and what people remember—and the effect the search has on the author. His goal is to make his readers think, not to just give them a pastime to temporarily distract their mind.

The Movement in Malaise and Saudade

Born in Pisa in 1943 amid Nazi occupation and intermittent bombings, Tabucchi is a child of melancholy and conflict whose body of literature never strays far from these themes. In a 1991 interview with Professor Anna Botta, Tabucchi affirmed, “I like characters that are defective, who live in a state of privation that causes them continual malaise . . . I think, in fact, that it somehow functions as a narrative force. The character is in a state of malaise and for that reason begins to move”.

Tabucchi’s preoccupation with grief and the impetus inherent in absence also stems from his deep admiration of Portuguese literature, which is infused with the notion of saudade, a yearning for what is lost, a sort of nostalgia or aching heart. Saudade is regarded as a fundamental element of Portugal’s national character, and became an immutable characteristic of Tabucchi’s work.

Throughout his most prominent novellas, Tabucchi’s protagonists are spurred by a search for a lost person—sometimes someone close to them and other times a seemingly random acquaintance—but always a stand-in for the protagonist himself. The 1986 novella The Edge of the Horizon, the protagonist Spino becomes obsessed with discovering the identity of an unknown dead man. As he reconstructs tidbits of the man’s identity, it becomes increasingly clear that he is in fact searching for his own identity.

Tabucchi’s capolavoro Pereira Declares chronicles the fictional life of a Portuguese newspaper editor under Salazar’s dictatorship, as the protagonist consciously reconstructs his identity when he realizes that he’s become a propagandist puppet. Winner of numerous international literary prizes, the work was used by Berlusconi’s opponents due to its powerful message of media oppression. Marcello Mastroianni portrayed Pereira in one of his last screen appearances.

A Man of Two Lives, Two Countries

Like his mentor Pessoa, Tabucchi was split between literary personalities. He divided his year between Siena and Lisbon. He lived half in Italian, half in Portuguese, publishing in both. Half the year he lectured students on the literature of the authors of the past and half the year he authored the literature of the future.

Even his family was split along cultural lines: Tabucchi Italian, his wife María José de Lancastre Portuguese, his daughter “more Portuguese than Italian” and his son “more Italian than Portuguese.”

When asked in an interview why his characters are always preoccupied with the past, Tabucchi uncovered his own quest. “It must be [my] obsession, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe my writing is also an unconscious attempt to come to know it . . . to learn more about myself, to know myself better”.