Customer Reviews

Indian Nocturne (New Directions)

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The traveller is someoene who is looking for a friend who got lost in India, but we realize very soon that he's actually looking for himself. A trip full of incredible encounters with people who are the soul of India, and places described in such a way that we could almost smell, hear and see what the author felt while he was there.

This Medicis Prize('89) winning book is an exploration of the frontiers of identity within very ancient India. It may all be a dream as the "Author's Note" which precedes this 100 page text describes the narrative as an "insomnia" and a "search for a shadow". You can make of that what you like but those evocative sentences only partially set the tone for Tabucchi's book is a playful series of encounters that his unnamed narrator-protaganist has with fellow travelers and interesting Indian characters along the way to finding a missing friend. The several encounters read like enquiries, but pleasant ones, and ones with philosophical as well as humorous overtones(in one encounter identity is compared to a suitcase). Some of the sequences are so strange you think it all must be a dream as when a female thief breaks into the narrators hotel room only to be invited to stay the night. Other meetings are full of a very engaging and speculation rich kind of conversation as in the meeting with the Hugo and Pessoa quoting eastern intellectual. If it is all a dream it is a very literate one. The last meeting takes place in the old Portugese port of Goa and there the narrator meets a lovely charming stranger to share a dinner with as he waits for a chance to spy a glimpse of his old searched for friend. But as they eat the narrator relates his "story' in a way that makes one suspect there was no one and nothing to search for after all(modern fiction indeed it is). But you are left after putting this book down with a feeling of having had several intriguing conversations and having met a lovely woman. Not at all a bad feeling. An insomnia well spent.

The first time I read this book was when I also read for the first time Carrere's The Mustache - a fortunate accident as they both pose a question of identity. Tabucchi sets his tale in India in the form of an unnamed man trying to find a man, perhaps his brother, who has been missing for about a year. His search takes him to a brothel in Bombay, to a Bombay hospital, to the Theosophical Society in Madras, to the library of a religious order in Goa ... Along the way he encounters a dying Jain, a deformed saddhu/fortune teller, a former Philadelphia mailman, a photographer of human misery ... An interesting story, well written, with an unexpected ending. A movella well worth your time.

A narrator's novella with precise images, active imagination, and a subtly suggested plot should enthrall any reader. Tabucchi is probably Italy's best living writer. This tale, made up of dreamy yet clear episodes, in a seach of ambiguous meaning brings out all the narrator's ambivalencies. An understanding of India emerges and most important portraits of men and one woman.