Customer Reviews

Requiem: A Hallucination

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book suplies a very rich mix of portuguese culture, Lisbon City and a strugle of a narator to find meanings in his subconcient. The author takes the reader in a journey thoug Lisbon and at the same time in a journey to his memories, doubts and feelings, meeting people from his past, and characters that represent parts of him self, like the "seller of stories". All of wich is seasoned by the narrators love of the food of Portugal. Finally he gets to confront some realy important characters in his unconcient and ends up arguing whiht who we can supose to be Fernando Pessoa -a poet- or Sigmund Freud -a Psychiatrist- Reading this book gives me the feeling that the best things in life are the simple things, not meaning that all the rest must not be dealt with. If you like stories abuot the inside world of characters, you wil ask yourself how could so much be put in few pages, and at the same time be a special 'travel giude` to Lisbon.

The lightness of Tabucchi's Requiem makes it a very easy book to like. It helps to be at least a little bit familiar with the Portugese poet and author Fernando Pessoa who is the figure Tabucchi is to meet. The novella is very short (107 pages but lots of chapters so lots of white space and big print) and really more on the amusing than philosophical side. The little conversations read like little asides but soon one realizes that is what the book is, a little aside. There are some amusing references made about modern literature that could very well apply to the book we are reading and also a very interesting reference to a story written that later came true(a kind of mini meditation on how fact and fiction mimic each other or follow the same laws, the same could be said for life and dreams) but the book purposely stays on the surface of things. Food is the real center of the book. That is the most substantial and sustaining ritual at the heart of life, at least that apsect of life that is most real it seems to Tabucchi. So the books pages pass, each meeting a chance for conversations and most of the conversations are just small talk. Kind of like life. It is clear the events are all dreamed and so Tabucchi is free to talk to both friends and relations living and dead. But they say the same kinds of things to each other in the dream world that they did in real life. And the dream world is little different than the real world. That is the charm of the book. Life is a dream, so eat.

Requiem: A Hallucination is a book in which the narrator is obviously a persona of the author. The action takes place within a single day - the action being a dream, an hallucination of the narrator. The narrator is introduced as he is annoyed that the person he is to meet has missed their appointment at 12 noon - only to realize that 12 to a ghost is more likely midnight. The person he is to meet is not explicitly identified but is most likely the poet Pessoa.

The narrative then covers the time until the midnight meeting. In this time the narrator meets a drug addict in the park, a seller of lottery tickets, a gypsy who reads his fortune, a dead friend, a madame of an unsavory hotel, his deceased father, a barkeeper, a painter of details from the Temptation of St. Anthony, a lighthouse keeper's wife who is caretaker for a house in which he once lived, a former lover, a seller of stories, and finally the intended guest. Along the way one gathers recipes, literary history, a bit of philosophy ...

I highly recommend this book; it is an excellent text to first encounter Tabucchi.

Antonio Tabucchi (born in 1943 in Pisa) was Italian cultural consul in Lisbon, lives there half the year, and teaches Portuguese Literature at the University of Siena the other half of the year. I greatly admire his 1994 novel "Periera Declares" won the Aristeion European Literature Prize.

Tabucchi wrote the novella "Requiem," subtitled "A Hallucination," in Portuguese. It involves a reverie-filled day by an aging writer not unlike Tabucchi that involves visiting a graveyard, a bordello, a crumbling mansion on the Caiscais coast, and culminates in a meal with the ghost of a poet who can only be Fernando Pessoa, the towering figure of 20th-century literature whom Tabucchi has translated and written about (with his Portuguese wife).

The text of "Requiem" occupies only 90 pages (plus three pages providing detail on the many Portuguese dishes mentioned in the text). I don't regret the small amount of time I spent reading the book, though "Periera Declares," which I can heartily recommend for characterization, plotting, and subject matter.

The lightness of Tabucchi's Requiem makes it a very easy book to like. It helps to be at least a little bit familiar with the Portugese poet and author Fernando Pessoa who is the figure Tabucchi is to meet. The novella is very short (107 pages but lots of chapters so lots of white space and big print) and really more on the amusing than philosophical side. The little conversations read like little asides but soon one realizes that is what the book is, a little aside. There are some amusing references made about modern literature that could very well apply to the book we are reading and also a very interesting reference to a story written that later came true(a kind of mini meditation on how fact and fiction mimic each other or follow the same laws, the same could be said for life and dreams) but the book purposely stays on the surface of things. Food is the real center of the book. That is the most substantial and sustaining ritual at the heart of life, at least that apsect of life that is most real it seems to Tabucchi. So the books pages pass, each meeting a chance for conversations and most of the conversations are just small talk. Kind of like life. It is clear the events are all dreamed and so Tabucchi is free to talk to both friends and relations living and dead. But they say the same kinds of things to each other in the dream world that they did in real life. And the dream world is little different than the real world. That is the charm of the book. Life is a dream, so eat.

The main character " I ", meditates in a hot summer day and night in Lisbon. A wonderful account with a strong feel of the mediteranean culture, food and drink are carefully supplied. The action takes place in no more than a day and the book should be read as so

"Requiem" is Antonio Tabucchi's praise for Lisbon. It describes the journey of one man through the Portugalise city, where he meets some people, dead and alive, in the otherwise deserted city.

The peculiarity of the character is the fact that he has lost his superego, with the consequences of his id, the subconscious fludding his contious mind, hence makim him live in a sort of dreamworld. And from that world come the dead of his past.

The book is slightly semi-artistic, and it's message is left to be speculated about. And even if the basic premise of the story is intriquing, it fails to measure up to the potential it contains.

A short, nice read, wich doesn't offer anything to think about.