A Taxonomy of Longing
Message from the Shadows by Antonio Tabucchi. Archipelago Books, 2019, $18.00 paper.
THE ITALIAN writer Antonio Tabucchi’s oeuvre is notably eclectic, and has about it the air of a painful exertion. Each story is so strange he seems to be reinventing himself with every published work, learning what he must to pull off his next mystifying effect. His world—largely Mediterranean, frequently twilit—is one rich with velvety nights and copper-colored days, pale-blue lamps and yellow taverns sunk in shadowy streets, homey cafés and windswept terraces and fado concerts held by candlelight. A mild breeze seems to flutter the pages of Message from the Shadows, which present a haunting succession of stories rife with train journeys and flagrant passions, with children who sing to eels on moonlit nights and thoughtful whales that offer their two cents on the goings-on up above.
Unstintingly rhapsodic, the stories in range from the nearly undiluted fabulism of “The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico”—in which the famed painter is visited by strange birdlike grotesques—to the boisterous small-town account of an Italian boyhood, reminiscent of Fellini’s , in “Letter from Casablanca.” While a number of the stories have a metafictional cog buried somewhere in their depths, Tabucchi’s dabbling in this realm produces some of his weaker outings. In these stumbling, involuted, and oddly half-hearted stories, most of them written in the 1970s and 1980s, he comes off like an old soul trying
