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Message from the Shadows: Selected Stories
Message from the Shadows is a new collection featuring Antonio Tabucchi's finest short stories, spanning the breadth of his career. These playful tales explore Tabucchi's signature themes, from his inventive, lyrical meditations on language, art, and philosophy, to his fascination with the passage of time, and the mystery of storytelling.
300 pages, Paperback
First published May 14, 2019
11 people are currently reading
244 people want to read
About the author
Antonio Tabucchi
149 books833 followersAntonio Tabucchi was an Italian writer and academic who taught Portuguese language and literature at the University of Siena, Italy.
Deeply in love with Portugal, he was an expert, critic and translator of the works of the writer Fernando Pessoa from whom he drew the conceptions of saudade, of fiction and of the heteronyms. Tabucchi was first introduced to Pessoa's works in the 1960s when attending the Sorbonne. He was so charmed that, back in Italy, he attended a course of Portuguese language for a better comprehension of the poet.
Deeply in love with Portugal, he was an expert, critic and translator of the works of the writer Fernando Pessoa from whom he drew the conceptions of saudade, of fiction and of the heteronyms. Tabucchi was first introduced to Pessoa's works in the 1960s when attending the Sorbonne. He was so charmed that, back in Italy, he attended a course of Portuguese language for a better comprehension of the poet.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
September 13, 2024
He thoughts of the winds in life, because there are winds that accompany life: the soft zephyr, the warm wind of youth that later the mistral takes upon itself to cool down, certain southwesterly winds, the sirocco that weakens you, the icy mistral. Air, he thought, life is made of air, a breath and that’s it, and after all we too are nothing but a puff, a breath, then one day the machine stops and that breath ends.
What a brilliant writer Antonio Tabucchi (1943-2012) was.
Suggestive, mysterious, replete with literary references (Ibsen, Proust, Kafka, Pessoa, Dino Campana, Alice in Wonderland, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald..), I have been savouring this delightful collection of short stories very slowly over a few months, and upon finishing find myself returning to some passages which struck me as particularly enigmatic, beautiful or charming. Tabucchi’s short stories have an airy, almost magical touch, often veering between dream and reality, creating a peculiar form of wistful, lyrical beauty only words on paper can convey, together with a sensation somewhat equivalent of having one’s naked skin touched and tickled with a feather, teasing, with playful grace and subtle humour. Set in India, Italy, Spain, the Azores, Argentina, Greece and Tabucchi’s beloved Portugal, the 23 stories in this collection read like a travelogue, spanning three decades of the Italian author’s writing.
Places and landscapes where we lived together, moments we shared, even our conversations of long ago, do you remember? We would talk about parks in Madrid, about a fisherman’s house where we would have liked to live, about windmills and the rocky cliffs falling sheer into the sea one winter night when we ate bread soup, and of the chapel with the fishermen’s votive offerings: madonnas with the faces of local women and castaways like puppets who save themselves from the waves by holding on to a beam of sunlight pouring down from the heavens. But all this flickers by inside my eyes and although I can decipher it and do so with minute exactness, it’s so fast in its exorable passage that it becomes just a colour: the mauve of morning in the highlands, the saffron of the fields, the indigo of a September night with the moon hung on the tree in the clearing outside the old house, the strong smell of the earth and your left breast that I loved more than the right, and life was there, calmed and measured out by the cricket who lived nearby, and that was the best of all nights, liquid as the pulp of an apricot.
(from the titular story – Message from the shadows)
Taking the shape of a letter, or an exchange of philosophical letters (between Tabucchi and a character of his novel Indian Nocturne, The phrase that follows is false: the phrase that precedes this is true), overheard conversations, a telephone conversation with a suicide helpline (Voices), a fable-like tale on the genesis of some of Fra Angelico’s paintings, a vengeance story, the vision of whales on the pitiful, sad and comic creature that is man (A Whale’s view of Man), a intertextual pastiche on the Fitzgeralds and Virginia Woolf (Little Gatsby), a prose poem, some stories are musical, gem-like pieces, allusive and contemplative; other stories exude melancholy – saudade – or are undergirded by the feeling of threat inherent to life under an authoritarian regime (Night, Sea or distance). Others are unsettling, like the letter of political prisoner (Islands), or alluding on the traumas of a war veteran (Clouds). Recurrent themes are memory (like in the affecting story Bucharest hasn’t changed a bit) as well as transience and transformation (Letter from Casablanca). The theme of time – according to Tabucchi ‘our existential roommate’ - returns in every story.
And that was the strange function of art: to touch people by chance, because everything is random in the world and art reminds us of that. And for that reason it both saddens and comforts us. It doesn’t explain anything, just as the wind does not explain: it blows in and stirs the leaves, then it sweeps through the trees and sails away.
Besides the ingeniously composed The Trains that Go to Madras, one of my favourites stories was The Flying creatures of Fra Angelico – in which fra Giovanni di Fiesole, aka Fra Angelico, is visited in the monastery by three colourful creatures with wings which Tabucchi suggests are at the origin of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation paintings. Fragile, the creatures are iridescent but also comical - one of them gets stuck in the branches of a tree, so a few ripe pears fall and splat on the clods beneath; they are clumsy when they land, crashing down headfirst into the rosemary bushes or bouncing like a roly-poly ball into the rows of lettuce, and as greenish, hard to discern from the other heads of lettuce.
He let himself slide to the ground, his back against the wall, and he gazed upward. The blue of the sky was a colour that painted a wide-open space. He opened his mouth to breathe that blue, to swallow it, and then he embraced it, hugging it to his chest.
Tabucchi devotees will find two previously untranslated stories in this collection, The Cheshire Cat and Wanderlust; the other 21 stories are sampled from previously published collections (Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, The Woman of Porto Pim, Letter from Casablanca: Stories, Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, Time Ages in a Hurry). For readers who are new to Tabucchi or to his short fiction, Message from the shadows is a gorgeous collection of elegant, open, amusing, imaginative stories with an elusive flavour I thoroughly enjoyed.
And he said to himself: ‘Go Dino, walk faster, run far, life is restricted and too boundless is the soul’.
What a brilliant writer Antonio Tabucchi (1943-2012) was.
Suggestive, mysterious, replete with literary references (Ibsen, Proust, Kafka, Pessoa, Dino Campana, Alice in Wonderland, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald..), I have been savouring this delightful collection of short stories very slowly over a few months, and upon finishing find myself returning to some passages which struck me as particularly enigmatic, beautiful or charming. Tabucchi’s short stories have an airy, almost magical touch, often veering between dream and reality, creating a peculiar form of wistful, lyrical beauty only words on paper can convey, together with a sensation somewhat equivalent of having one’s naked skin touched and tickled with a feather, teasing, with playful grace and subtle humour. Set in India, Italy, Spain, the Azores, Argentina, Greece and Tabucchi’s beloved Portugal, the 23 stories in this collection read like a travelogue, spanning three decades of the Italian author’s writing.
Places and landscapes where we lived together, moments we shared, even our conversations of long ago, do you remember? We would talk about parks in Madrid, about a fisherman’s house where we would have liked to live, about windmills and the rocky cliffs falling sheer into the sea one winter night when we ate bread soup, and of the chapel with the fishermen’s votive offerings: madonnas with the faces of local women and castaways like puppets who save themselves from the waves by holding on to a beam of sunlight pouring down from the heavens. But all this flickers by inside my eyes and although I can decipher it and do so with minute exactness, it’s so fast in its exorable passage that it becomes just a colour: the mauve of morning in the highlands, the saffron of the fields, the indigo of a September night with the moon hung on the tree in the clearing outside the old house, the strong smell of the earth and your left breast that I loved more than the right, and life was there, calmed and measured out by the cricket who lived nearby, and that was the best of all nights, liquid as the pulp of an apricot.
(from the titular story – Message from the shadows)
Taking the shape of a letter, or an exchange of philosophical letters (between Tabucchi and a character of his novel Indian Nocturne, The phrase that follows is false: the phrase that precedes this is true), overheard conversations, a telephone conversation with a suicide helpline (Voices), a fable-like tale on the genesis of some of Fra Angelico’s paintings, a vengeance story, the vision of whales on the pitiful, sad and comic creature that is man (A Whale’s view of Man), a intertextual pastiche on the Fitzgeralds and Virginia Woolf (Little Gatsby), a prose poem, some stories are musical, gem-like pieces, allusive and contemplative; other stories exude melancholy – saudade – or are undergirded by the feeling of threat inherent to life under an authoritarian regime (Night, Sea or distance). Others are unsettling, like the letter of political prisoner (Islands), or alluding on the traumas of a war veteran (Clouds). Recurrent themes are memory (like in the affecting story Bucharest hasn’t changed a bit) as well as transience and transformation (Letter from Casablanca). The theme of time – according to Tabucchi ‘our existential roommate’ - returns in every story.
And that was the strange function of art: to touch people by chance, because everything is random in the world and art reminds us of that. And for that reason it both saddens and comforts us. It doesn’t explain anything, just as the wind does not explain: it blows in and stirs the leaves, then it sweeps through the trees and sails away.
Besides the ingeniously composed The Trains that Go to Madras, one of my favourites stories was The Flying creatures of Fra Angelico – in which fra Giovanni di Fiesole, aka Fra Angelico, is visited in the monastery by three colourful creatures with wings which Tabucchi suggests are at the origin of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation paintings. Fragile, the creatures are iridescent but also comical - one of them gets stuck in the branches of a tree, so a few ripe pears fall and splat on the clods beneath; they are clumsy when they land, crashing down headfirst into the rosemary bushes or bouncing like a roly-poly ball into the rows of lettuce, and as greenish, hard to discern from the other heads of lettuce.
He let himself slide to the ground, his back against the wall, and he gazed upward. The blue of the sky was a colour that painted a wide-open space. He opened his mouth to breathe that blue, to swallow it, and then he embraced it, hugging it to his chest.
Tabucchi devotees will find two previously untranslated stories in this collection, The Cheshire Cat and Wanderlust; the other 21 stories are sampled from previously published collections (Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, The Woman of Porto Pim, Letter from Casablanca: Stories, Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, Time Ages in a Hurry). For readers who are new to Tabucchi or to his short fiction, Message from the shadows is a gorgeous collection of elegant, open, amusing, imaginative stories with an elusive flavour I thoroughly enjoyed.
And he said to himself: ‘Go Dino, walk faster, run far, life is restricted and too boundless is the soul’.
February 13, 2019
I received a preview copy of this short story collection from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I thank them for the opportunity to experience a new (to me) writer.
I have never read any of Tubucchi’s stories before and I enjoyed the opportunity. One can divide these stories into what I would call evocative and narrative and both were very effective. I also could list a third category—those that completely went over my head and lost me. Unfortunately there were a few of those also.
Among my favorites:
“Letter from Casablanca” and “Bucharest Hasn’t Changed a Bit”—wonderfully evocative tales of a style that are almost never written by an American but are so beautifully written by Italian or Latin American writers. Think “Cinema Paradiso” and you will know what I mean.
“The Trains that Go from Madras”—as I finished this story I felt that it could have been quite at home published in a Hitchcock mystery magazine. The story had an almost British feel to it, as stories set in India often do. Could it be the fact that it takes place on a train? Great story with a real punch at the end.
“The Woman from Porto Pim”—Hemingway didn’t write this, obviously, but he would have liked it. A very satisfyingly unapologetic story about human emotions and their consequences.
“Message from the Shadows”—one of the evocative ones that deals with the situation where one spouse passes on, leaving the other. This story ends with one of the most poignant images I have ever read—deeply emotional yet so recognizable and common-place. I doubt I that will ever forget it.
“Little Misunderstandings of No Importance”—another disturbing story offered with no apologies, this time about how the wheel of time moves and changes the positions that we find ourselves, both in society, and in relation to the people in our lives.
Once again, I would like to thank the publisher for generously allowing me to read this fine short story collection.
I have never read any of Tubucchi’s stories before and I enjoyed the opportunity. One can divide these stories into what I would call evocative and narrative and both were very effective. I also could list a third category—those that completely went over my head and lost me. Unfortunately there were a few of those also.
Among my favorites:
“Letter from Casablanca” and “Bucharest Hasn’t Changed a Bit”—wonderfully evocative tales of a style that are almost never written by an American but are so beautifully written by Italian or Latin American writers. Think “Cinema Paradiso” and you will know what I mean.
“The Trains that Go from Madras”—as I finished this story I felt that it could have been quite at home published in a Hitchcock mystery magazine. The story had an almost British feel to it, as stories set in India often do. Could it be the fact that it takes place on a train? Great story with a real punch at the end.
“The Woman from Porto Pim”—Hemingway didn’t write this, obviously, but he would have liked it. A very satisfyingly unapologetic story about human emotions and their consequences.
“Message from the Shadows”—one of the evocative ones that deals with the situation where one spouse passes on, leaving the other. This story ends with one of the most poignant images I have ever read—deeply emotional yet so recognizable and common-place. I doubt I that will ever forget it.
“Little Misunderstandings of No Importance”—another disturbing story offered with no apologies, this time about how the wheel of time moves and changes the positions that we find ourselves, both in society, and in relation to the people in our lives.
Once again, I would like to thank the publisher for generously allowing me to read this fine short story collection.
January 22, 2019
A collection of 20 of the best of Tabucchi’s short stories, set in Italy, Lisbon and the Azores mid 20th century, linked for the most part by a couple of themes. That is, a yearning for what might have been, to transport oneself back to the moment of happy innocence before the event that changed everything, a nostalgia for simpler times before everything got so complicated. Coupled with people not being quite what they seem, there is a sinister feel to many of the situations here, especially since we don’t always find out what the catastrophe was but are led to imagine the worst.
…if I’d said this instead of that or that instead of this, if I’d got up late instead of early, today I’d be imperceptibly different, and perhaps the world would be imperceptibly different, too. Or else it would be the same and I couldn’t know it.
It was a slender hope, perhaps an illusion, and I didn’t want to consume it in the short space of a plane flight; I preferred to cradle and savor it in a leisurely fashion, as we like to do with hopes that we cherish while knowing that there is little chance of their realisation.
I found Tabucchi’s style difficult to begin with, full of oblique references and confusing jumps in time, as we hear the various narrators’ often disjointed memories. Not a quick read, the writing takes some concentration (for me, at least) and I needed to take breaks between stories. Worth the effort, though, for the beauty of his images and a sense of places and times gone forever except in people’s memories.
With thanks to Archipelago via NetGalley for the opportunity to read an ARC.
…if I’d said this instead of that or that instead of this, if I’d got up late instead of early, today I’d be imperceptibly different, and perhaps the world would be imperceptibly different, too. Or else it would be the same and I couldn’t know it.
It was a slender hope, perhaps an illusion, and I didn’t want to consume it in the short space of a plane flight; I preferred to cradle and savor it in a leisurely fashion, as we like to do with hopes that we cherish while knowing that there is little chance of their realisation.
I found Tabucchi’s style difficult to begin with, full of oblique references and confusing jumps in time, as we hear the various narrators’ often disjointed memories. Not a quick read, the writing takes some concentration (for me, at least) and I needed to take breaks between stories. Worth the effort, though, for the beauty of his images and a sense of places and times gone forever except in people’s memories.
With thanks to Archipelago via NetGalley for the opportunity to read an ARC.
March 13, 2019
Antonio Tabucchi, for numerous reasons, is one of my new favourite authors. And this book was another good surprise.
As the title says, it is a collection of stories, some that part in Portugal, others that don't, but all within the same sign of weirdness, of looking behind appearances. It is, in each story, as if the author captured a very precise moment in time in the life of those characters, and lets us take a sneak pic inside. Some of them we fully grasp, others we are left to wonder.
In retrospect, I think the first one ("The Reversal Game"), because being set in Portugal before the revolution was my favourite. By I also loved "The Train That Goes to Madras", "The phrase that follows this is false: the phrase that precedes this is true" and many others.
I recommend to everyone who likes to read short quirky stories, full of hidden meanings and beautiful places.
As the title says, it is a collection of stories, some that part in Portugal, others that don't, but all within the same sign of weirdness, of looking behind appearances. It is, in each story, as if the author captured a very precise moment in time in the life of those characters, and lets us take a sneak pic inside. Some of them we fully grasp, others we are left to wonder.
In retrospect, I think the first one ("The Reversal Game"), because being set in Portugal before the revolution was my favourite. By I also loved "The Train That Goes to Madras", "The phrase that follows this is false: the phrase that precedes this is true" and many others.
I recommend to everyone who likes to read short quirky stories, full of hidden meanings and beautiful places.
October 15, 2024
Short story collections could be a mixed bag. You can encounter some great stories, or you could encounter stories that strike you as obscure. That is certainly the case with Antonio Tabucchi's Message from the Shadows: Selected Stories. I fell in love with "The Reversal Game," "Night, Sea, or Distance," "The Trains That Go to Madras," and "Postscript: A Whaler's View of Man."
What can make Tabucchi's stories seem difficult is his multiculturalism. He is an Italian who happens to live in Portugal but is conversant with other cultural contexts, such as Romanian, Indian, and Argentinian. For me, the stories varied from good to great, so that I hope to read more of his work.
What can make Tabucchi's stories seem difficult is his multiculturalism. He is an Italian who happens to live in Portugal but is conversant with other cultural contexts, such as Romanian, Indian, and Argentinian. For me, the stories varied from good to great, so that I hope to read more of his work.
July 13, 2019
I was not familiar with this Italian author prior to reading this wonderful collection of short stories. Even the titles are whimsical, imaginative and fun. He was a gifted and careful writer and sorry to learn he died in 2012. Apparently he was drawn to both Portugal and Italy, and that is apparent in this variety of offerings.
In the first story, The Reversal Game, he mentions an author's name repeatedly, "I wanted to inform you of a new translation of Fernando Pessoa" as a contact code when in real life, Tabucchi was the translator from Portuguese to Italian of that poet's works.
The paperback book from Archipelago Books is compact and attractive.
a wee sample:
"And everything began again, in the imagination of the one imagining that night, like a pantomime or witch's spell: from the door to the armchairs, from the armchairs to the door, like poor creatures, bewitched and condemned to senseless repetition, forced to mime and run through yet again the prelude to the horrible experience awaiting them in the night, that an imagination didn't have the courage to make them endure the way they had to endure.
Until enough. Now they've left, are finally headed down the stairs, the lightbulb on the second-floor landing is burned out, someone trips, someone laughs...and finally they're on the main floor, the button pushed that operates the lock, a click, and now they're outside, ah, finally free from the vicious circle of a comment holding them captive in the imagination of the one imagining how that night might have gone; ..." And then, man does it get crazy! [from "Night, Sea or Distance"]
The variety of the 23 stories is great, so there will be at least a few that should be appeal to all.
In the first story, The Reversal Game, he mentions an author's name repeatedly, "I wanted to inform you of a new translation of Fernando Pessoa" as a contact code when in real life, Tabucchi was the translator from Portuguese to Italian of that poet's works.
The paperback book from Archipelago Books is compact and attractive.
a wee sample:
"And everything began again, in the imagination of the one imagining that night, like a pantomime or witch's spell: from the door to the armchairs, from the armchairs to the door, like poor creatures, bewitched and condemned to senseless repetition, forced to mime and run through yet again the prelude to the horrible experience awaiting them in the night, that an imagination didn't have the courage to make them endure the way they had to endure.
Until enough. Now they've left, are finally headed down the stairs, the lightbulb on the second-floor landing is burned out, someone trips, someone laughs...and finally they're on the main floor, the button pushed that operates the lock, a click, and now they're outside, ah, finally free from the vicious circle of a comment holding them captive in the imagination of the one imagining how that night might have gone; ..." And then, man does it get crazy! [from "Night, Sea or Distance"]
The variety of the 23 stories is great, so there will be at least a few that should be appeal to all.
March 9, 2023
There are stories here that are so exceptional, so inspiring, so creative, they made me rethink everything I thought I knew about fiction. Stories like Clouds, The Woman From Porto Pim, Night, Sea, or Distance, and The Trains that go to Madras. These are among the best of Tabucchi's short work in my opinion, and well worth the price of the volume. Other stories maybe not so much but then, I might be commenting on their translations, I don't know. This is a collaborative publication. The stories are translations done by 7 different writers.
I am still a dedicated Tabbuchi follower. This book took me a long time to get through only because it had taken me some time to settle into a routine after moving from the US to Spain. What a great companion this book has been for my circumstance, however. Tabucchi is nothing of not a European artist.
I am still a dedicated Tabbuchi follower. This book took me a long time to get through only because it had taken me some time to settle into a routine after moving from the US to Spain. What a great companion this book has been for my circumstance, however. Tabucchi is nothing of not a European artist.
February 22, 2019
This was very hit and miss for me. Some of these stories are a bit too dense, not quite revealing their purpose until it's almost too late – such as the very first piece, where a man finds he might not have known the woman he once knew, having met her almost under terms of subterfuge. Some have a languid, nightclubby wooziness, as in someone telling their sister how they started in the chanteuse career, or how one such job took them to jail for years. There's a sort of class concern here, where we see high society travel done by sleeper train, or Bugatti. Those meet with the instance of a young girl questioning a strangely inactive man at a beach, unaware he's dying, and are all a bit Thomas Mann – albeit a Thomas Mann with added mobile phones and Samaritans call takers.
Others still, however, are just too abstract – politically-motivated gunpoint arrest, with added seabass, anyone? Much is too meta, with the author pretending not to be the author, ie very much admitting to being the author. Straighter fare, such as a monk meeting some unearthly creatures, was quite atypical but also the best to my taste. This 'selected stories', gathered from several original volumes of shorts, translated by various people over the various years and decades, is a frustrating opener to this author.
Others still, however, are just too abstract – politically-motivated gunpoint arrest, with added seabass, anyone? Much is too meta, with the author pretending not to be the author, ie very much admitting to being the author. Straighter fare, such as a monk meeting some unearthly creatures, was quite atypical but also the best to my taste. This 'selected stories', gathered from several original volumes of shorts, translated by various people over the various years and decades, is a frustrating opener to this author.
May 6, 2021
A wonderful collection of stories. There is in them both a freshness and a timelessness, as though they were newly uncovered ancient lore, and they exhibit magic that should be beyond the ken of a single mortal man. The epilogue is one of the most hilarious paragraphs I've ever had the pleasure of reading (spoiler: it involves whales).
August 26, 2019
All of these stories are good to great, but be aware (which I wasn't) that 20 out of the 23 stories have already been translated in previous English collections out from New Directions and Archipelago. (less)
September 1, 2019
Some hit and misses. When you 'get' Tabbuchi, you get it - when you don't, it's frustrating because it looks like he's rambling and you're trying to figure out where the 'deepness' is.
Nevertheless, he has a magical ability to craft vivid, sensual moments that occur suddenly without warning, mingling with the aspects of mundane life.
Nevertheless, he has a magical ability to craft vivid, sensual moments that occur suddenly without warning, mingling with the aspects of mundane life.
February 15, 2022
Hit or miss.
July 18, 2023
Incredible, I will hold these in my head for a long time.
February 10, 2019
Beautifully written and pretty absorbing - although perhaps best dipped into rather than read straight through - Tabucchi's short story collection set in Italy, is tinged with nostalgia and has a distinct melancholy feel with a touch of disquiet thrown in for good measure.
Worth a look.
With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC. R
Worth a look.
With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC. R
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews