I always enjoy Antonio Tabucchi's short stories. Good collection from Archipelago, thanks very much to NetGalley.

This wasn't an easy read. Still, I enjoyed most of the stories and loved the idea behind the book. I'm still not interested in modern art or photography, and I don't think I'll read Tabucchi for a long time. The book got harder to follow with each story, and I lost the will to read.

Sometimes, things group together in your life entirely without you planning them. With the most recent COVID lockdown in the UK, I decided to invest some time exploring “abstract photography”, an area I have been fascinated with for a long time but about which I have done very little until now. Then I read, in fairly quick succession, Barthes’ Camera Lucida, Sontag’s On Photography and Berger’s Understanding A Photograph. Then, on impulse, I bought and read Max Porter’s new novel (The Death of Francis Bacon) which is an attempt at “writing as painting”. Finally, I picked up this book in which Tabucchi is inspired by various works of art. It seems my two main interests, images and reading, have temporarily merged into a single stream.

It is worth reading the Author’s Note at the start of this collection. Tabucchi explains that it isn’t as simple as seeing a picture and writing a story about it:

”From image to voice, the way is brief if the senses respond…But this current flows back and forth, departs again from where it arrived, returns again from where it departed. And the word, returning, carries with it other images that weren’t there before: the word has invented them. Such is the case with many of these stories. If the image has sparked the writing, the writing in turn has led the image elsewhere, to that hypothetical elsewhere that the painter didn’t paint.”

I have to come clean at this point and acknowledge that many of the stories in this book went over my head. There are a lot of surreal stories here and also a lot of complex ideas presented in elliptical language. The surreal element is fine for me, but I did get lost several times in the elliptical presentation of ideas. This is not an easy book to read.

The pieces collected together here are gathered from across Tabucchi’s writing life. They are grouped into three sections which draw their titles from music (as well as art, Tabucchi draws on music a lot, so this is appropriate). We have Adagio (a slow section characterised by melancholy), Andante con brio (more playful and upbeat) and Ariette (pieces for a single voice with or without orchestral accompaniment where one definition I saw suggested that the motif is only hinted at and not performed). Each piece is introduced by a page with just an image on it. Sometimes, as the quote above suggests, the link between image and following piece is clear, sometimes it is fairly obscure.

The opening story gives a feel for the atmosphere of the book as a whole. The opening image shows a city scene but the right hand side of the picture fades away and becomes blank. What read is of a man, Taddeo, who has lost his life partner and is packing his bags to leave. He plans to write postcards and starts to make a list of people he should remember to send them to. Then he discovers a pack of cards in his apartment. He begins to write the postcards as though he is in places on his planned voyage, even though the pictures on the cards are of other places where he is not planning to go. When he gets to the station to catch his train, he meets an ice cream seller to whom he eventually gives the cards whilst he himself does not get on the train but leaves the station.

This one is fairly straightforward and easily comprehensible, as are the next few stories. But gradually, the element of the surreal begins to assert itself (we spend one story in the dreams of Antonio Dacosta and the dreams of a surrealist artist are a strange place to be) and the complexity of the writing begins to increase. I’m not sure quite at what point I felt I was out of my depth, but it was probably early in Andante con brio when my notes started to have question marks after them.

Overall, an interesting collection of stories for my first experience of reading Tabucchi. I can see the beauty of a lot of the writing, but I did find it a struggle to keep my head above water whilst navigating the book. My rating is a reflection of my inability to read the book rather than any deficiency in the book itself.

"Nothings changed. Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances. The gesture of the hands shielding the head has nonetheless remained the same."

There were some stories here that I really loved.; the Minotaurs headaches, A curandeiro in the city on water, a midwinter nights dream, a difficult decision, and of course The Heirs are Grateful (my fav). As a whole though, while the prose itself, and his little essays at the end were pretty, it didn't do much for me. The pictures were also nice, but not enough. I felt like the book needed to be broken up a but more, or just half the stuff removed.

Thank you, NetGalley for this ARC!