Due to a passing in the family a few years ago and my subsequent health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for years after the bereavement. Thank you for the opportunity.

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.

I enjoyed the European scope of these stories. 'The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico' was my stand-out. Intriguing, sometimes opaque, but none of the twenty stories wasted.
Great cover art, too.

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.

A wide-ranging collection of stories mostly set in Portugal and Italy, there is a lot here to enjoy, although it takes a while to get a feel for them. In the very brief title story, the narrator talks of a shadow world which is 'like a dream you know you are dreaming, that's where its truth lies: in its being real beyond the real'. In 'The phrase that follows this is false: the phrase that follow this is true' we are told 'don't believe too readily in which writers say: they lie (tell lies) almost all the time'. The best stories here reflect these playful observations, bringing together the 'micro-perspectives' highlighted in the final story 'Voices' and the broader socio-historical contexts in which they are set. Well worth your time and Archipelago/Steerforth should be congratulated for bringing them to an English language audience. I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to read them.

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.

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. Review also posted to Goodreads.

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.