Requiem

Reading this is like having a buzzed after-dinner conversation with a mind too brilliant to get into nuts and bolts. And yet the streamlike writing, spliced by endless commas, contains a charm that shines through the monochrome

Kirkus Reviews

Beautifully translated ... perhaps his most accessible work to date

The Nation

In the narrator's conversations and in his memories of the past, there is created a personal requiem for the old Lisbon, Tabucchi's Lisbon, not the traditional, solemn celebration of the mass for the dead, with its organ music and cathedrals, but the street music of mouth-organs and barrel-organs

Jack Byrne, Review of Contemporary Fiction

Elegant, cosmopolitan, inventive and disquieting; his writing is, paradoxically, sensuous and economical

Boston Review

This imagined world is created with elegance and complexity

Robert Gray, Publishers Marketplace

Tabucchi's books are economical surreal-comic novellas. There's a cosmopolitan eeriness here

Amit Chaudhuri, Times Literary Supplement

Winner of the 1991 Italian PEN Prize, this playful bagatelle translated from the original Portuguese, is partly homage to Portuguese culture, partly a mellow autobiographical fantasy

Publishers Weekly

A wonderful, enchanting tribute to the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa ... aptly subtitled, this book brilliantly creates a story that, like a delicious cocktail, most readers will finish in one gulp and will return to savor

Library Journal

Tabucchi is a master of illusion and allusion, and this is a literary puzzle that teases, amuses and provokes

Sunday Telegraph

A funny, sad novella about how we got here from there, and how, in our youth, "our eyes saw things differently" . . . a light summer read with enough weight to stop it blowing away

John Self, The Times