- Published: 15 July 2025
- ISBN: 9780241752234
- Imprint: Penguin Classics
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 112
- RRP: $17.99
Requiem
A Hallucination











- Published: 15 July 2025
- ISBN: 9780241752234
- Imprint: Penguin Classics
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 112
- RRP: $17.99
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