Letter from Casablanca
Antonio Tabucchi
Language: English
Pages: 132
ISBN: 0811209865
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The eight stories contained in Antonio Tabucchi's Letters from Casablanca introduce to an American audience a rising Italian writer (born 1943) whose intriguing narrative strategies make the reader an active participant in his work. Each story can be seen from at least two perspectives, and each protagonist can be seen as experiencing an objective "reality" or having his own imagined and quite possibly distorted view of events.
Almost like a detective, the reader must try to puzzle out what has happened, what relationship X "really" has to Y. In "Dolores Ibarruri Sheds Bitter Tears," is the mother's report of her son's happy childhood just a remembered mirage? Is life inside a Fitzgerald novel a game invented by the narrator of "The Little Gatsby," or has the game indeed replaced any other reality? From the title story "Letter from Casablanca," with its double and triple inversions of our expectations, to the final thoughts of "The Backwards Game," where the author plays with the idea of reversing life and literature, the haunting theme of this remarkable and rewarding debut is: "Reality is unpleasant and you prefer dreams"––but modified in teasing counterpoint by the observation that "sometimes reality surpasses the imagination." The author implies that many of the stories are "true," but it is the reflecting and refining power of art and language which focuses seemingly random events into patterns of inevitability.
CONTENTS LETTER FROM CASABLANCA SATURDAY AFTERNOONS HEAVENLY BLISS DOLORES IBARRURI SHEDS BITTER TEARS THE LITTLE GATSBY VOICES THEATRE THE BACKWARDS GAME LETTER FROM CASABLANCA Lena, I don’t know why I begin this letter talking to you about a palm tree when you haven’t heard anything about me for eighteen years. Perhaps because there are many palm trees here. I see them from my hospital window waving their long arms in the torrid wind along the blazing avenues that disappear in
that he was aware of them. —Good,—continued Monsieur Delatour. —Now try to translate these problems into dollars.— Probably Monsieur Huppert did the translation mentally, because he grew pale; the fork with the truffle remained in mid-air. His forehead was beaded with a veil of perspiration. —Monsieur Huppert,—said Monsieur Delatour in a cutting tone—are you aware that we pay you to sell? You cease to sell, we cease to pay.— I blessed Giuseppe, who came in with dessert. It was a frozen
together, persons who have died, things done together, places, other names, our life. Piticche means little one. He was really tiny when he was young. He was blond, look at this photograph, he’s four years old—not that one, he’s eight there—this one here crouching near Pinocchio. Don’t you see that Pinocchio is taller than he is? At our house there was a lemon tree. It grew espaliered against the facade facing south. Its branches reached the window of the upper floor. He spent his childhood
too, “Gandesa,” for example: Si me quieres escribir ya sabes mi paradero, en el frente de Gandesa primera linea de fuego … No, he was not a communist, he was a libertarian socialist. He said that La Pasionaria had been a friend, too, that they had fought side by side, that she was an exceptional woman. Then they had had a furious quarrel, she said ugly words to him, and he retorted that one day she would cry bitterly over the mistakes she had made. He talked about it with much pain. He said that
years in Tete, seemed almost like Europe to me, even though it was a sleepy, dirty city of ravaged beauty, passed through by transitory people. Somehow the little commercial harbor sheltered behind the Punta da Barra, where every month the steamers put into port from Port Elizabeth and Durban straight from the Red Sea, gave an illusion of civilization, constituted a remote tie to the world. A walk as far as the docks, when the little English steamers or the ship from the Lisbon Line arrived, was