Stories with pictures / Antonio Tabucchi ; translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tabucchi, Antonio, 1943-2012, author.

Contributor:

Harris, Elizabeth, 1963- translator.

Standardized Title:

Racconti con figure. English

Language:

English

Italian

Subjects (All):

Tabucchi, Antonio, 1943-2012.

Short stories, Italian--Translations into English.

Short stories, Italian.

Intimacy (Psychology)--Fiction.

Intimacy (Psychology).

Loneliness--Fiction.

Loneliness.

Time--Fiction.

Time.

Tabucchi, Antonio, 1943-2012--Translations into English.

Tabucchi, Antonio.

Genre:

Fiction.

Short stories.

Physical Description:

209 pages : color illustrations ; 17 cm

Edition:

First Achipelago Books edition.

Place of Publication:

Brooklyn, NY Achipelago Books, 2021.

Summary:

In Stories with Pictures, Antonio Tabucchi responds to paintings, drawings, and photographs from his dual homelands of Italy and Portugal, among other countries. This collection's varied writings - stories, essays, journal entries, poems - spring forth from the shadows of Tabucchi's imagination, as he steps into worlds just hidden from view, and into intimate conversation with the artists and their works. Here is a diary written to Valerio Adami and his drawings with their insistent labyrinthian outlines that "we risk being caught inside . . . where we linger, delay our exit, and so are shipwrecked." Here are splashes of stories to Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and her colors, "a madder lacquer for the sound of a cello playing," a "sumptuous black" to see Titian step out from darkness. And tributes to the dreamy, story-telling landscapes of Tullio Pericolo, where Tabucchi soars with the painter and breathes deeply at the top of a distant volcano. From quiet windows, stamps of bright parrots, postcards of yellow cities, portraits of devilish Portuguese nuns, the way to Tabucchi's remote landscapes appears like a "train emerging from a thick curtain of heat." As we peer through the curtain, what we find on the other side rings distinctly human, a world charged with melancholic longing for time gone by. "Sight, hearing, voice, word," Tabucchi writes, "this flow isn't in one direction, the current is back and forth." Reading these pieces, one feels the pendulum current, and the desire in this remarkable author to hold the real in the surreal and to reflect, always, on the nature of art and life, as he converses with the artworks that have "often moved [his] pen."-- Publisher's description.

Contents:

Author's note

Adagios : So long

Flames

Rainy evening on a Holland dike

Bernardo Soares on holiday

Faraway

The painter and his creatures

A window onto the unknown

Story of the man of paper

Dreaming with Dacosta

On the road to Möbius

An unforgettable night

Hold it

don't wake up

A discovered letter

Double enigma

The minotaur's headaches

A midwinter night's dream

Andantes, con brio : The heirs are grateful

A difficult decision

The lady-with-the-hat

A curandeiro in the city on the water

Ariettas : The arrival of Doctor Pereira

The fixed traveler

Like a mirror

Portraits of Stevenson

Spices, lace, distant journeys

Dear wall, I'm writing you

Diary of Crete, with hues of sinopia

Outside terraces, inside terraces

Parisian cafés

For a catalogue that isn't

Translator's note

Art.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (page 203).

ISBN:

9781939810687

193981068X

OCLC:

1140727848

Publisher Number:

99987463121