Letter from Casablanca Contributor(s): Tabucchi, Antonio (Author) |
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ISBN: 0811209865 ISBN-13: 9780811209861 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation OUR PRICE: $15.26 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: June 1986 Annotation: 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. |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Literary |
Dewey: FIC |
LCCN: 85028380 |
Physical Information: 0.37" H x 5.4" W x 7.99" (0.31 lbs) 132 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Tabucchi, Antonio: - Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa in 1943 and died in Lisbon, his adopted home, in 2012. Over the course of his career he won France's Medicis Prize for Indian Nocturne, the Italian PEN Prize for Requiem, and the Aristeion Prize for Pereira Maintains. A staunch critic of the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, he once said that "democracy isn't a state of perfection, it has to be improved, and that means constant vigilance." |