Antonio Tabucchi's <i>Requiem</i>: mourning modernism

Abstract

Requiem, the only narrative text written by Antonio Tabucchi in Portuguese, is also, as the author himself has confessed, his most autobiographical work. This text also presents its reader with an amazingly dense fabric of signification. An essentially plotless story, the narrative is cast as a dream and is as elusive and enigmatic as Tabucchi's other fictional works. The abundance of familiar topoi, along with references to the writer's own fiction and to his personal canon of literary and non-literary authors, would seem to invite the reader to provide an interpretation. Yet this invitation is itself a fiction, as several critics who have already engaged the text agree.