Девушка в тюрбане

Antonio Tabucchi's new novel The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro continues the experiment so successfully begun with his Pereira Declares (New Directions, 1994) — a European best-seller and winner of the prestigious Aristeion European Literature Prize in 1997. Tabucchi has now written a thriller, but one with a subtle intellectual depth not usual in that genre. The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro intriguingly reflects on current social issues: crime, police corruption, yellow journalism, and the courts — both of the law and of public opinion. Tabucchi hooks the reader on page one of this book and the story advances with electric and unflagging suspense. A gypsy discovers a headless body; Firmino, a young journalist who writes for a scandal-sheet, takes up the case; the headless corpse turns out to be that of one Damasceno Monteiro, an employee at an import-export company who, having stumbled upon a heroin smuggling ring at his work, had stolen a drug shipment; and, the police are supressing evidence — all the stuff of familiar daily news, here made riveting in the hands of a rare and brilliant writer.

Late on night, the body of a young man is delivered to the morgue of an Italian town. The next day's newspapers report that he was killed in a police raid, and that went by the obviously false name "Carlo Nobodi." Spino, the morgue attendant on duty at the time, becomes obsessed with tracing the identity of the corpse. "Why do you want to know about him?" asks a local priest. "Because he is dead and I'm alive," replies Spino. In this spare yet densely packed cautionary tale, Tabucchi reminds us that it is impossible to reach the edge of the horizon since it always recedes before us, but suggests that some people "carry the horizon with them in their eyes."

As the collection's title suggests, time's passage is the of these stories. All of Tabucchi's characters struggle to find routes of escape from a present that is hard to bear, and from places in which political events have had deeply personal ramifications for their own lives.

Each of the nine stories in Time Ages in a Hurry is an imaginative inquiry into something hidden or disguised, which can be uncovered not by reason but only by feeling and intuition, by what isn't said. Disquieted and disoriented yet utterly human in their loves and fears, the characters in these vibrant and often playful stories suffer from what Tabucchi once referred to as a "corrupted relationship with history." Each protagonist must confront phantoms from the past, misguided or false beliefs, and the deepest puzzles of identity-and each in his or her own way ends up experiencing "an infinite sense of liberation, as when finally we understand something we'd known all along and didn't want to know."

Антонио Табукки (р. 1945) – итальянский писатель, специалист по португальской литературе. Книга «Утверждает Перейра» принесла автору мировую известность. Роман получил четыре итальянские премии, был экранизирован (в главной роли – М.Мастрояни). Коллизия романа, но существу, близка советской истории: действие происходит в фашистской Португалии в 1938 г. Кажущаяся простота сюжета и слога повествования оттеняет изысканное композиционное построение «этих свидетельских показаний».