Antonio Tabucchi (1943-2012)
I have not been a great novel reader for a long time now, but Antonio Tabucchi — first discovered in Paris in the eighties when Christian Bourgois started publishing him in French — was & remains someone I read with pleasure. He is a supremely elegant, rather spare prose stylist, whose love for Portugal and — before all — the writings of poet Fernando Pessoa was so great that he not only moved to Lisbon & translated Pessoa into Italian, but even wrote some of his books first in Portuguese before translating them back into his native Italian. In this country New Directions has published him for many years — try It’s Getting Later All the Time.