Original language: Italian
Original title: Poetics a posteriori
Translation: Charles Gumpert.
Year of publication: 2006
Valuation: essential for completists, highly recommended in general
It seems that I am late to Tabucchi’s work, and I don’t know if I will have time to amend or correct it, because reading this Other people’s autobiographies I admit I feel tempted – if I had time – to catch up or even review one of his novels (obviously a blog like this has already reviewed Sostiene Pereira) But I’m going to focus on what I’ve found here.
That he is a high-level writer, with some aftertaste of that multilingual and slightly decadent Europe that, I speculate, he shares with someone else like Vila-Matas or Sebald. In a derogatory tone they are often called writers for writers but I would not venture with such an equivocal concept. What we have in this collection of texts is like a complement that its regular readers have surely not ignored. When reading it without having read his novels, it sounds to me as if he had composed a text with prologues or epilogues or even with some footnotes or discards from them.
The curious thing is that, due to its always adjusted length and the skill of the writer, it ends up functioning as a separate work without ceasing to fulfill the function of arousing curiosity, as works of this type usually do. Seducing in short space, in sections in which it seems like a diary of personal experiences parallel to the creative process, or taking a broader perspective, where it ventures into exercises that clearly demonstrate that many great writers are enormous readers. The references here are not limited only to the introductory sentences of the chapters or the extensive index of authors mentioned – from the A of Apollonaire to the Y of Yourcenar, but they are integrated perfectly into the text and play with it, thus which all those hyperboles about his work seem to make complete sense. So, for once, I will gladly accept suggestions about his work.
Source: https://unlibroaldia.blogspot.com/2024/12/antonio-tabucchi-autobiografias-ajenas.html
