Requiem: A Hallucination

Antonio Tabucchi's novel Requiem is set in Lisbon on a torrid July day. The unnamed narrator - clearly a persona of Tabucchi himself - awaits a midnight appointment on a quay of the Tagus. His time is filled with a succession of encounters with residents of the Portuguese capital, and with late friends and relations. Part travelog, part autobiography, part fiction, Requiem at once becomes a homage to a country and a people and a farewell to the past; requiescat in pace. In all this, the narrator himself remains shadowy, walking in a dream atmosphere. The midnight appointment approaches. The narrator meets at last with another unnamed writer, now long dead, though the evidence points to the great poet Fernando Pessoa. Requiem thus ends as an act of succession, the narrator's claim to a literary forebear who, like himself, is of evasive and manifold personalities.