Antonio Tabucchi Week: Piazza d'Italia

Antonio Tabucchi’s first novel, Piazza d’Italia (1975), paints a family portrait spanning nearly one hundred years of Italian history, from the country’s unification under Garibaldi through its early birth pangs, expanding colonial empire, passage through World War I, losses to emigration and influenza, Fascism, World War II, and finally its post-war emergence as a democratic republic, a vast historical panorama of a nation and family buffeted by the waves of great historical events, rendered in sumptuous detail with a penetrating, granular examination of every facet of Italian life, a sweeping depiction, extending nearly 200 pages, of-…

Okay, so I made up all that stuff about granular examination and sumptuous detail. This is, after all, Antonio Tabucchi, not some 19^th century novelist who wouldn’t have dreamed of compacting so much time into so few pages. But there’s something winsome about Tabucchi’s restrained yet imaginative and engaging attempt to do this, and, as his first novel, Piazza d’Italia also sows some grains for what would emerge in his subsequent works. That Tabucchi choose to divide Piazza d’Italia into three sections – the “restored” subtitle of the 1993 French re-issue I read is “A Popular Tale in Three Times” - may suggest his own sense of the unwieldiness of the narrative’s temporal compression.

Piazza d’Italia’s “Three Times” correspond roughly to three generations of one libertarian, left-leaning family, whose surname is never provided as though to emphasize their representational aspect. The first section tells of a veteran of Garibaldi’s campaigns, the soldier Plinio (the names of many characters in Piazza Italia echo through Italian history, and the tradition of naming children after historical figures gets an amusing treatment when a misprint on a poster results in several children being named “Imberto” instead of “Umberto”). Plinio and his wife Esterina produce two sets of twins, one identical (the brothers Quarto and Volturno) and one fraternal (brother Garibaldo and sister Anita).  Hints of Tabucchi’s later manifestations of interest in the vagaries of identity are evident here, since not only do the twins allude to Italy’s origins in the Romulus and Remus myth and suggest continuity through time, but they also serve as a concatenation of identities within the family. Adding to this concentrate are multiple iterations of the name Garibaldo, including when the town hall denies Plinio his initial wish to name each of the identical twins Garibaldo, or a generation later when their brother Garibaldo’s son, yet another Volturno, discards his own name and adopts that of his father (there’s an indispensible family tree provided in an appendix). Moving gingerly from one generation to the next, Piazza d’Italia traverses Italian history, its events filtered through the Tuscan village of Borgo and marked in the town piazza by the serial replacement of the statue at its center to reflect whichever political figure is most popular at the time. The town’s first cinema also comes to play a starring role in marking later historical events, its ostensible function loaned out for speeches, rallies, and other gatherings having nothing to do with cinema, causing the poor population to wait repeatedly in vain for Giovanni Pastrone’s epic nationalist film Cabiria to finally reach the town. While the family’s men go off to fight or emigrate to the Americas or stay to combat fascism or drift into the deserts of Africa, its fierce and smart women form the moral center of Piazza d’Italia and play as active a political role, albeit often behind the scenes, as their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons. Some of the references to Italian particulars may be lost on non-Italian readers (just as Pereira Maintains, despite its setting in Salazar’s Portugal, was read by many in Italy as a warning of resurgent fascism under Berlusconi), but at least for historical background, endnotes help fill gaps in the reader’s knowledge.

Tabucchi’s preface to the reissue of Piazza d’Italia contains an admission that it’s the novel with which he realized he wanted to be a writer, as well as a melancholic, Tabucchi-esque musing on the identify of that other, younger Tabucchi who wrote it. For those familiar with Tabucchi’s work, Piazza d’Italia may seem almost quaint, and only hints at what makes his later works so notable, with their dreams and hallucinations, rich literary and cultural references, surprising shifts of identity and clever, meta-fictional conceits that display Tabucchi’s well-known obsession with Fernando Pessoa (those later works also demonstrate significantly pared-down historical scope, as though Tabucchi realized that beyond mere historical measure, an even greater expansiveness might be attained by exploring the multiplicities within an individual’s identity). Tabucchi gives us, in Piazza d’Italia, something more akin to Gabriel Garcia Marquez than to Pessoa, a linear history of three generations of a family set in a small town not unlike Macondo and told through anecdote and vignette, with a few lexical games, such as when the second generation children all refer to one another by their names spelled backwards, and sprinklings of magical and surreal elements, as when the town’s windows all loose themselves from their casements and, flapping their shutters, take to the sky. For me, the setting and period also call to mind Federico Fellini’s film “Amarcord,” with its similar intimacy, gentle humor, great humanism, and sense of distant events sending ripples through a small town, altering it temporarily yet lending it the aspect of some eternal witness. But the beginnings of Tabucchi’s later directions are evident in the confusion of identities, the historical repetitions and caprices of time, the determined, explicit political stance (perhaps because of Tabucchi’s strong opposition to fascism even in his own time, the novel’s scenes during Mussolini’s rule possess a particularly acute power), and above all, Tabucchi’s humor and playfulness, delight with language, confidence and clarity, and warmth of spirit. In other words, Piazza d’Italia is not a bad place to start for a great writer, or for those interested in getting to know him.

I read Piazza d’Italia for Antonio Tabucchi Week, graciously hosted by Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat.

Antonio Tabucchi on The Book of Disquiet

If one can say that a life can be transformed by reading a writer’s work, the contemporary Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi (who died this March) provides a notable example. As a student in Paris, Tabucchi read Fernando Pessoa’s poem, “The Tobacco Shop,” which set him on a lifelong trajectory influenced to an unusual degree by the Portuguese writer. Tabucchi  wrote and taught of Pessoa, translated nearly all of the writer’s works into Italian, and, in his own novels and short stories, fed ravenously on Pessoa’s influence.

Before I leave off discussion of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, I thought I’d attempt to summarize Tabucchi’s brief treatment of this work in La nostalgie du possible: sur Pessoa (The Nostalgia of the Possible: On Pessoa), one of Tabucchi’s two books of essays on the writer. There may be more insightful works on Pessoa, but I’ve singled out this one due to my appreciation of Tabucchi and because the book is both unavailable in English and difficult to track down in French.  La nostalgie du possible consists of four lectures Tabucchi presented in Paris in 1994 along with a handy guide to Pessoa’s principal heteronyms, those alter egos he created as authors of his poetry and prose. The first lecture addresses philosophical concepts in the entirety of Pessoa’s work. Another compares Pessoa to Leopardi. In a third (for me the highlight of the collection, though not the subject of this post) Tabucchi literally unpacks – like Harpo Marx emptying his pockets – the diverse and surprising belongings of the Pessoan heteronym Alvaro de Campos, commencing with a list of all the physical objects mentioned in de Campos’ poems, and incorporating a wonderful bit about the automobile in modernist literature that begins with Proust’s “Ruskinian adventures” in visiting France’s cathedrals using a car’s headlights to illuminate their facades and ends with discussion of a wayward tire floating in the middle of the de Campos poem, “Maritime Ode.”

The short lecture Tabucchi devotes to The Book of Disquiet is entitled, “L’infinie dysphorique du Bernardo Soares” (“The Dysphoric Infinity of Bernado Soares”). Tabucchi views Soares as a being whose primary mode of interacting with the world is a “disquiet” feeling of nostalgia, not for the past, or even the present, but for those things that might have been. Soares’ life is unusually marked by insignificance and troubled by the day-to-day. Out of the vast and dense universe of the quotidian described in these 450 pages of meditations by Soares, Tabucchi pulls out a particularly interesting episode: the fright Soares experiences when a group photo is taken at a holiday party at his office (fragment 56 in the Richard Zenith translation), a photo that causes Soares to suffer “the truth on seeing myself there” and that prompts him to wonder who he is, exactly, among this “lifeless tide of faces.” In effect, it’s a scene that clearly identifies Soares as depressive and dysphoric. And while as Tabucchi points out, the origins of this depression beg for a psychoanalytic interpretation he’s unqualified to provide, one must also point out that Soares is a fictional character, his book a “phenomenological” one (with a kinship to Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). Soares’ depression is not just the “black mood” of the ancients, but a dysphoric rupture with reality, a frustration with not being able to find in the exterior world a correlation for the grandeur of his emotions and sensations, those great and small alike. His interior world is simply too expansive to fit the crude limitations of his commonplace reality. A commonplace person, he turns of necessity to “his little daily universe, his pocket universe,” (I love this phrase – “pocket universe”), the ordinariness of the world, constructing of it a new kind of infinity, a new kind of metaphysics through which the mysteries of the universe are revealed via the quotidian and banal. One result of this attempt to invest the outside, commonplace world with the tumultuous interior world of Soares’ emotions is the richness with which, in his daily journal, Soares is able to imbue the most insignificant of things and magnify the world through them (through descriptions Tabucchi compares to the “word-paintings” of Ruskin).  As Tabucchi concludes, Soares’ writing – his pinning down the impressions of a day and etching his reflections on his tenuous existence – is the dysphoric stroke of a pendulum that finds a correlating euphoric expression in Pessoa’s other poet heteronyms, together representing an almost compulsory attempt to fill the void by trying to write “all possible books…incessantly multiplying oneself as though the world were made of writing.”  

“…as though the world were made of writing.”

I look forward to tracking down Tabucchi’s other book of essays on Pessoa.