Time Ages in a Hurry

February 2, 2015
In this collection of short stories, the late Tabucchi (The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico) plays with philosophical themes such as the circularity of memory and time, depicting characters who struggle to preserve voices they can no longer hear and to communicate these echoes to others. In “Drip, Drop, Drippity-Drop,” a man visits his sick aunt in the hospital, where she unexpectedly begins relating stories of his forgotten childhood. As he tries to catch hold of these “memories”—the former selves he had lost—she tells him “this is how the past is made.” In some stories, new events can change the meaning of former ones: in “Between Generals,” a Hungarian general fights a losing battle on principle, is imprisoned most of his life, and finally spends his best days with the Soviet general to whom he had lost. In fact, many of Tabucchi’s characters are nearing the end of their lives and have lived through 20th-century horrors that younger generations cannot understand. For instance, in “Bucharest Hasn’t Changed a Bit,” an aged father recounts his painful experiences in Romania, complaining that memories can be told “but not transmitted.” His sensible son, meanwhile, points out the factual errors of his father’s version of events. Exposing memory for the fiction it is, these wonderful stories produce a melancholic nostalgia even as they undermine it.

February 1, 2015
A pensive, beautifully written meditation on personhood and nationhood in the new age of European unity.Novelist, translator and professor Tabucchi (It's Getting Later All the Time, 2006, etc.), who died three years ago, was an Italian who loved Portugal above all other places but who always looked homeward as well. Just so, many of the characters in this joined collection-something more than short stories but not quite a novel-are stateless and uprooted; they come from somewhere else, and they're never quite at home where they are. So it is that, in one of the most memorable pieces, a South American adoptee protests to a returning war veteran that she is as Italian as he is: "I am totally Italian like you and maybe even more than you, sir, but I like languages and I also know the Mameli anthem by heart...." The reader who is not versed in contemporary Italian society or, for that matter, European geopolitics may miss a reference or two here and there, as when the young girl continues to say that she doesn't like the politico who's threatening to abolish that anthem, said piece of musical patriotism having been taken up by fascists and communists alike back in a day that continues to haunt these pages. Other of Tabucchi's characters wander the streets of New York, London, Berlin, their personal geographies not always jibing with modern realities; thinks another young woman in Paris, "it's a Haussmann building, and Haussmann was Haussmann, and that was that, yet what did Haussmann have to do with what she was?" Tabucchi would have assumed that the reader knew who Haussmann was, among his other allusions, but one might want to read these illuminating stories with historical dictionary at hand. A quibble: The title might have been more idiomatically rendered Time Gets Old in a Hurry, getting at the paradoxes and wordplay that Tabucchi loved. A pleasure all the same for fans of modern European literature.

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