Antonio Tabucchi and the inconsistency of love in post-modernity

Abstract

Antonio Tabucchi, an Italian writer deceased in 2012, gained notoriety for his translation, research and promotion of Fernando Pessoa’s works. As a fiction writer, he was successful since the 1980s with the publication of books such as O Jogo do Reverso (1981) and Afirma Pereira (1994). Since then, he stood out among the great names of contemporary literature by his large and varied body of work which became widely translated and received many movie adaptations. His texts, full of postmodernist features, present themselves to the readers as a portrait drawn from observation of reality and ever-changing unstable individuals. One example is the text highlighted here, “Bom como você é”, which integrates the 2001 work Está ficando tarde demais. Written as an epistle, the letter investigates one of the most prominent and shifting dimensions of human life: the feeling of love. Therefore, the present article aims to reflect on Tabucchi’s work, looking into its dialogues with post-modernity and the way it faces typically contemporary questions such as the frailty of relationships, the inconsistency that surrounds the individual and the fluidity of identities.