The Woman of Porto Pim Paperback - 2013

Excerpt

Small Blue Whales Strolling about the Azores Fragment of a Story

She owes me everything, said the man heatedly, everything: her money, her success. I did it for her, I shaped her with my own hands, that’s what. And as he spoke he looked at his hands, clenching and unclenching his fingers in a strange gesture, as if trying to grasp a shadow. The small ferry began to change direction and a gust of wind ruffled the woman’s hair. Don’t talk like that, Marcel, please, she muttered, looking at her shoes. Keep your voice down, people are watching us. She was blonde and wore big sunglasses with delicately tinted lenses. The man’s head jerked a little to one side, a sign of annoyance. Who cares, they don’t understand, he answered. He tossed the stub of his cigarette into the sea and touched the tip of his nose as if to squash an insect. Lady Macbeth, he said with irony, the great tragic actress. You know the name of the place I found her in? It was called ‘La Baguette’, and as it happens she wasn’t playing Lady Macbeth, you know what she was doing? The woman took off her glasses and wiped them nervously on her T-shirt. Please, Marcel, she said. She was showing off her arse to a bunch of dirty old men...

Media reviews

"What a strange and wonderful book this is! If, like me, you are interested in shipwrecks, whales, the Azores and the unique way in which only literature can bring a location to life, and if you like the unclassifiable, small works by authors such as Michael Ondaatje and Italo Calvino — then have I got the book for you ... Wildly inventive." — Ethan Rutherford, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Tabucchi's prose creates a deep, near-profound and sometimes heart-wrenching nostalgia and constantly evokes the pain of recognizing the speed of life's passing which everyone knows but few have the strength to accept ... Wonderfully thought-provoking and beautiful. —Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered

Ruminative, elegiac and mordantly funny, Mr. Tabucchi¢s prose conjures a state between waking and dreaming. —The New York Times

There is in Tabucchi's stories the touch of the true magician, who astonishes us by never trying too hard for his subtle, elusive, and remarkable effects. —The San Francisco Examiner

A witty and subtle meditation on the limits of memory and imagination. —Nick Hornby, Times Literary Supplement

Elegant, cosmopolitan, inventive, ambitious, and disquieting; his writing is, paradoxically, sensual and economical. —Boston Review

Meticulously crafted . . . marked by wit, emotion, memory, and lost grandeur. —Publishers Weekly

"On a final note, I must add that this reviewer had the pleasure of reading The Woman of Porto Pim at the seaside. If at all possible, I recommend all others do the same. I imagine, however, that Tabucchi’s prose, and Parks’s translation, would allow the sea to come to you, wherever you may find yourself reading." — Monika Seger, World Literature Today
 

Like good short fiction, the stories in this volume act in ways that suggest a wider world outside the frame of the story. —Sycamore Review

Citations

• New York Review of Books, 06/04/2015, Page 63