Requiem, or The Temptation of Antonio (Tabucchi)

Abstract

Among the various distorting mirrors that characterize his works, in the novel Requiem, Antonio Tabucchi places an Egyptian saint (St. Antony the Abbot), a Nordic school altarpiece (Hieronymus Bosch’s Temptation of St. Antony) and a postmodern writer (himself), three interdependent elements within the semantic horizon of this work. The article intends to deepen this theme, showing how the investigation of the relationship between factors scattered around the four corners of Europe can prove to be a key to reading this work and, maybe, also shed light on the mechanisms of Tabucchian writing in general.