The Edge of the Horizon

by Antonio Tabucchi, Tim Parks (Translator)

Overview

New Directions is proud to be the publisher of the the distinguished Italian novelist Antonio Tabucchi, whose works include The Edge of the Horizon, a story of an “unimportant death,” now available for the first time in a paperback edition.  

Late on night, the body of a young man is delivered to the morgue of an Italian town. The next day's newspapers report that he was killed in a police raid, and that went by the obviously false name "Carlo Nobodi." Spino, the morgue attendant on duty at the time, becomes obsessed with tracing the identity of the corpse. "Why do you want to know about him?" asks a local priest. "Because he is dead and I'm alive," replies Spino. In this spare yet densely packed cautionary tale, Tabucchi reminds us that it is impossible to reach the edge of the horizon since it always recedes before us, but suggests that some people "carry the horizon with them in their eyes."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811224512
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	08/27/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa in 1943 and died in Lisbon, his adopted home, in 2012. Over the course of his career he won France’s Medicis Prize for Indian Nocturne, the Italian PEN Prize for Requiem, and the Aristeion Prize for Pereira Maintains. A staunch critic of the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, he once said that “democracy isn’t a state of perfection, it has to be improved, and that means constant vigilance.”

Tim Parks is the author of more than twenty novels and works of nonfiction, including the best-selling Italian Neighbors and An Italian Education. His novels include Europa which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.  His essays have appeared in the The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Parks is also a renowned translator from the Italian and lives in Verona.

Editorial Reviews

Tabucchi's fourth work to be translated into English functions as both a surrealistic mystery novel and a philosophical inquiry into the nature of existence. But muddy writing and a badly conceptualized story line prevents it from realizing that magical quality achieved so effortlessly by Calvino, with whom the author can be compared. Spino, a mortuary worker whose name, Tabucchi coyly admits, is an abbreviation of Spinoza, becomes intrigued when the corpse of a young man who went by the pseudonym ``Carlo Nobodi'' is brought into the morgue. Although he was killed in a bloody gun battle with police, it is unclear whether Carlo was part of a criminal gang or only an unlucky bystander. Spino fixates on the mystery surrounding the young man's short life and death, and determines to learn as much as he can. A series of palpable yet baffling clues--an old photograph, a jacket that belonged to Carlo's father--leads Spino figuratively and literally to the outskirts of the Italian underworld, a realm he must enter to complete his discovery, in this promising but yet ultimately frustrating work. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly