The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro

by Antonio Tabucchi, J. C. Patrick (Translator)

Overview

A literary thriller of heroin rings and headless bodies uncovers social ills and corruption in modern day Portugal, whileas in all of Tabucchi's workblurring genre boundaries.

Antonio Tabucchi, Italy's premier writer and a best-selling author throughout Europe, draws together Manolo the gypsy, Firmino, a young tabloid journalist with a weakness for Lukacs and Vittorini, and Don Fernando, an overweight lawyer with a professed resemblance to the actor Charles Laughton, to solve a murder that leads far up and down Portugal's social ladder. As the investigation leads deeper into Portugal's power structure, the novel defies expectations, departing from the formulaic twists of a suspense story to consider the moral weight of power and its abuse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811216043
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/17/2005
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(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.”

Editorial Reviews

"The Missing Head is among Tabucchi's most controversial books for its insistence that even in such evolved societies as those of contemporary Portugal and Italy, a kind of lowercase fascism not only continues to flourish but is too often supported by the supposedly anti-authoritarian forces that control the levers of power."

From the Publisher

Elegant, cosmopolitan, inventive, and disquieting....

Boston Review

His elliptical use of allusions lends this thriller's bare events an intriguing range of philosophical and political overtones.
— Review of Contemporary Fiction

Thomas Hove

The missing head of the title doesn't go missing for very long, so obviously the book is after deeper fish, and is not simply a tale of lost and found...
—Easy Reader

Bondo Wyszpolski

As in his previous novel, the 1994 international bestseller Pereira Declares, Tabucchi, professor of Portuguese literature at the University of Siena in Italy, explores Portugal's politics and culture through the eyes of a journalist. This time his protagonist is Firmino, a young reporter who's also a literature student and whose lofty preoccupation with his academic thesis frequently conflicts with the more earthbound assignments his editor at a Portuguese national scandal-sheet demands. He travels, reluctantly, from Lisbon to the provincial town of Oporto to investigate the gruesome discovery of a headless body found on the edge of a Gypsy encampment. Firmino's sleuthing is assisted by antifascists--the Gypsy who discovered the body, a mysteriously well-connected hotel proprietress, a waiter and a sweaty, heavy-set aristocratic lawyer who defends the unfortunate. It is through literary discussions with the lawyer, Don Fernando, that Firmino learns the legal system of Oporto, the process of investigation and the role journalism can play in bringing a murderer to court. Tabucchi fills his contemporary literary thriller with the kinds of benevolent, humanitarian characters he explored in Pereira, which was set in pre-WWII Portugal; here he delves into the deplorable subjugation of the Gypsies, and finds champions of a just social order in the humbler strata: a transvestite prostitute, an errand-boy drifter. Tabucchi's memorable, conflicted characters are sometimes implausibly altruistic in helping outsider Firmino, and the plot involves the kind of requisite drug-trafficking/police cover-up that weakens the suspense of a thriller. However, it's Tabucchi's setting that breathes life into his work: the reader can almost feel the heat of the Iberian peninsula and experience along with Firmino the unique customs, foods and political climate of Oporto. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly