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