It's Getting Later All the Time

From Italy, an epistolary novel like no other, full of Tabucchi's special "enchantment, which trans-figures even as it captivates" ("TLS"). In "It's Getting Later All the Time," an epistolary novel with a twist, Antonio Tabucchi--"internationally acclaimed as the most original voice in the new generation of Italian writers" ("The Harvard Book Review")--revitalizes an illustrious tradition, only to break all its rules. Seventeen men write seventeen strangely beautiful letters--tender or rancorous--lonely monologues which move in circles, each describing an affair, and each desperate for a reply which may never come. The letters plunge the reader into an electric, timeless no-man's-land of "this past that is always somewhere, hanging in shreds." And at last, collecting all their one-sided, remorseful adventures into a single polyphonic novel, an 18th letter startlingly answers the men's pleas: a woman's voice, distant, implacable, yet full of sympathy. "It's Getting Later All the Time" captures destinies which, though so varied in appearance, are at rock bottom all the same: broken. This is an anti-Proustian novel--time lost is lost forever: it is impossible to get back to the past no matter how it haunts the present. As Tabucchi remarked, "Broken time is a dimension you find lots of men living in...an ambiguous, impossible situation, because they are faced with a kind of remorse, a choice they never made."