Requiem - by Alain Tanner (1998)

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Requiem - by Alain Tanner (1998)

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Requiem - by Alain Tanner (1998)

This story is set in Lisbon on the last Sunday in July, between midday and midnight. That Sunday was apparently the hottest day of the year. It was also a very unusual day, engendering hallucinations and the most amazing encounters. Time has unravelled, dissolved in the oppressive heat. Past and present merge into one. The living and the dead meet and settle accounts. In the footsteps of the poet Fernando Pessoa, in a desolate Lisbon, between dream and reality, people from the present and ghosts from the past converse in a manner both grave and light-hearted, and shrug off their burden of regret between midday and midnight of the last Sunday in July… “In REQUIEM, Tanner’s classic frontier assumes an exclusively temporal, inner connotation. Nothing in the Portuguese city inhabited solely by symbolic figures distinguishes reality from dream, and the only demarcation line that stands out with any clarity is that between past and present. This Lisbon is a city of the soul (not of the unconscious because, as a lottery-ticket seller points out: ‘We have nothing to do with “Mitteleuropa”, we have soul’), but still a last landfall, a place on the edge, a land projecting into the ‘beyond’, on account of the ancient finis terrae imprinted on its DNA.”

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Requiem - by Alain Tanner (1998)

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Requiem - by Alain Tanner (1998)

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Requiem - by Alain Tanner (1998)

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Requiem - by Alain Tanner (1998)

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