Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico Paperback - 2012

Excerpt

The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

The first creature arrived on a Thursday towards the end of June, at vespers, when all the monks were in the chapel for service. Privately, Fra Giovanni of Fiesole still thought of himself as Guidolino, the name he had left behind in the world when he came to the cloister. He was in the vegetable garden gathering onions, which was his job, since in abandoning the world he hadn’t wanted to abandon the vocation of his father, Pietro, who was a vegetable gardener, and in the garden at San Marco he grew tomatoes, courgettes and onions. The onions were the red kind, with big heads, very sweet after you’d soaked them for an hour, though they made you cry a fair bit when you handled them. He was putting them in his frock gathered to form an apron, when he heard a voice calling: Guidolino. He raised his eyes and saw the bird. He saw it through onion tears filling his eyes and so stood gazing at it for a few moments, for the shape was magnified and distorted by his tears as though through a bizarre lens; he blinked his eyes to dry the lashes, then looked again.

Media reviews

There is in Tabucchi’s stories the touch of the true magician, who astonishes us by never trying too hard for his subtle, elusive and remarkable effects. —The San Francisco Examiner

Tabucchi’s work has an almost palpable sympathy for the oppressed. —The New York Times

By now the appearance of a new novel by Antonio Tabucchi is a literary event. —World Literature Today

Like good short fiction, the stories in this volume act in ways that suggest a wider world outside the frame of the story. —Sycamore Review

A witty and subtle meditation on the limitations of memory and imagination. —Nick Hornby, Times Literary Supplement

[Tabucchi's] prose creates a deep, near-profound and sometimes heart-wrenching nostalgia and constantly evokes the pain of recognizing the speed of life's passing which everyone knows but few have the strength to accept ... Wonderfully thought-provoking and beautiful. —Alan Cheuse, NPR's All Things Considered