For Isabel: A Mandela

Hello Gentle Reader

Patience and dedication as virtues are in short supply in today’s world. Numerous forms of media vie for attention of the consumer, reader, and viewer. Attention is divided to the point of fragmentation. The commodities of today’s world are: instant gratification and instant relief. In today’s consumerist driven society, consumers want products, services, materials instantaneously. Patience, the once preached and revered virtue, is now a mythological concept, which is no longer featured in today’s high demand and high volume society. Now days waiting in line are not a testament of virtue; it’s an exercise in tolerating inconveniences. Admiration can only be expressed for the sheer will, patience and meditative tenacity possessed by Buddhist monks, when they design, form, construct their beautiful sand paintings, called mandalas. A mandala is a visual feast. The beauty of the mandalas comes from their intricate superficial simplicity, which only hides their complex symmetry and geometry, which creates their striking patterns, which is only accentuated by the bold and striking spectrum of colours included. By geometric pattern and shape and infused with colour becomes one of the most beautiful and transient piece of art, utilized in religious ceremonies and other liturgies. The craftsmanship and detailed oriented design, is rivaled only by the dedication and meditative patience displayed by the monks who diligently and patiently spread, weave, and guide the different colours of the sand in different patterns, to create a geometrically cerebral picture infused with a bold spectrum of colours. The dedication and detailed hard work, however, is quickly brushed away after it’s completed in a ceremony. The beauty of the sand painting and its quick transient erasure, speaks to the materialist metaphor and disengagement the Buddhist theology convicts itself to when discussing the meaninglessness of material goods. Yet, the entire process and finished product is truly an amazing spectacle to observe and admire.

The mandala as a symbol is important to Antonio Tabucchi’s posthumous published novel: “For Isabel: A Mandala.”  In other words: if it isn’t made clear enough by the title; it’s an important element to Tabucchi’s final novel. In this novel, Tabucchi’s narrator is a dead Polish writer by the name of: Tadeus, to come back from the dead (or to travel from the Dog Star— Sirius or Canis Major (Greater Dog))—to review and find answers to the mysterious woman of his youth, Isabel. Moving through different rings, Tadeus, is tasked with meeting with an eclectic group of acquaintances, friends, cohorts, saviours, and connections of Isabel’s life, in order to piece together her identity, her life, as well as the mysterious circumstances in which she disappeared. Tadeus, openly introduces and explains his journey as moving through the mandala, to the individuals in which he meets, and explains his interest in finding out the fate of Isabel, in order to make peace with her, and find peace for himself. The entire novel is not subtle in how it is crafted like a mandala sand painting. Each of the nine chapters, opens with a fragmented title, starting with the numbered circle, character being interviewed, location, and finally the abstract theme or trope of that circle of the mandala; such as: Evocation, Orientation, Absorption, Restoration, Image, Communication, Worldliness, Expansion, and Return. Throughout it all, Tadeus and the reader, journey through Salazar’s Fascist Portugal, in search of Isabel, who came to the attention of the secret police and the paranoid totalitarian government due to her activities with student demonstrations and a explicitly critical view of the government, as well as finally forming connections and allegiances with the Communist Party (the spiritual opposition of fascism). This would make Isabel, oh sweet Isabel, an enemy of Salazar’s Portugal. But her opposition to Salazar and his totalitarian government made her the speaker and orator of the discontent of Portugal. She wrote articles and essays in underground newspapers, she spoke freely, criticized with fire, and protested with conviction. She inspired both awe and worry in the common people, but also her colleagues, school friends, and family. Most importantly, though—perhaps in her own eyes—she had yanked and attracted the ire of the government, who sought to disband and subject the citizenry to obedience not dissidence.

Through meeting the individuals who had some coherent connection to Isabel, Tadeus, seeks to piece together her fate. Through a friend, who explains Isabel’s antigovernment activities, she confesses a pregnant Isabel, had overstayed her welcome, and the government had grown intolerant to her propagation of revolt and resistance. She was arrested. It is there in her prison cell, (allegedly) pregnant, and alone, Isabel dies. Tadeus, however, cannot accept this account of events. They don’t add up. If her life was so easily finished and final, why is he all of a sudden called back to piece together her life for his own eternal peace and rest? He refuses the accounted narrative, and seeks to find someone else who may find more answers, and so his quest continues. From nanny, to musician, to prison guard, to priest, to poet; Tadeus searches endlessly for the complete piceture and fate of Isabel, and in doing so begins to pass through his mandalas, with greater accomplishment as he begins to orbit on the peripherals of the centre, were surely, Isabel, will be waiting for him; and if not, at least at long last her fate will have been made clear, and he can finally return to his dog star, and continue his final end once again.

If one were to request that I draft a list of my favourite writers, Antonio Tabucchi, would most certainly be on it, alongside so many others (as to this day the list continually grows). Discovering, Antonio Tabucchi, numerous years ago was a wonderful reading experience; but it did take a long time for me to finally allocate the courage in order to read him. Every article, entry, interview, and profile, described an Italian who had become a scholar of Portuguese language and literature, with a particular fascination with the elusive and mystically fragmented Portuguese Fernando Pessoa, and all of his heteronyms. Reading the prefaces, articles, profiles, and digressions on Tabucchi, created a portrait of a cerebral and unique writer; one whose obsession with the obscure and almost schizophrenically mystical Portuguese poet, made him even more curious; but the term: scholar—or Portuguese language scholar—always appeared in his discussions, which immediately led to hesitation (and not due to the language) but rather due to the idea of scholar, meaning dry, stuffy and sophistic. Nothing is more boring to read or endure, then the self-absorbed monologue and intellectual masturbation, of someone droning in a monologue about their niche interest. For the longest time, I held Antonio Tabucchi with reserve and uncertainty. I scouted and stalked; but never pounced. Until finally, I took a chance on his most famous novel:  “Pereira Maintains,” or “Pereira Declares,” (pending on your translation available). The novel is slim and short; fast paced and engaging. The novel is a colourful display of political protest, and awakening. Pereira harbours a fugitive revolutionary, which stirs and disrupts his own political apathy, as he submits censorship as just an aspect of political change in Salazar’s renewed vision of Portuguese society. Yet the young man he harbours revolts, refutes, and expresses disdain to this shift in authority and power, and promotes widespread dissidence and protest. This without a doubt begins to gather the attention of the government who see this radical perspective as dangerous and counterproductive, and begin to harass Pereira, who despite receiving the articles and reportage and reviews, from the young man never publishes them. yet the more they are sent, the more they are received, the more they are read—even by Pereira himself—the begin to resonate and influence the individual change necessary to begin influencing grander change. The novel during its time was often picked up and used as a symbol, icon and image of protest against unpopular governments in Italy. From there Antonio Tabucchi, proved to show himself as a masterful writer, a writer who can tackle complex political and societal issues, with skepticism and critique without adhering to any particular ideology other than one which fixated on humanities and universal ideas of freedom. His novels and short stories could shift between the cerebral and mystical (“Requiem: a Hallucination,” “Indian Nocturne,”) to the political (“Pereira Maintains,” or “Pereira Declares,” “The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro,” “The Edge of Horizon,”) to his masterful experimental novels (“It’s Getting Later All The Time,” “Tristano Dies,”) and of course his famous short stories (“Little Misunderstandings of No Importance,” “Time Ages in a Hurry,”) and prose fragments and stories which defy genre and expectation (“The Woman of Porto Pim,” “The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico,”). Yet the unifying elements of his work, is also his humanistic spirit, his political engagement and recognition of historical importance, his masterful use of language, and his ability to tell narrative in sometimes the most complex and unusual ways—be it letters written to an unknown recipient, who in the end comes full circle, and responds, comforts and confronts her epistolary ghosts; or a morphine infused monologue, from a dying soldier recounting his unreliable life, which grows more hazy as the dosage increases, and memories by their construct in themselves unreliable. Ever masterful and always engaging, Antonio Tabucchi, never truly seems to dissapoting; and he when he does—such as: “The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro,”—it can be overlooked and absolved.

“For Isabel: a Mandala,” is slightly different than the rest of Tabucchi’s backlog and oeuvre. Its unique and blends the dream and unrealistic (Tadeus confesses to being dead, and coming from the great dog), but it also holds his preoccupations with Portugal and his political involvement and willingness to criticize ideologies and dictators. It shows his preoccupation with the shifting and fluid idea of identity, and how others perceptions make up in part our own identity. Yet, of his previous novels, “For Isabel: a Mandala,” appears uncharacteristically unpolished. I have my doubts the novel was ready for publication upon the authors untimely death of lung cancer back in two-thousand and twelve; as certain sections appeared like they could have been fleshed out a bit more, there could have been more philosophical conversations, more intrigue, and the ending seems quickly forced and even kitschy for Tabucchi. It is certainly one of his more interesting narratives, but not entirely the most successful. It is, however, masterfully translated by the exquisite hands of Elizabeth Harris; but it shows its imperfections and carries the shadow of its authors untimely demise. Yet, if one is looking for an ontological and cerebral mystery in a hundred and some pages, it’s a good read. Reading, “For Isabel: A Mandala,” is being able to once again meet an old friend, and rekindle and clear the weeds away of a well-established respect and principle of enjoyment as reader and author. I look forward on a personal note to see more works of Antonio Tabucchi’s work published further; and perhaps his out of print works republished to find a new audience again. Antonio Tabucchi truly is and was one of the greatest writers of the past century and early twenty-first; and one of the best Italian writers since Italo Calvino.

Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader

Take Care

And As Always

Stay Well Read

M. Mary