For Isabel: A Mandala [Paperback]

Winner of the 2018 Italian Prose in Translation Award

A metaphysical detective story about love and existence from the Italian master, Antonio Tabucchi. When Tadeus sets out to find Isabel, his former love, he soon finds himself on a metaphysical journey across the world, one that calls into question the meaning of time and existence and the power of words.

Isabel disappeared many years ago. Tadeus Slowacki, a Polish writer, her former friend and lover, has come back to Lisbon to learn of her whereabouts. Rumors abound: Isabel died in prison under Salazar's regime, or perhaps wasn't arrested at all. As Tadeus interviews one old acquaintance of hers after the next, a chameleon-like portrait of a young, ideological woman emerges, ultimately bringing Tadeus on a metaphysical journey across the continent. Constructed in the form of a mandala,For Isabelis the spiraling search for an enigma, an investigation into time and existence, the power of words, and the limits of the senses. In this posthumous work Tabucchi creates an ingenious narration, tracing circles around a lost woman and the ultimate inaccessible truth.APublishers WeeklyBest Book of 2017
Winner of the 2018 ALTA Italian Prose in Translation Award

The story’s procedural structure rather pleasingly echoes an episode of “Law and Order.” But to Tadeus the encounters represent the concentric circles on a mandala, a symbol of wholeness in Indian philosophy. . . this tantalizing, quicksilver novel, subtly translated by Elizabeth Harris, illuminates a soul in transit, yearning to complete the story that will release him from his suffering. — Sam Sacks, inThe Wall Street Journal

Planes of existence are crossed, and the dead brought back to life, in order to reach the center of Tabucchi's project. Luckily, that center is worth its intrigue. Isabel's path through life, and the narrator's path following her, is filled witlăœ