Tristano Dies: A Life

4.5 stars Antonio Tabucchi's Tristano Dies, beautifully translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris, is a dizzying stream-of-consciousness monologue by Tristano, who, as the title indicates, is dying from gangrene of his leg. Considered a hero for having single-handedly taken out an encampment of Germans during the World War II invasion of Greece, Tristano tells the "true" story to an audience of one, a writer who had previously written a complimentary novel based on Tristano's life. The truth, however, is not so easy to grasp; not only is Tristano taking large doses of painkillers (perhaps rendering him a less-than-reliable narrator), but he also moves back and forth through time with little or no warning, and all of the key characters he mentions have multiple names (his American lover is referred to variously as Marilyn, Guagliona, and Rosamunde, and she occasionally refers to Tristano as Clark, apparently because he resembles Clark Gable). Tristano himself brilliantly sums up the dilemma at the heart of his tale: "But instead, the world's composed of acts, actions ... concrete things that then are gone, because, writer, an action takes place, it occurs ... and occurs only in that one precise moment, then disappears, is no longer there; it was. For an action to remain, it needs words, which continue to make it be, they bear witness. ... All that remains of what we are and what we were are the words we've said, the words you're writing down now, writer, and not what I did in that given place and that given time." What power words have! Tabucchi, through Tristano, returns to this theme - the unreliability of history as recorded by human words - again and again: "[H]e didn't understand that we make history, that we build it with our own two hands, it's our own invention, and we could build another, if we just wanted to, if we just convinced ourselves that history, her story, is this or that, if we only had the strength to tell her, you're nothing, madam history, don't be so arrogant, you're just my hypothesis, and if you don't mind, madam, I'm going to invent you now as I see fit. . . . You came here to gather up a life. But you know what you're gathering? Words. No - more like air, my friend - words are sounds composed of air. Air. You're gathering air." My only complaint, and a somewhat embarrassing one at that, is that the translator did not include translations of the many French phrases used by Tristano. It is a sad fact that most Americans are not multilingual, and even those of us who can muddle along with schoolhouse Italian and Spanish are defeated by French and German. I hope that, in the future, Archipelago Books will include such miscellaneous translations at least in endnotes. Although, come to think of it, Archipelago may have done this deliberately, hoping to draw English-speaking readers to discover such fabulous works as Tristano Dies in their native tongues. I received a free copy of Tristano Dies through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.