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Original Title:	Notturno indiano
ISBN:	0811210804 (ISBN13: 9780811210805)
Edition Language:	English
Setting:	India
Literary Awards:	Prix Médicis Etranger (1987)

Indian Nocturne

Antonio Tabucchi

Paperback | Pages: 88 pages

Rating: 3.74 | 1887 Users | 199 Reviews

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Title	:	Indian Nocturne
Author	:	Antonio Tabucchi
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	New Directions
Pages	:	Pages: 88 pages
Published	:	March 17th 1989 by New Directions (first published January 1st 1984)
Categories	:	Fiction. European Literature. Italian Literature. Cultural. Italy. India. Novels

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”As well as being an insomnia, this book is also a journey. The insomnia belongs to the writer of the book, the journey to the person who did the travelling. All the same, given that I too happen to have been through the same places as the protagonist of this story, it seems fitting to supply a brief index of the various locations. I don’t know whether this idea was prompted by the illusion that a topographical inventory, with the force that the real possesses, might throw some light on this Nocturne in which a Shadow is sought; or whether by the irrational conjecture that some lover of unlikely itineraries might one day use it as a guide”.

These enigmatic words figure Antonio Tabucchi’s prelude to his narrator’s journey to South India, ostensibly aimed at searching for a Portuguese friend ‘who lost his way in India’, Xavier, who disappeared a year ago. The narrator leads a dim existence on the fringes of an abstruse world, also travelling to India for ‘scouring through old archives, hunting for old chronicles’. Starting in Bombay (Mumbai), the narrator tries to piece together the traces Xavier left behind by travelling through the country by train and by bus, bringing him to Madras (Chennai), stopping over near to Mangalore to end up in Goa.

Each chapter draws a vignette of the narrator’s puzzling and fascinating successive encounters with a multitude of characters cross sectioning Indian society: a prostitute, a doctor, a thief, a Jain Prophet (arihant), a dying man on his way to Varanasi, the Secretary of the Theosophical Society Adyar, and finally a French woman.



The narrator ‘never stays anywhere for more than a night’, sometimes sleeping while on the road, roaming the country like a somnambulant, intangible to the reader, like India. Why is he so determined to find Xavier? Is he truly looking for his friend at all? Or is he essentially fleeing something, his own past perhaps, or himself? The oblique epigraph to the novella alludes to a tinge of guilt, of remorse, with a quote from the French writer, philosopher and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot:People who sleep badly always appear more or less guilty. What do they do? They make night present.

There is a certain similar anti-detective feel to this novella as found in Auster’s The New York Trilogy.

Gradually, the search for Xavier shifts into a search for the narrator’s identity, a search for his own soul, his ‘atman’. A fortune-teller deplores that he cannot enunciate the narrator’s fate, because ‘you are someone else’. His soul is missing. His personality seems to merge with Xavier’s, strengthening the bewilderment of the baffled reader.

The narrator’s dreams and nightmares intensify the dreamlike atmosphere of the novella, the blurring of what is real and what is not, unveiling distortedly the thoughts the narrator is hiding, his unconscious mind, like in the narrator’s horrendous encounter with an old man clad in a black cloak in a Jesuit library (*) in Goa, pretending to be ‘Afonso de Albuquerque, Viceroy of the Indies’’, echoing Borges’s universe:

He laughed cruelly and pointed his forefinger at me. ‘Xavier doesn’t exist,’ he said. ‘He’s nothing but a ghost.’ He made a gesture that took in the whole room. ‘We are all dead, haven’t you realised that yet? I am dead, and this city is dead, and the battles, the sweat, the blood, the glory and my power, all dead, all utterly in vain.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘there is always something survives.’
‘What?’ he demanded. ‘His memory? Your memory? These books?’

As a writer, where would you locate an ethereal allegory on a spiritual quest for one’s self? To most Westerners, like the narrator, India is ‘mysterious by definition’. In an interview Tabucchi referred to Jung’s essay ‘The dreamlike World of India’, to explain that India is the place in the world par excellence enabling to evoke a dreamlike landscape.

Why do so many Westerners travel to India or long to do so sooner or later? For some of these passengers, travelling to India is synonymous with a proverbial quest for the self, for personal growth. Some look for spiritual enlightenment, or have a long-standing mystical relationship with the country. ‘Experiencing difference’ is mentioned as the most common reason for coming to India, conjoined with the search for self-realisation.

Ages after the hippie trail, a whole bunch of friends decided to depart for a few months, returning frequently, alternating work and budget travel. Years later, having devoured what was at hand in the local library on the subcontinent, I quit work and found myself travelling the land too, joining my partner in a lifelong dream. From the moment we got off the plane in Bombay, I couldn’t deny I was overwhelmed by a coup de foudre, and the memories of these months trying to connect to the culture, the people, the matchless beauty, still are an inexhaustible source of inspiration and rapture in my life (and, discarding the clichés, no drugs or ashrams crossed my path).



In some respects, this novella, as a philosophical quest permeated with references to Portugal, recalled another philosophical travelogue on identity, Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, about a Swiss teacher abandoning his old life to travel to Lisbon in order to retrace an obscure Portuguese author, culminating in a discovery of the self. As Tabucchi was deeply in love with Portugal, teaching Portuguese language and literature at the University of Siena, spending 6 months a year in Lisbon, one shouldn’t be oversurprised by the appearance of Pessoa in the novel, Tabucchi’s literary hero whom he translated into Italian and who altered his life forever after reading Pessoa’s poem ‘The Tobacco Shop”.

‘Pessoa said he was a gnostic,’ I said. ‘He was a Rosicrucian. He wrote a series of esoteric poems called Passos da Cruz.’
‘I’ve never read them,’ said my host, ‘but I know something of his life.’
‘Do you know what his last words were?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘What were they?’
‘Give me my glasses,’ I said. ‘He was very shortsighted and he wanted to enter the other world with his glasses on.’
My host smiled and said nothing.”

However as a reader one could prefer to keep wondering on alternative outcomes of the equivocal ending, I highly recommend the atmospheric film adaptation Nocturne Indien by the French director Alain Corneau (1989).

I am looking forward to read other work of this fascinating author.

This novella bringing back wonderful memories, I couldn’t resist inserting some of our slides photographed in India in 1994.

I loved this map on http://www.le-cartographe.net, , tracing the narrator’s journey.


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(*) In Goa, there actually exists a Jesuit history research centre called ‘Xavier Centre of Historical Research’, referring to the co-founder of the Society of Jesus, Saint Francis Xavier, a namesake of the friend the narrator is searching.

Rating Epithetical Books Indian Nocturne

Ratings: 3.74 From 1887 Users | 199 Reviews

Write Up Epithetical Books Indian Nocturne

Tabucchi has a rare finesse for the understatedly metaphysical travelogue. Tethered by a search for a missing friend, this is a sequence of vivid, memorable encounters and places, with all excess pared away to leave vast cosmoses of the unsaid. Elegant and mysterious, and always capable of producing quietly breathtaking maneuvers out of the dancing twilight air.

Saudade on the Ganges! But a little too uncritically orientalist, even if it WAS the eighties

The tone is somber in this murky noir novel. As is Tabucchis yen it is the noir he hides behind. It is done so well that it provides excellent cover for the existential workings raveling and unraveling beneath.In its essence it is a novel about sight. As the novel moves forward the narrator accumulates pieces of observations in his travels through India, an awakening travel or nightmarish, to find his friend Xavier. Why, is not made clear though hints are left along the dark inlets he must

This novel demonstrates that you don't need to go to great lengths to be devious and spin a gripping story: At a mere 115 pages - set in good, reader-friendly print size - it still fools its reader, throws veils and shadows and takes you for a ride.

As well as being an insomnia, this book is also a journey. The insomnia belongs to the writer of the book, the journey to the person who did the travelling. All the same, given that I too happen to have been through the same places as the protagonist of this story, it seems fitting to supply a brief index of the various locations. I dont know whether this idea was prompted by the illusion that a topographical inventory, with the force that the real possesses, might throw some light on this

This is a book for you post-modernists out there. Ostensibly is about a man traveling through India looking for his friend who has disappeared there. However the reader is clearly meant to understand that there is more going on here, even before the trick ending, which, in my opinion felt a bit flat. A better way to look at it is imagining Tabucchi writing this book while reading a guidebook to India, though never visiting the place itself. This brings up all kinds of discussions on writing and

A stranger in a strange town in a hot climate, amongst this takes place the arousing of senses with rich armours and colours, with poverty and corruption to hinder the soul, children in vast array littering the streets with nothing to do and nobody to care, he is in search for a certain person a man and in this first person narrative the author pulls you in to these new surroundings, sights, and smells, you read on in this search with a kind of curiosity in who is this person he seeks.One minute