Antonio Tabucchi's 'Il se fait tard, de plus en plus tard': Epistolary Novel Explores Broken Time

In a 2002 interview with artpress, Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi discusses his epistolary novel 'Il se fait tard, de plus en plus tard' (It's Getting Late, Getting Later and Later). The novel consists of seventeen letters written by men, plus a final letter by a woman, all anonymous and undated. Tabucchi explains he mixed the letter and diary genres, drawing on Laclos's 'Les Liaisons dangereuses' and Balzac's 'Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées'. Unlike Hella S. Haasse's reimagining of Merteuil's future, Tabucchi's novel offers no temporal visibility. The book explores 'broken time'—a dimension where the past is irreversibly lost, yet present as absence. Tabucchi cites Clément Rosset's concept of 'presence of absence' and describes the letters as attempts to reverse the irreversible, a form of anti-Proustian memory. The novel is built on a 'retroactive wound', with characters trapped in monomaniacal fixations. Tabucchi also references Diderot's 'Paradox of the Actor', Pavese, Borges, and Sadeq Hedayat. The work is described as an 'oral' novel, sometimes dictated to a tape recorder, and aims to 'pervert' the epistolary genre deeply. Tabucchi teaches Portuguese literature in Siena, lives between Siena, Pisa, and Paris, and wrote the novel in Paris.