Tomasi Di Lampedusa, Beppe Fenoglio, and contemporary authors, like Vincenzo Consolo. Career In 1978, he was appointed to the University of Genoa, and published Il piccolo naviglio, followed by Il gioco del rovescio e altri racconti in 1981, and Donna di porto Pim (1983). His first important novel, Indian Nocturne, was published in 1984, and became the basis of a 1989 film directed by Alain Corneau. The protagonist tries to trace a friend who has disappeared in India but is actually searching for his own identity. He published Piccoli equivoci senza importanza in 1985 and, the next year, Il filo dell'orizzonte. This novel features another protagonist (Spino) on a quest to discover something (here, the identity of a corpse) but who is also looking for his own identity—which was to become a common mission for Tabucchi protagonists. Whether these characters succeed in the attempt is uncertain, but they are compelled to face their image as mirrored by others. A film was drawn from this book in 1993, directed by the Portuguese Fernando Lopes. In 1987, when I volatili del Beato Angelico and Pessoana Minima were published, he received France's Prix Médicis for best foreign novel (Notturno indiano). The next year he wrote the comedy I dialoghi mancati. The President of Portugal appointed him the title Do Infante Dom Henrique in 1989, and that same year the French government named him a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. Tabucchi published Un baule pieno di gente. Scritti su Fernando Pessoa (Feltrinelli) in 1990, and the next year, L'angelo nero (1991). In 1991 he wrote in Portuguese Requiem: A Hallucination, a novel later translated into Italian (winner of Premio P.E.N. Club italiano) and he published Sogni di sogni. In 1994 he released Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa, as well as the novel that brought him the most recognition: Sostiene Pereira, winner of the Prizes Super Campiello, Scanno and Jean Monnet for European Literature. The protagonist of this novel becomes the symbol of the defence of freedom for information for the political opponents of all anti-democratic regimes. In Italy, during the election campaign, the opposition against the controversial communication magnate Silvio Berlusconi aggregated around this book. The director Roberto Faenza drew from it the eponymous film (1995) in which he cast Marcello Mastroianni as Pereira and Daniel Auteuil as Dr. Cardoso. In 1997 Tabucchi wrote the novel The Missing Head of Damasceno