Dr. Peirera, an editor at a second-rate Lisbon newspaper, wants nothing to do with European politics. He's happy to translate 19th-century French stories. His closest confidante is a photograph of his late wife. All this changes when he meets Francesco Monteiro Rossi, an oddly charismatic young man. Pereira gives Rossi work, and continues to pay him, even after discovering that he is using the money to recruit for the anti-Franco International Brigade. PEREIRA MAINTAINS chronicles Pereira's ascent to consciousness, culminating in a devastating and reckless act of rebellion.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
'A masterpiece of compression. A political history of 1930s Portugal, a love story between a man and his dead wife, a gloriously successful formal experiment, and an irresistible thriller - and it can be read with enormous pleasure in a single afternoon.' Mohsin Hamid
About the Author
Antonio Tabucchi is one of Italy's most acclaimed contemporary writers. Born in Pisa in 1943, Tabucchi lived in India and Portugal before settling in his native Tuscany. He is the author of twenty-six books, six of which have been translated into English, and has been awarded many prestigious prizes, including the Prix Medicis etranger for Notturno indiano and the Premio Campiello and the Aristeion Prize for Pereira Maintains. He divides his time between Lisbon and Siena, where he teaches Portuguese language and literature at the University of Siena.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
PEREIRA MAINTAINS
Antonio Tabucchi
Pereira Maintains as its title suggests is a narrative at one remove from a personal document. Thus, the reader is continually reminded that this is only one man's testimony, and thus it is open to question, or at least interpretation. The speech direction `Periera maintains' is continuously employed throughout and, while this can become repetitive and even annoying to the reader, it reminds him or her that this is in part a self-revelatory monologue at a distance. One might wish to demand of the narrator how or she he came to know of Pereira and his life and thought. This way of telling breaks the smooth surface of what we have come to regard as the fictional transaction between reader and narrator. After all, we know the whole thing is fiction, is a novel, and could well be just another cock and bull story in the Sterne tradition.
Although the device of using `Pereira maintains' instead of `he said' or `he says' throughout has a distancing effect, this turns out to be all to the good in the end. The reader `believes' in the story because suspension of disbelief is part of the fictional contract: the principal behind fable and folk tale for instance - and behind talking pigs and friendly moles and badgers in river banks chatting like office mates.
But in Tabucchi this double distancing has a shock impact, since we know about the insidious growth of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and its ruthless persecution of dissenters. This lack of political explication in the novel works well, for the fascist background needs no emphasis; it hovers over every page and makes the novel's horrific dénouement all the more disturbing to the reader. If Pereira is telling his narrator a pack of lies, then he does so because this is his only way to reveal a deeper truth about acts of tyranny.
So much for the narrative technique, but what about the story? Well, it tells us about a journalist who is in charge of editing the culture page of a minor publication. He wishes to include reviews of French writers, such as Bernanos, who stand up for freedom and what the politicised may think of as frivolity or even moral corruption - poetry and homosexuality for instance. He meets a young man who has republican views. The man is poor and dependent on an activist girl friend. He submits articles to Pereira that he never dares accept for the paper, but he never tells this to the young man. He simply pays the man from his own pocket. Gradually the noose tightens on both the active dissident and Pereira, his helper. The novel is thus a thriller as well as being a disguised political document, a muted appeal for civilised conduct in a world of cruelty and repression.
The fact that this novel is set not in Spain or Italy but in Portugal adds even more power to the understated theme of survival in a time of terror.
This is a short and compelling novel that has received much acclaim, from such as Mohsin Hamid (his introduction to the book is reprinted in the Review section of Saturday's Guardian -11.12.10), Diana Athill, John Carey, Philip Pullman and MJ Hyland
Antonio Tabucchi
Pereira Maintains as its title suggests is a narrative at one remove from a personal document. Thus, the reader is continually reminded that this is only one man's testimony, and thus it is open to question, or at least interpretation. The speech direction `Periera maintains' is continuously employed throughout and, while this can become repetitive and even annoying to the reader, it reminds him or her that this is in part a self-revelatory monologue at a distance. One might wish to demand of the narrator how or she he came to know of Pereira and his life and thought. This way of telling breaks the smooth surface of what we have come to regard as the fictional transaction between reader and narrator. After all, we know the whole thing is fiction, is a novel, and could well be just another cock and bull story in the Sterne tradition.
Although the device of using `Pereira maintains' instead of `he said' or `he says' throughout has a distancing effect, this turns out to be all to the good in the end. The reader `believes' in the story because suspension of disbelief is part of the fictional contract: the principal behind fable and folk tale for instance - and behind talking pigs and friendly moles and badgers in river banks chatting like office mates.
But in Tabucchi this double distancing has a shock impact, since we know about the insidious growth of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and its ruthless persecution of dissenters. This lack of political explication in the novel works well, for the fascist background needs no emphasis; it hovers over every page and makes the novel's horrific dénouement all the more disturbing to the reader. If Pereira is telling his narrator a pack of lies, then he does so because this is his only way to reveal a deeper truth about acts of tyranny.
So much for the narrative technique, but what about the story? Well, it tells us about a journalist who is in charge of editing the culture page of a minor publication. He wishes to include reviews of French writers, such as Bernanos, who stand up for freedom and what the politicised may think of as frivolity or even moral corruption - poetry and homosexuality for instance. He meets a young man who has republican views. The man is poor and dependent on an activist girl friend. He submits articles to Pereira that he never dares accept for the paper, but he never tells this to the young man. He simply pays the man from his own pocket. Gradually the noose tightens on both the active dissident and Pereira, his helper. The novel is thus a thriller as well as being a disguised political document, a muted appeal for civilised conduct in a world of cruelty and repression.
The fact that this novel is set not in Spain or Italy but in Portugal adds even more power to the understated theme of survival in a time of terror.
This is a short and compelling novel that has received much acclaim, from such as Mohsin Hamid (his introduction to the book is reprinted in the Review section of Saturday's Guardian -11.12.10), Diana Athill, John Carey, Philip Pullman and MJ Hyland
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
A finely nuanced novel that explores the mind and life of an ordinary man in extraordinary times. An unlikely hero on a testing journey, Pereira allows readers both to share and to observe his defiance and become involved in the moral and ethical dilemmas of his time. This was a most welcome addition to my Kindle.
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