‘Fantastically readable and very thought-provoking’ – Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi

Although Antonio Tabucchi has twice been shortlisted for the International Man Booker and has won countless European awards for his fiction, essays and plays, I hadn’t heard of him before. Well, more fool me.  Now that I’ve read Pereira Maintains, I’ll be looking out for the English translations of the rest of his works.  Pereira is a deceptively simple read; a sharp and compelling account of one man coming to political awareness under an increasingly repressive regime, told in an easy, conversational manner that belies Tabucchi’s understanding of human hesitancy and fear in the face of oppression and potentially violent repercussion.

Dr Pereira is a crime reporter, childless and widowed, and currently working as editor of the culture page of the Lisboa, an evening paper based in Lisbon.  He eats almost nothing but omelettes, drinks nothing but lemonade (as recommended by his cardiologist, he maintains), and converses almost exclusively with his friend Father António, the waiters at his local café and a photograph of his dead wife.  It’s 1938, and the fascist regime on nearby Spain is having an effect on life in Pereira’s Portugal.  The Lisboa’s caretaker is a suspected police informer, and there are angry undercurrents of unrest spreading throughout Lisbon.  Everybody but Pereira has an opinion and has taken a side, but Pereira himself just wants to carry on with his sedate life.  When he hires an assistant for his culture page, though, things begin to change – Montiero Rossi is a young political activist, enraged by the right-wing movements in Spain, Portugal and beyond, and though he’s a useless assistant and a worse journalist, he needs Pereira’s help.

Dr Pereira is a hugely sympathetic character – his quiet melancholia, his understated wish that he’d had children (Rossi is, he says, about the age his own son would be, if he had had a son), his guilty consumption of his omelettes despite his doctor’s advice to the contrary, and his desire to stay out of trouble and off the police radar – it’s all very human and understandable.  He’s not a coward or apathetic – he’s just unsure what place he can occupy in a rapidly changing society.  His boss is on one side of the fence, his friends on the other, and his wife can’t talk back.  As the novel goes on, he helps out Rossi almost without acknowledging that he’s doing so – he takes enormous risks for this young man whom he barely knows, and claims not to know why he’s behaving like that.  Rossi’s presence in his life offers him an excuse to act on his buried political preferences, and this is obvious to the reader before Pereira himself becomes aware of it.  The novel charts his belated political awakening as he slowly distances himself from his past life in favour of taking a more active role in the present day troubles.  His final, quietly devastating act of rebellion, is as memorable a piece of fiction as I’ve read in a long time – I won’t spoil it for you, but it had me punching the air and grinning.  Pereira’s an unlikely hero – fat, unhealthy, ageing – but a hero he is, nonetheless.

The novel’s written in an intriguing style – the whole book is set out as a testimonial.  It opens and closes with the titular phrase, ‘Pereira maintains’, and this is peppered throughout, as Pereira narrates the events in the text to a silent witness or interrogator.  Interestingly, an older English edition (same translator) is called Pereira Declares, which, to me, completely alters the tone; the word ‘maintains’ gives it an insistent note, as though the character is standing by his version of events despite constant or increasing pressure to change his story.  This fits in with the politicised content – Pereira, after making his stand, is being called to account for his actions and/or his beliefs.  If we replaced ‘maintains’ with the word ‘declares’, he’s simply stating the facts – there’s no suggestion of doubt, of unreliability, of gaps between what happened and what had been said to happen.  ’Maintains’ gives the book a keen edge – it plants suspicion in the reader’s mind that Pereira might actually be more disingenuous than he appears.  Of course, I haven’t read the other edition and I can’t read the original Italian, so I’ll have to take this version, with the new title, to be definitive – but either way, it’s fantastically readable and very thought-provoking.

Any cop? If you’ve ever thought that ‘somebody like me can’t make a difference’, well, here’s a role model.  The book’s beautifully written, the politics don’t override the characterisation (it’s not a polemic), and you can’t help but want to invite Dr Pereira around for dinner.  This book needs more publicity in the English-speaking world – it’s brilliant.

Valerie O’Riordan