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By Kathleen Thorne
BOOK REVIEW
Pereira Maintains
By Antonio Tabucchi
Published by Canongate
Translated from Italian by Patrick Creagh
Price €9.50
It is 1938 and much of Europe is in turmoil. In Lisbon, a man called Dr Pereira is a journalist responsible for the culture pages with an evening newspaper called the Lisboa. He works in isolation in a dingy office, which is located at a distance from the newspaper’s headquarters.
Pereira is a widower. He is overweight and unhealthy and has a passion for omelettes and lemonade. He has few friends. In his apartment, he regularly speaks to his dead wife’s picture. He tells her everything about his daily life and in the absence of any real companionship he seems to draw comfort from this.
Then out of the blue, he phones a young man, Monteiro Rossi, who has written an article on death in some obscure magazine. Why Pereira does this is not entirely clear, but he is a Catholic, has an obsession with death and, furthermore, his work requires the preparation in advance of obituaries of important, but ageing, European writers of the time. Names like Bernanos, Mauriac, Claudel and Lorca crop up frequently.
Pereira meets young Rossi and employs him to write these obituaries. However, Pereira is taking on much more than he realises when he does this. His uneventful life is rattled out of the ordinary into an arena of moral and political problems.
He sticks with his decision and its consequences until the end – an ending which seems at odds with the kind of man we meet at the beginning of the novel.
Pereira Maintains is a short novel but it encompasses an extraordinary breath of experience from so many perspectives. It gives insights into the European political scene of the late 1930s. It is insightful in terms of personal psychology. Besides, it reads fluently and easily.
