Pereira Maintains

Product Information

I love this book and can't stopl thinking about it — mainly about the character, Pereira, I suppose, but also about narrative style. The prose is spare, graceful, sometimes humorous. Plenty of others have summarized the story line, so I’ll skip most of that. I’d love to comment on the ending, but can’t do that, in case you read it. Oh, please do read it! Harmless Dr. Pereira, whose main pleasures are the enjoyment of fine food (there's a lot of eating in this book) and 19th century French literature, is out of touch with the difficult times. Das Bedeutungsvolle und Hintersinnige, mit dem Tabucchis Büchlein kokettiert, machte es dann auch für nichtitalienische Literaturfreunde reizvoll, denen vor allem die Machart gefiel." - Gustav Seibt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Dictator holds utter power over the country… Portugal turned into the authoritarian state… Everyone exists in constant fear… The nation is immersed in total deceit and lies… The result is mysterious, menacing, enthralling and mind-bending – all at once. Through the testimonial form, Pereira makes detectives of its readers. We are unsettled and given more to do. An unexpected interpretative space opens up before us, nags at us, seduces us. We feel more like characters than we are used to. And if my experience is anything to go by, we love it.

François Mauriac “for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life.” (1885 – 1970).

Growing apprehension, however, is assisted by something oblique and disjointed in the prose -- the slight lag behind words and phrases experienced even in excellent translations." - Ophelia Field, The Observer By the tale’s end, Pereira’s perspective has shifted, and so has ours: what we had assumed was a simple story about an old, harmless man turns out to be a powerful indictment of authoritarian government. The climax is unexpected and exhilarating." - Chiara Marchelli, Times Literary Supplement

Philosophy appears to concern itself only with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself only with fantasies, but perhaps it expresses the truth. The relationship that most profoundly and universally characterizes our sense of being is that of life with death, because the limits imposed on our existence by death are crucial to the understanding and evaluation of life.’Written in a specific form, statement or maybe, as the publisher suggests, an interrogation, with repetitive phrase Pereira maintains , it is a beautiful and haunting tale about the man who at all costs is trying to avoid politics and troubles and at the same time remain decent man. It's also a tribute to the brave man ready to risk own life to protest against the evil and power of an insane ideology; the thing is going on in 1938, in the shadow of Nazi activities in Spain and Italy. Pereira Maintains ( Italian: Sostiene Pereira) is a 1994 novel by the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi. It is also known as Pereira Declares and Declares Pereira. Its story follows Pereira, a journalist for the culture column of a small Lisbon newspaper, as he struggles with his conscience and the restrictions of the dictatorial regime of Antonio Salazar. Antonio Tabucchi won the Premio Campiello, Viareggio Prize and Premio Scanno in 1994 for the novel. [1] [2] It was adapted into a film, also called Sostiene Pereira, in 1996. So it was in Salazar’s Portugal during the 1930’s, as it was in most of contemporary Europe. Fear and hypocrisy combined to create political acceptance, even among those who found its oppressive fascism most distasteful. And so is it now in Trumpist America. Christianity seems to have a natural affinity with monarchs, dictators, and anyone else who can consolidate power in its, Christianity’s, interest. Occasionally however someone, usually a non-Christian, provokes the dormant conscience of the Christian psyche. Pereira Maintains is the story of such a provocation, and its consequences. In Praca de Alegria there was no sense of being in a besieged city, Pereira maintains, because he saw no police at all…