Pereira Maintains

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Into this vacuum comes a young philosophy student named Monteiro Rossi. Impressed by his wide reading, Pereira asks Rossi to contribute newspaper articles, and a friendship develops. Under the younger man’s influence, Pereira becomes less politically naive and wonders if journalism can serve as a weapon against oppression. His sense of decorum is offended one day by the sight of anti-Semitic graffiti on a kosher butcher’s shop. The threat of increased oppression now makes neutrality impossible. When Pereira learns that Rossi is on a mission to recruit volunteers for the anti-Franco cause in neighbouring Spain, he realises he must act. The Reviewer maintains she took a sip of honey-sweetened lemonade, as she doesn’t drink alcohol and has abandoned refined sugar, adding that she thought those words spoke of the fleeting nature of life, the elusiveness of happiness and the need to seize those special moments before they get lost in the midst of the ordinary, the humdrum routine, the minutiae of everyday life. Moments that urge us to regard the past as a collection of memories and nothing but memories so it won't tyrannize so violently over our present. The Reviewer maintains she dreamed a lovely dream about one of such moments that are worth seizing. A dream which made her feel nostalgia for things that never existed, the kind of nostalgia discussed decades ago in a book filled with disquiet to which she had referred recently. It was a long dream. But the Reviewer prefers not to say how it went on because her dream has nothing to do with these events, she maintains. Despite it being a short novel, the story evolves at a pace that allows you to enjoy the smallest of details: a swim in the open ocean during a scorching day in August, a disturbing encounter on a train, chats about health and literature with a surprisingly open-minded Psychologist, evoking memories of the sanatorium in “The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann… Despite its economy, Pereira Maintains was never perfunctory. It conjured out of its small hat a vast and touching sense of the humane. When the eponymous protagonist, an elderly and overweight journalist, confides each day in the photograph of his dead wife, I experienced their relationship as a living thing. When he tells her the young man Rossi is "about the age of our son if we'd had a son", I understood why Pereira risks paying him for articles he knows cannot be published because of their implicit critique of Portugal's authoritarian regime. However, even he can't ignore the political situation entirely, and it is brought home to him by his young activist friend.

Pereira è un uomo non perfettamente in salute, pingue, che suda a fare le scale, vedovo. Solo. L’unica persona con cui curiosamente parla è proprio moglie, o meglio la foto di lei. La trama del romanzo è ambientata a Lisbona nel 1934 durante la dittatura di Salazar alla vigilia di uno dei più grandi disastri della storia. Pereira è solo "un oscuro direttore della pagina culturale di un modesto giornale del pomeriggio". È vedovo, grasso e avanti con gli anni. In seguito alla lettura di un saggio sulla morte, conosce un ragazzo, Monteiro Rossi, a cui invita a scrivere necrologi che non possono essere pubblicati, perché pieni di teorie socialiste e anarchiche e c'è il rischio di incorrere nella censura del regime.Strikingly, Pereira Maintains is narrated in the third person by a government inquisitor. The constant refrain, “Pereira maintains”, suggests that Pereira is before a courtroom scribe. As well as a riveting political allegory, Tabucchi’s novel explores the sadness of widowhood. Even as the police break down his door, Pereira is seen to kiss a photograph of his wife, and raise a toast to happier times. The end is not as clear as either of these two reviewers suggest -- possibly they are correct, but there seems no certainty either way (or some other way). As is the narration by Derek Jacobi. Absolutely fantastic narration. It couldn't be better. Women sound like women. Derek Jacobi is the most talented male narrator of women that I have ever come across. He does secretaries and bitchy caretakers and attractive women, each and every one is pitch-perfect. All the different characters have their own intonation. Each sentence has the perfect inflection to say what the author wants said. I cannot praise the narration enough. L’immagine di Antonio Tabucchi che tutti conosciamo, e con cui è noto a tutt’oggi al grande pubblico, è quella di un uomo con i baffi e con gli occhiali. Nei ritratti che gli fece Tullio Pericoli si presenta in questo modo: fronte alta, sopracciglia indomite, palpebre sornione, rilassate sopra l’iride.

About my Pereira, however, I began to know many things. In his nocturnal visits he told me that he was a widower who suffered from heart disease and unhappiness. He loved French literature, especially Catholic writers between the wars, such as François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos. He was obsessed with the idea of death. His closest confidant was a Franciscan named Father Antonio, to whom he shuddered to confess his heresy: he didn't believe in the resurrection of the body. 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.’ A month later Pereira paid his visit to me. I didn't know what to say to him then and there. And yet I dimly understood that his vague self-presentation as a literary character was symbolic, metaphoric: somehow he was the ghostly transposition of the old journalist to whom I bid my last farewell. I felt embarrassed, but I warmly welcomed him. Then we have the fact that the narrator incessantly repeats the words “Pereira maintains.” This is a brilliant device which not only adds another element of mystery but adds tension to the story. Initially, some of the information Pereira “maintains” is inconsequential details of his daily life which makes this phrase seem somewhat innocuous. But as the story continues “Pereira maintains” begins to take on a more ominous meaning and the reader’s idea of to whom Pereira is maintaining becomes more clear. He had chosen Honorine, a story about repentance which he intended to publish in three or four instalments. Pereira does not know why, but he had a feeling this story about repentance might come into someone’s life like a message in a bottle. Because there were so many things to repent of, he maintains, and a story about repentance was certainly called for, and this was the only way he had of sending a message to someone ready and willing to receive it.It’s 1938, the time of the Spanish Civil War. Fascism under Franco of Spain is creeping into neighboring Portugal as well under its dictator Salazar. A kosher meat shop the main character frequents is vandalized by fascist thugs. The sparring between the careful Dr. Pereira and the irresponsible and troublemaking (so Dr. Pereira) Monteiro Rossi continues. But his peace of mind starts to change when he meets Mario Rossi and his girlfriend Marta, a young couple who start talking about terms like justice or revolution. Pereira finds himself unwittingly or willingly involved with the young couple and starts helping them, triggering a series of symbolic events which make him rethink his entire existence and put his sense of justice to the limit. Pereira is a lonely apolitical widower… Pereira conforms but at the same time he tries to keep his individuality… For me it was really clever because that phrase made me think he would be arrested in the end, but then he seems to foil the censors and make his heroic declaration and probably be on his way to live in France… and yet the use of that narrative device raises a much more menacing possibility, as you say. It stops it from being a purely happy, heroic ending and makes it something more sinister and uncertain. I hadn’t thought of that other possibility, of him testifying against fascism – that’s also a possibility.

Since you are here, we would like to share our vision for the future of travel - and the direction Culture Trip is moving in. António Ferro. [The Portuguese Department of Propaganda-SPN, later called the Portuguese Information, Culture and Tourism Department - SNI, was created by Antonio Ferro to create strategies for ideological propaganda. Una novela magnífica por todo lo que consigue trasmitir Tabucchi en ciento ochenta páginas gracias a un personaje como Pereira, que se hace querer tan rápidamente. What a lovely piece of writing it is. I really do not want to waste your time that you could devote to read the story itself so I'll try to be brief. Like in The Requiem, the previous story by Tabucchi I've read, we are in scorching Lisbon again where a chubby, mid-aged journalist named Pereira, every day talking with a photograph of his deceased wife, thinks about death, soul and resurrection of the body. Accidentally having come across on an article written by Monteiro Rossi, on impulse engages him to writing occasional obituaries of famous writers and poets, happily still alive. Pereira maintains that he just wants to be prepared in the event of their death. Sounds crazy? In Praca de Alegria there was no sense of being in a besieged city, Pereira maintains, because he saw no police at all…

And this response from his friend, the priest, after Pereira says he wants to make confession the next time he visits: “You don’t need to, replied Father Antonio, first make sure you commit some sin and then come to me, don’t make me waste my time for nothing.” I liked this passage: “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.” Afirma Pereira que poderá estar a atravessar um processo de mudança, após a tomada de conhecimento de uma teoria ontológica.

Escrita de manera muy sencilla y con muchos toques de humor, Tabucchi encuentra en Pereira un personaje realmente entrañable. For me, the entire experience of witnessing Tabucchi’s Pereira to enact a slice of his life was like sitting in a new class with a mo No skin off his nose, retorted Dr Cardoso, because there’s the state censorship and every day, before your paper appears, the proofs are examined by the censors, and if there’s something they don’t like don’t you worry it won’t be printed, they leave blank spaces, I’ve already seen Portuguese papers with huge blank spaces in them, and it makes me very angry and very sad.

Retailers:

Sostiene Pereira" è una riflessione essenziale su molti aspetti della nostra vita (solitudine, rimpianto, impegno, senso di colpa, intolleranza ...) che condensato in poco più di 200 pagine, ci regala un'opera di lettura molto delicata. Great point about “maintains”– it does remind me of a police testimony. Really casts a shadow over the ending. I didn’t want to discuss the ending in the main post, but since we’re down in the comments I think it’s OK. Scusate se mi sono dilungato sulla mia storia con questo libro, ma è fondamentale per comprendere appieno quanto esso sia cresciuto accanto a me, riuscendo a donarmi, nella sua modestia, qualcosa in più a ogni rilettura. Ora non riesco a non reputarlo un piccolo, grande capolavoro.