John, the consultant town planner, who lives in a Florentine style house at Saint Lucia, has an astonishingly broad reading range. Although we knew this about John, the members of the Blokes’ Book Club were still amazed that he had come up with a novel and an author of such power and beauty of whom none of us were previously aware.
The effect of the surprise was underlined by the reaction that several of us had when we first read the title. Pereira Mountains, we individually misread. Although the next thought was not universal, David’s was sufficiently typical. “Pereira Mountains”, he said to himself, “not another gay cowboy novel”.
The “Pereira maintains” of the title is repeated throughout the text. What it signifies, one eventually works out, is that this is a record of a statement taken from Mr. Pereira by some official. The identity of the official and the purpose of the statement are never revealed. However, as the action of the novel builds, the context, purpose and subject of the statement taking becomes of increasing concern. It will go some way to revealing whether Mr. Pereira’s immediate story ends in tragedy or sanctuary: whether this is a novel of optimism or despair. Eventually, the reader must work that out for herself. Enough clues are, however, given to make an informed choice.
The members of the Book Club should, perhaps, be castigated, at least for their lack of knowledge of Tabucchi. He has twice been short listed for the Mann Booker Prize, has published twenty novels along with volumes of short stories and plays and is said by the blurb to be one of Italy’s most acclaimed contemporary writers. (All I can say in my defence is that my knowledge of Italian writers is better among those who became famous after the Second World War. Alberto Moravia’s The Woman of Rome was once my favourite novel.)
Pereira Maintains, although published in 1994, is set in Portugal at the time of the Spanish Civil War.2 The government of Portugal is sympathetic to the Franco forces in Spain and is prepared to use similar combinations of fear and violence to crush opposition and enforce its hegemony. It is a time of repression, secret police and a fearful and weak press. Tabucchi is an expert in the language and history of Portugal. He has lectured in many places including New York and Paris but, relevantly for Pereira Maintains, as an Emeritus Professor at the University of Siena in Italy, he continues to spend much of his time researching and teaching in Lisbon.
Pereira Maintains is of modest size, a mere 194 pages of hardly crowded type. It is a masterfully concise example of the novel genre. Although written long after the events that it describes, the novel condemns the government whose actions it describes and champions those who were brave enough to resist that government and others who are prepared to resist aggression in other forms around the world.
The method used by Tabucchi resembles that of other great works of political persuasion. I am particularly reminded of Vercors’ La Silence de la Mer. In both novels, the political point is made by a sceptic or opponent coming, almost despite themselves, to the point of view for which the work contends.
In Pereira Maintains, the unlikely convert is Dr. Pereira, an overweight, middle aged and burned out journalist. Dr. Pereira has a backwater of a job, editing the cultural page for the lack lustre Lisbon evening paper, the Lisboa. Dr. Pereira is the antithesis of a political activist. He has an interest in good old fashioned Roman Catholic writers and he seeks to promote an appreciation for their work in his pages. Although his wife is dead, she remains his closest companion and confidante as he talks to her photo whenever he leaves or returns to his flat, sharing with her both his recent experiences and his immediate plans and seeking her advice on matters of concern.
Dr. Pereira notes the effect of the repression around him and the fact that the press, including his own employer, fails to even mention events such as the death of the carter, murdered by the authorities, whose blood had covered the melons on his cart. He is not one, however, to get involved. He is more concerned with his rejection of the Catholic doctrine of the resurrection of the body based on his own dissatisfaction with the difficulties of his own sluggish and sweaty body. Deaths around him merely deepen his own preoccupation with his own death initially driven by his own failure to separate from and properly mourn his wife.
Dr. Pereira is inspired to contact a young man called Monteiro Rossi because of an article published by Rossi in avant garde literary magazine. Dr. Pereira had read more into the article, which discusses the nature of death, than Rossi had intended but Dr. Pereira determines to hire the young man as an assistant and Dr. Pereira is drawn into a new world.
It is part of the beauty of the writing that, along with Mohsin Hamid, the author of the introduction to the Canongate edition, this reviewer fell in love with Rossi’s companion, Marta, immediately upon being told that:
“The girl who turned up had an Italian straw hat on. She was really beautiful, Pereira maintains, her complexion fresh, her eyes green, her arms shapely. She was wearing a dress with straps crossing at the back that showed off her softly moulded shoulders.”
Rossi and Marta are obviously working for the resistance to the Franco forces in Spain and are in danger of being arrested or worse by the authorities in Portugal. Dr. Pereira receives pieces of writing from Rossi. They are beautifully written progressive pieces that speak to the reader but could never be published on the cultural page of the Lisboa. Dr. Pereira doesn’t sack Rossi. Rather, he lends Rossi money; helps him out of scrapes; and finds himself at the edge of working for the progressive forces in Portugal and Spain. Even as he takes risks that might well result in the loss of his own life, Dr. Pereira loses his obsession with death. He embarks on a swim that is more appropriate to his young athletic days. He remembers when he was a much sought after partner by the young women at the dances of that same time. He also remembers why he chose the more pallid, more thoughtful woman who became his wife and, in turn, the companion in the photograph.
Dr. Pereira has others to guide him to a new more active and progressive position. Pereira Maintains provides a number of characters who represent the uncaring attitudes of the establishment. They include his boss, the editor of the Lisboa, spoken of only as Editor-in-Chief, whose links with the establishment are well known and ongoing. They also include Dr. Pereira’s old university chum, Silva, who chooses to ignore all that is inconvenient in the events in wider Europe and takes a jaundiced eye to anything critical of the Portuguese regime.
There are others, however, who are more involved and concerned about the events occurring about them all. Father Antonio, a hard working local priest has no time for Dr. Pereira’s self-obsession with “a carter being killed on his cart and strikes going on”. A one legged Jewish lady, Senhora Delgado, reminds Dr. Pereira of what is happening to Jewish people across Europe and the resultant difficulties they face. And Dr. Cardoso, the doctor at the thalasso-therapeutic clinic which Dr. Pereira attends for his heart condition, realises, well before Dr. Pereira, the course on which he has embarked and gives him both advice and encouragement.
So often, a promising piece loses its way after having established all of the pieces for a wonderful ending. This is not the case with Pereira Maintains. Tabucchi conjures a brilliant end game: a denouement that lives up to the beauty of the descriptions and characterisation and almost accidental intrigue that has preceded it.
You must read Pereira Maintains. The Blokes were unanimous on that point. I can say no more.
1. Canongate is an independent publisher based in Edinburgh but with an international focus. It was established in 1973 but became an independent for the second time with a management buyout in 1994.
2. The Estado Novo regime in Portugal was established in 1933 and lasted until it was brought to an end by the Carnation Revolution in 1974. The strong man from 1933 leader until his ill health in 1968 was Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.
