Pereira Declares

Pereira Declares [Sostiene Pereira] (New Directions, 1996)
by Antonio Tabucchi [translated from the Italian by Patrick Creagh]
Italy, 1994

Pereira Declares begins with, ends with, and in reality even bludgeons you with its recurring use of the two words "Pereira declares," a stylistic tic presumably designed to emphasize the fact that Pereira's testimony isn't written by him but is mediated by another whose friend or foe status remains unclear.  Thankfully, the "Pereira declares" word truncheon is about the only thing I didn't appreciate about Tabucchi's otherwise graceful novella.  Pereira, I should point out, is a middle-aged ex-crime reporter turned culture page editor of a Catholic nightly trying to cloak himself in literature to protect himself from the political realities of 1938 Lisbon.  This is of course much more easily said than done, the proof of which is that the die is cast for a clash between the newspaperman's wish to remain apolitical and the encroaching fascism of Salazar era Portugal once Pereira enlists the aid of an idealistic young assistant to help prepare future obituaries for still living writers.  Having wasted two precious sentences on plot, I hope you'll forgive me if I return to more pressing matters.  To begin with, I really enjoyed Tabucchi's sweet, gentle humor here--like the way the widower Pereira's relationship with his dead wife's photo, which he speaks to and packs in his suitcase when traveling but "face upwards, because his wife had all her life had such a need for air and he felt sure her picture also needed plenty of room to breathe" (63), says so much about the character's loneliness without mocking his devotion to his spouse's memory.  I was also won over by the emotional pull and lyricism of moments like this one, where Pereira ecstatically reacts to dancing a waltz with the beautiful twenty-something Marta: "And during the dance he looked up at the sky above the coloured lights of the Praça da Alegria, and he felt infinitely small and at one with the universe.  In some nondescript square somewhere in the universe, he thought, there's a fat elderly man dancing with a young girl and meanwhile the stars are circling, the universe is in motion, and maybe someone is watching us from an everlasting observatory" (16-17).  Finally, in a work in which obituaries and optimism are constantly at one another's throats, it was refreshing to witness an example of the reader/writer struggling to remain true to himself/herself in trying circumstances: "He read over what he had written and found it nauseating, yes, nauseating was the word, Pereira declares.  So he chucked that page away and wrote: 'Fernando Pessoa died three years ago.  Very few people, almost no one, even knew he existed.  He lived in Portugal as a foreigner and a misfit, perhaps because he was everywhere a misfit.  He lived alone, in cheap boarding-houses and rented rooms.  He is remembered by his friends, his comrades, those who love poetry'" (21).  (New Directions)

Antonio Tabucchi