Pereira Maintains - Hardcover

Tabucchi, Antonio

4.18

29,345 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1847675719 ISBN 13: 9781847675712

Publisher: Canongate Books, 2010

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Set in the sweltering summer of 1938 in Portugal, a country under the Fascist shadow of Spain, PEREIRA MAINTAINS tells a tale of reluctant heroism. An editor at a second-rate Lisbon newspaper, Dr Pereira wants nothing to do with European politics. Something of a recluse, his closest confidante is a photograph of his late wife, and he is happy to immerse himself in stories from nineteenth-century French literature. All this changes when he meets Francesco Monteiro Rossi, an oddly charismatic young man. Pereira gives Rossi work, even after discovering that he is using the money to recruit for the anti-Franco International Brigade. PEREIRA MAINTAINS chronicles Pereira's ascent to consciousness, culminating in a devastating and reckless act of rebellion.

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Review:

Pereira Maintains is small only in size. Its themes are great ones - courage, betrayal, fidelity, love, corruption; and its treatment of them is subtle, skilful, and clear. It's so clear, in fact, that you can see a very long way down, into the heart of a flawed but valiant human being, into the sickness of a nation, into the depths of political evil. It's the most impressive novel I've read for years, and one of the very few that feels truly necessary. --Philip Pullman

Every word of Mohsin Hamid's introduction is true: it's a stunningly good novel, and it goes on getting better in one's head after one has stopped reading it - it works as an experience - something that has happened to one, which is of course, the proof of great writing. --Diana Athill

It grips from start to finish....a riveting political allegory. --Financial Times

Antonio Tabucchi is an Italian writer, not well known to us in the way that Calvino is well known, but beautifully translated here by Patrick Creagh, in an understated elegant version that is a pleasure to read . . . i would read it in between Calvino's Mr Palomar and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. It is a novel that is a long conversation - with itself and with other novels too. --Times Review

Brilliant . . . Pereira Maintains is a concise, intense and original novel. First published in 1994, it is reissued here in a ludic translation by Patrick Creagh. Tabucchi now takes his place alongside Irene Nemirovsky, Sandor Marai and Stefan Zweig as one of the great Continental rediscoveries for English-speaking readers of recent years. --Daily Telegraph

Book Description:

An extraordinary novel from one of Italy's most acclaimed contemporary writers

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