Antonio Tabucchi (1943–2012)

We need each other more than ever

Pereira is every one of us, sad, tragic, melancholic, alone. Alone is the state we inhabit existentially, emotionally and politically when power is abused by a few for their own gain. It’s no accident that neo-liberal economics and freedom are the war cries of modern conservatives. Such ideologies bind us into thinking high and mighty ideas about our self-worth. We’re so individual, you know. Each and every one of us is so special, we have a wonderfully show more handmade self-delusional cloak of economic freedom to cocoon us. Such ideologies give us nothing but the anxiety that comes with the isolationist territory, not reliant on anyone, islands in anomie. This is the worse state we humans could live in, unable to ask for help, rely on others, or even to provide help. And if we lose this humanity and reliance on each other, what then are we? Once we are alone, isolated, we become like prey, easy to pick off. Today’s economic and political power players have us all right where they want us.

Faced with real threats to our safety, our individual freedom, most of us run towards power. We give up the values we had and hand them over to the powerful. Danger then lies ahead for those who still want to think clearly and critically. They must be silenced or eradicated. No wonder fascism takes hold, pretending to liberate us and rid us of thinkers, giving us easy options during times of uncertainty. We could be talking about 2020, when all around us we see the threats to liberty, health, welfare, sanity, social cohesion. These threats feel very real, yet we deal with them elusively, we brush them off, ignore them, have no time to examine them closely. After all, they might just originate in our own sordid decisions. Our self-worth is bound up in the fantasy that we are all highly skilled and capable of managing our own affairs, pay our way. The sweet messaging of fascists always aims to draw us to their bosom and offer us a new shared humanity. But it is a sham, based on sweet nothings. Words without meaning.

But Pereira Declares was written in the mid 1990s when one of the first of the recent threats to our humanity and liberty emerged in the form of Berlusconi in Italy. Berlusconi accumulate vast wealth and political power by owning most of Italy’s media. He was untouchable for a while – only his plastic surgeon got close. Tabucchi had a particular loathing for him. To explore this recurring phenomenon of fascist power, he goes further back, setting the novel in 1937, in Portugal when it was controlled by the dictator Salazar. Next door in Spain, fascist Franco was gaining ground, the Nazis were in full control in Germany and flexing their territorial muscles. The rich, like the Rockefellers in the USA and the aristocracy in England were also enamoured of these strong men. The world was turning. Democracy and freedom where under threat.

Pereira is self-absorbed in his grief, lonely, his wife passed, he habitually speaks to her daily through her photograph, seeking her counsel. He would like more than anything to be left alone, to carry on his work for the cultural page of the Lisboa, a newspaper whose politics he ignores so he doesn’t have to think too hard. He prepares his translations from the French, eats his daily omelette au fine herbes and drinks far too much sweet fresh lemonade. It’s a hot Lisbon summer, he can barely shift his large body around the place.

Pereira encounters a couple of young and politically motivated students, far too mixed up in socialist ideas in his mind. They get in trouble, yet they open his eyes to the world around him. He is reluctant, doesn’t want to cause trouble, perhaps he’s really too old for it. The fog he lives in slowly lifts.

Suddenly, his French translations are all a little too foreign. Portugal needs strong and virtuous local ideas. Not republican French ideas, anathema to ‘modern’ Portugal.

The politics of the day becomes clearer to Pereira. He must act. We are all faced with this need to act daily. Like Pereira. Are we clear about government policies? Is the world just and fair? Is it right that some people have less? Is it right that the environment and planet are degrading, that we objectify and deride the weakest and most desperate people around us?

How do we act, what propels us to act, to remind ourselves of shared humanity? Pereira simply acts. He must. It’s the right thing to do. We need literary Pereiras.

ADDIT. APRIL 2025
Mr Tabacchi keeps proving his worth. The the fascists are everywhere. Mild mannered, melancholic types need to step up. Nothing to lose except one's isolation. show less

"Silva, we’re not in Europe, we're in Portugal."

With the rise of extreme right-wing European populism during the 1930s, Portugal sees itself under the corporatist regime of Salazar, staying neutral on the surface as the Spanish civil war wages while aiding Franco’s National Army furtively behind doors. In mere hundred pages, and newspaper and magazine articles relayed between characters, Tabucchi’s Pereira Maintains encapsulates the uncertainties and dangers of the era as the threat of show more the Second World War also brews far up the horizons. Through the protagonist Pereira—a middle-aged journalist stricken by grief from his wife’s death—his avoidant attitude is ever-resonant: this unspoken choice of indifference, this compliance by turning a blind eye to oppression, censorship, as long as one is not directly affected by them. He firmly holds onto apolitical sentiments, preferring instead the comfort of literature and its translation as he heads the Culture segment of a small, independent magazine. In vain, he tries to separate literature from politics. But isn’t literature political?

Not before long, and in need of an assistant, Pereira hires Monteiro Rossi, a young man of a radical disposition, who, instead of adhering to government regulations, persistently sends in articles reflecting his leftist political views. Pereira, agitated and worried, rejects these articles but nonetheless proceeds to keep them. Soon, he finds himself amidst the furore of outward resistance through Rossi and his comrades, where Pereira’s convictions slowly transform into his own definition of resistance. Previously fascinated by the thought of death, bereft and without purpose nor anchor other than his work, once he is pulled into a movement where he realises he can make a difference, where he is urged by his wife’s memories to be with people, to return to himself, mortality becomes a secondary thought, bereavement wields a strength. But this novel is not only about courage, no, it’s not even entirely about a search for purpose, I wouldn’t say so. It mirrors people’s tendency (perhaps, it’s my cynicism) to remain a bystander amidst their worsening surroundings if they knew to be uninvolved will save them from harm, even at the cost of losing their individuality and humanity. It is worth noting too that the word “maintains” appears several times in the book for Pereira to convince himself, to never waver, to stay firm opposite the self-transformation laving its pages. Tabucchi’s Pereira Maintains is not a novel on a revolutionary act ignited, though it ends with one, defiant and suitcase-in-hand. It is about carrying our principles with us, and recognising that life may be only truly meaningful when we genuinely care for another person, and most of all, when we “maintain” and never surrender our humanity despite the germinating cruelty and brutality in everyone and everything around us. show less

“[…] but I feel I must tell you that originally, we were Lusitanians, and then came the Romans and the Celts, and then came the Arabs, so what sort of race are we Portuguese in a position to celebrate? The Portuguese Race, replied the editor-in-chief, and I am sorry to say Pereira, that I don’t like the tone of your objection, we are Portuguese, we discovered the world, we achieved the greatest feats of navigation the world over, and when we did this, in the 16th century, we were show more already Portuguese, that is what we are and that is what you are to celebrate, Pereira.”

In “Pereira Declares” by Antonio Tabucchi.

I read this in a Portuguese translation from the Italian more than ten years ago, if memory serves me right, I haven't come across anything quite like it and I still have a place in my heart for portly, perspiring Pereira with his omelets and his quiet, but subversive, decency. This time, this wonderful translation by Patrick Creagh just made my day.

In a narrative that does not want a puzzle, Tabucchi uses a very similar resource to the one used by Isaac Bashevis Singer: that of telling alien stories supposedly collected from conversations with real people, and not hiding it in the book's writing. “Pereira Declares” is a book that walks slowly, seeking to situate the scenario through which the characters walk, without extending the descriptions but worried to leave the reader with significant details about the characters, as, for example, the custom of Pereira to take Lemonades and the same path every day. Alongside this, there is a concern for more philosophical discussions, or at least the ones that foster deeper reflections. One can use as an example both the theory of the confederation of souls and the hegemonic hegemony proposed by Dr. Cardoso as well as Pereira's trajectory. There is also Tabucchi 's sensitivity to perceive and bring to light two issues that I consider to be praiseworthy remarks by “Pereira Declares”: the portrait of the dialectic relationship between the subject and the world, and the capacity to demonstrate the darkest tentacles of the status quo – in this case, Salazar’s Portuguese dictatorship. The relation between subject and world is drawn in the contours of the historical situation of Portugal and the existential situation of Pereira. There is much of the world in Pereira, and much of the dilemmas of Pereira in the world. The tension embodied in the dictatorial political moment is experienced by the character through the psychological state with which he turns things around. The dispute between the hegemonic selves in the confederation of the souls of Pereira is the dilemma that many live under dictatorships: to stay quite in the name of personal security or to risk everything in the name of something greater? The postures in dispute within Pereira are metaphors of this state of tension, which Tabucchi was able to capture with mastery. The persona of Pereira and his psychological characters express very well this question: he incorporated a routine discipline of fearful respect, a fear hidden even in the choice of French tales that he would like to translate. And Tabucchi made this a veiled critical observation, because just when Pereira leaves aside his mediocre habits, he becomes the target of Salazar agents. The testimony of Pereira was made literature by Tabucchi, but he’s also able to extrapolate the conception of literature as an aesthetic object, reinvigorating the power of narratives as devices of reflection as much as objects and aesthetic exercises. show less

Spino, a failed medical student, is working as a mortuary attendant in a small port on the Gulf of Genoa. He's somehow slipped into middle-age without ever quite making his mind up whether to go back to college and try again, or indeed deciding where his long-standing but undefined relationship with Sara is going. One night, the body of a young man killed in a shoot-out between police and gangsters is brought in to the mortuary. The police have little idea who he is, beyond a false ID in the show more name of "Carlo Nobodi", and don't seem to be making much effort to find out, but Spino somehow becomes interested and starts to investigate on his own account.

He follows up a few clues which don't lead anywhere very concrete. They do however put him indirectly in touch with people who seem to know something, who summon him to a chain of increasingly scary but inconclusive appointments - a low-life patisserie, a shop selling under-the-counter hair-tonics, a cemetery at closing time, the docks late at night. The solution to the mystery posed by the plot of the book remains elusive, but through his investigation, Spino seems to be coming closer to making sense of the mystery of who he is himself.

Very atmospheric, wistful, allusive, dark - not at all the conventional crime story Tabucchi pretends to be writing, more a philosophical investigation than a forensic one. And rather beautiful. show less