beer good
Well-Known Member
Saw that Heteronym was just reading this and I'd forgotten to post my review of it...
Pereira Declares, Antonio Tabucchi.
Tabucchi declares that Pereira is a middle-age journalist working as the editor of the "culture" section of a Portuguese newspaper in 1938. As such, he mostly just translates 19th century French literature and runs it as serials along with the occasional obituary of some writer who's died. Tabucchi doesn't declare this in so many words, but it's obvious that Pereira is not really in touch with anything that might be happening right now - he's too busy drinking lemonade in the shade from the hot Lisbon sun and grieving for his dead wife to notice things like the Spanish civil war that's drawing to a close, the approaching world war, or the fact that his own country has turned into a fascist dictatorship... until he hires a young man to help him write the obits, and he starts delivering pieces on lots of controversial 20th-century writers - Lorca, Mayakovsky, etc - that Pereira declares he cannot print. Why? Well, because... um, not because he's scared of censorship or anything, surely Portugal is a free country, right? No, it's just...
...because there's power in literature in times of oppression, as he discovers when he starts re-reading his old Frenchmen in the light of what the young people he meets tell him of Spain, and of Europe. And the question is just how neutral it's possible to remain. Yes, it's a slightly clichéd story - a man forced to re-examine his every value in the light of something bigger - but it's excellently told, reminding me of Söderberg's Doctor Glas in the way it's introspective yet very easy to relate to.
Pereira Declares is short and deceptively lazy; it packs a punch. This is the second Tabucchi I've read, and while it tackles some similar subjects to his recent Tristano Dies, it does so much more accessibly and vitally. Beer Good declares that he liked this a lot.
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Pereira Declares, Antonio Tabucchi.
Tabucchi declares that Pereira is a middle-age journalist working as the editor of the "culture" section of a Portuguese newspaper in 1938. As such, he mostly just translates 19th century French literature and runs it as serials along with the occasional obituary of some writer who's died. Tabucchi doesn't declare this in so many words, but it's obvious that Pereira is not really in touch with anything that might be happening right now - he's too busy drinking lemonade in the shade from the hot Lisbon sun and grieving for his dead wife to notice things like the Spanish civil war that's drawing to a close, the approaching world war, or the fact that his own country has turned into a fascist dictatorship... until he hires a young man to help him write the obits, and he starts delivering pieces on lots of controversial 20th-century writers - Lorca, Mayakovsky, etc - that Pereira declares he cannot print. Why? Well, because... um, not because he's scared of censorship or anything, surely Portugal is a free country, right? No, it's just...
...because there's power in literature in times of oppression, as he discovers when he starts re-reading his old Frenchmen in the light of what the young people he meets tell him of Spain, and of Europe. And the question is just how neutral it's possible to remain. Yes, it's a slightly clichéd story - a man forced to re-examine his every value in the light of something bigger - but it's excellently told, reminding me of Söderberg's Doctor Glas in the way it's introspective yet very easy to relate to.
Pereira Declares is short and deceptively lazy; it packs a punch. This is the second Tabucchi I've read, and while it tackles some similar subjects to his recent Tristano Dies, it does so much more accessibly and vitally. Beer Good declares that he liked this a lot.
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