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4.13 AVERAGE
4.13 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
When I started reading this book I was annoyed to discover that it follows the horrible style of Saramago - where dialogues are inside the text instead of following the usual writing rules. However, I ignored it because the content was interesting.
Positive points:
I think we can easily relate with the transformation process that is happening to the main character. How many times people do repeatedly some action without thinking deeply about it? And how often do you realise later that it is wrong? That you were being reckless, unfair or insensitive towards someone else's feelings? Some people criticise Faith as being a stubborn belief in something that Someone wants us to believe but aren't there millions of similar situations where we humans do bad things because someone tells us it is the right thing to do?
Therefore I really enjoyed the awakening of Pereira's conscience about the political situation of the country - it ia really hard to say something is wrong when most people say it is right.
Negative points:
Clearly "afirma pereira" is a title that corresponds to a book that uses that expression 2.5 millions of times throughout the story.
Positive points:
I think we can easily relate with the transformation process that is happening to the main character. How many times people do repeatedly some action without thinking deeply about it? And how often do you realise later that it is wrong? That you were being reckless, unfair or insensitive towards someone else's feelings? Some people criticise Faith as being a stubborn belief in something that Someone wants us to believe but aren't there millions of similar situations where we humans do bad things because someone tells us it is the right thing to do?
Therefore I really enjoyed the awakening of Pereira's conscience about the political situation of the country - it ia really hard to say something is wrong when most people say it is right.
Negative points:
Clearly "afirma pereira" is a title that corresponds to a book that uses that expression 2.5 millions of times throughout the story.
comecei o livro sem qualquer expectativa nem ideia do enredo, apenas uma compra impulsiva de um autor do qual já tinha ouvido falar bastante, e fiquei absolutamente fascinada com a fluidez do texto e do enredo, ao contrário da experiência anterior que tinha tido com outras obras do mesmo autor... a estrela em falta deve-se à forma da escrita do autor, que faz lembrar saramago de certa forma, e que infelizmente me provoca alguma confusão na passagem da narrativa para o diálogo e vice-versa, uma vez que estou muito habituada à forma cânone de apresentação do texto.
reflective
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death
Moderate: Police brutality
Minor: Chronic illness, Terminal illness, Antisemitism
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
It was while taking advantage of an idle stretch of time in between a couple of business meetings, that I stumbled upon – happily, in hindsight – Antonio Tabucchi and Pereira Maintains. Browsing literary websites at random to kill the interval separating two intimidating calls of duty, I settled on an interview with the best-selling author Philip Pullman, that was featured on the popular book recommendations website fivebooks.com. Pullman spoke highly about Pereira Maintains, and what he had to say piqued my curiosity to no end. I purchased a copy on a sheer whim and suffice it to say it has been one of my most fulfilling investments ever made on books till date.
Pereira Maintains is set in the sultry and simmering heat of Lisbon in the year 1938. Even though the cataclysmic upheaval that is to ravage Europe is a year away, its augury is already visible in pockets of brutality. Spain is in bedlam. The nationalists of Franco are clobbering the Second Spanish Republic, with assistance from Mussolini’s Italy. Portugal has a dictator of her own in the form of the tyrannical Salazar whose regime is mercilessly cracking down on ‘rebels’ and ‘dissenters.’ However these unfortunate events are many degrees removed from the prosaic, mundane and uneventful life of Dr. Pereira, a corpulent widower who is also the editor of the cultural page of the newspaper Lisboa. Whilst not talking to the photograph of his departed wife or guzzling jars of iced lemonade with masses of sugar to the accompaniment of omelets aux fines herbes, Dr. Pereira is busy translating the works of past greats for his newspaper and also collating ‘advance obituaries’ of living legends. “When T.E. Lawrence died not a single Portuguese paper got anything out on time, they all came out with their obituaries a week late, and if we want to be an up-to-date paper we must keep abreast of things.” Dr. Pereira also has a proclivity to avoid controversies and conversations like the plague, deciding to completely stay clear of one, while keeping the other to the barest minimum.
To further the endeavour of stacking up a pre-emptive obituary listing of a phalanx of living writers, Dr. Pereira recruits as his assistant, a young but impoverished youth, Francesco Monteiro Rossi. This move up-ends Pereira’s personal life and political philosophy as seeds of absolutist awakenings begin to germinate in Dr. Pereira as a result of the mysterious workings of Rossi and his bewitchingly beautiful but equally mystical girlfriend, Marta.
The title of the book and repeated references to the phrase “Pereira maintains” makes it clear to the reader that the narrative is a testimonial. In all likelihood a police report, the slim volume is an encapsulation of Dr. Pereira’s transformation as viewed and experienced by an unrelated, unbiased and perhaps even an unaffected individual. If indeed the testimonial is that of a policeman, unamused, as well in all likelihood.
Carefully created characters typifying atonal perspectives and atypical attributes waft in and out to hasten the conversion of Dr. Pereira. He is jolted out of his political naivete in drips and trickles. But drips and trickles that are powerful enough to shake his docile ideologies to the core. A Jewish woman with a wooden leg immersed in her copy of Thomas Mann agitates Pereira’s conscience while lunching together in the dining car of a train. Ingeborg Delgado, a German of Portuguese ancestry is on a journey to Portugal to reconnect with her roots. But Senhora Delgado realises that Europe is not a place for people of her kind (she happens to be a Jew) and is in the process of emigrating to the United States. When Dr. Pereira also expresses his unqualified resentment tinged with a shade of wistfulness at the facile workings of the political regimes (including the one in his own country), Delgado chides him for his meek view. Arguing that as an intellectual he has the tools at his disposal to institute ‘change’, Delgado opines, “but surely there’s nothing one can’t do if one cares enough.”
Then there is the assertive and assuring young Dr. Cardoso. The physician in charge of Dr. Pereira’s ‘thalassotherapy’ (a treatment that comprises of seaweed baths and leisurely constitutionals)c, Dr. Cardoso influences the editor by introducing him to some radical theories and influences. Dr. Cardoso regales Pereira on the groundbreaking philosophy of ‘the confederation of souls’. First propounded by French psychologists Theodore-Armand Ribot and Pierre Janet, this theory is a conflation of medicine and philosophy. Arguing that human beings are a confederation of souls, the psychologists contended that a ruling ego would rule the roost until such time it is displaced by another rising ego, stronger and more powerful than the former. Dr. Cardoso urges Dr. Pereira to pay heed to the stirrings of his new ruling ego that is begging to be unshackled from its deep confines.
The transformation of Dr. Pereira from a political abolitionist to a fervent ideologue within the span of 194 pages is the result of some absolute magic wrought by the pen of Tabucchi. The culmination of Dr, Pereira’s metamorphosis is complete when going against the wishes of his editor-in-chief and a spineless stooge of the Salazar regime, Pereira refrains from publishing a paean to Eca da Queiros, a writer of Portuguese realism and instead busies himself with translating a novel of Louis Émile Clément Georges Bernanos was a French author, and a soldier in World War I. Even though Dr. Pereira knows that his translation will never see the light of the day, he still ploughs about it in a methodical manner.
A bone jarring encounter with the Fascist police brings the stupendous work of Tabucchi to a climactic crescendo. Pereira Maintains is as stupefying and stunning as it is slim. It is a homage to subterfuge, eulogy to conscience and a tribute to an unwavering sense of courage under pressure. More than all of these, it is also an acknowledgement of an absolute genius at his bewitching work.
Pereira Maintains is set in the sultry and simmering heat of Lisbon in the year 1938. Even though the cataclysmic upheaval that is to ravage Europe is a year away, its augury is already visible in pockets of brutality. Spain is in bedlam. The nationalists of Franco are clobbering the Second Spanish Republic, with assistance from Mussolini’s Italy. Portugal has a dictator of her own in the form of the tyrannical Salazar whose regime is mercilessly cracking down on ‘rebels’ and ‘dissenters.’ However these unfortunate events are many degrees removed from the prosaic, mundane and uneventful life of Dr. Pereira, a corpulent widower who is also the editor of the cultural page of the newspaper Lisboa. Whilst not talking to the photograph of his departed wife or guzzling jars of iced lemonade with masses of sugar to the accompaniment of omelets aux fines herbes, Dr. Pereira is busy translating the works of past greats for his newspaper and also collating ‘advance obituaries’ of living legends. “When T.E. Lawrence died not a single Portuguese paper got anything out on time, they all came out with their obituaries a week late, and if we want to be an up-to-date paper we must keep abreast of things.” Dr. Pereira also has a proclivity to avoid controversies and conversations like the plague, deciding to completely stay clear of one, while keeping the other to the barest minimum.
To further the endeavour of stacking up a pre-emptive obituary listing of a phalanx of living writers, Dr. Pereira recruits as his assistant, a young but impoverished youth, Francesco Monteiro Rossi. This move up-ends Pereira’s personal life and political philosophy as seeds of absolutist awakenings begin to germinate in Dr. Pereira as a result of the mysterious workings of Rossi and his bewitchingly beautiful but equally mystical girlfriend, Marta.
The title of the book and repeated references to the phrase “Pereira maintains” makes it clear to the reader that the narrative is a testimonial. In all likelihood a police report, the slim volume is an encapsulation of Dr. Pereira’s transformation as viewed and experienced by an unrelated, unbiased and perhaps even an unaffected individual. If indeed the testimonial is that of a policeman, unamused, as well in all likelihood.
Carefully created characters typifying atonal perspectives and atypical attributes waft in and out to hasten the conversion of Dr. Pereira. He is jolted out of his political naivete in drips and trickles. But drips and trickles that are powerful enough to shake his docile ideologies to the core. A Jewish woman with a wooden leg immersed in her copy of Thomas Mann agitates Pereira’s conscience while lunching together in the dining car of a train. Ingeborg Delgado, a German of Portuguese ancestry is on a journey to Portugal to reconnect with her roots. But Senhora Delgado realises that Europe is not a place for people of her kind (she happens to be a Jew) and is in the process of emigrating to the United States. When Dr. Pereira also expresses his unqualified resentment tinged with a shade of wistfulness at the facile workings of the political regimes (including the one in his own country), Delgado chides him for his meek view. Arguing that as an intellectual he has the tools at his disposal to institute ‘change’, Delgado opines, “but surely there’s nothing one can’t do if one cares enough.”
Then there is the assertive and assuring young Dr. Cardoso. The physician in charge of Dr. Pereira’s ‘thalassotherapy’ (a treatment that comprises of seaweed baths and leisurely constitutionals)c, Dr. Cardoso influences the editor by introducing him to some radical theories and influences. Dr. Cardoso regales Pereira on the groundbreaking philosophy of ‘the confederation of souls’. First propounded by French psychologists Theodore-Armand Ribot and Pierre Janet, this theory is a conflation of medicine and philosophy. Arguing that human beings are a confederation of souls, the psychologists contended that a ruling ego would rule the roost until such time it is displaced by another rising ego, stronger and more powerful than the former. Dr. Cardoso urges Dr. Pereira to pay heed to the stirrings of his new ruling ego that is begging to be unshackled from its deep confines.
The transformation of Dr. Pereira from a political abolitionist to a fervent ideologue within the span of 194 pages is the result of some absolute magic wrought by the pen of Tabucchi. The culmination of Dr, Pereira’s metamorphosis is complete when going against the wishes of his editor-in-chief and a spineless stooge of the Salazar regime, Pereira refrains from publishing a paean to Eca da Queiros, a writer of Portuguese realism and instead busies himself with translating a novel of Louis Émile Clément Georges Bernanos was a French author, and a soldier in World War I. Even though Dr. Pereira knows that his translation will never see the light of the day, he still ploughs about it in a methodical manner.
A bone jarring encounter with the Fascist police brings the stupendous work of Tabucchi to a climactic crescendo. Pereira Maintains is as stupefying and stunning as it is slim. It is a homage to subterfuge, eulogy to conscience and a tribute to an unwavering sense of courage under pressure. More than all of these, it is also an acknowledgement of an absolute genius at his bewitching work.
Reasons of the Heart
Giving unto Caesar is considered by most Christians to be a strict requirement of citizenship. From the payment of taxes to the offering of one’s life in patriotic war, one is expected to conform as a Christian duty. Established government appears to be divinely sanctioned by the biblical command. After all, Christianity stands for orderliness in the universe. Social chaos is by definition evil. And isn’t salvation a purely personal matter?
Martin Luther, for example, divided the world cleanly in two. In his interpretation the spiritual had nothing at all to do with the political. Modern Evangelicals still view existing law as God-given, unless of course they take offence at it. But mostly, middle-class Christians simply accept the inevitability of government and its policies and they adopt an attitude of impotent indifference to the resulting suffering - usually by the less well-off and non-Christians. Commonly they claim to do so in the name of Christianity itself.
So it was in Salazar’s Portugal during the 1930’s, as it was in most of contemporary Europe. Fear and hypocrisy combined to create political acceptance, even among those who found its oppressive fascism most distasteful. And so is it now in Trumpist America. Christianity seems to have a natural affinity with monarchs, dictators, and anyone else who can consolidate power in its, Christianity’s, interest. Occasionally however someone, usually a non-Christian, provokes the dormant conscience of the Christian psyche. Pereira Maintains is the story of such a provocation, and its consequences.
Christian conscience can be a strange thing. The eponymous Pereira feels uncomfortable with the political condition of his country and “... he wanted to repent but didn’t know what he had to repent of, he only felt a yearning for repentance as such, surely that’s what he meant, or perhaps (who knows?) he simply liked the idea of repentance.” Repentance, like salvation, is a personal thing without social implications. The resolution of Pereira’s discomfort, he thinks, is confession and counsel. Political involvement is unthinkable.
Pereira is drawn to memory, mainly the reminiscence of his deceased wife. But more generally he is motivated by the memory of how things used to be, the familiar orderliness of past life. Unable to live in the past, he ignores the reality of the present except within the limited sphere of his own ego - his digestion (poor), the weather (hot), his job as a journalist (satisfying), the maintenance of his social isolation from potential threats (mainly the government and its network of informers).
Pereira fervently believes in and desires the resurrection of his soul but not his body. The later, of course, is inherently social and dependent upon other human beings. This is hardly an orthodox opinion but it is necessary in order to maintain his detachment from the world. What he finds, however, is that the slightest human contact is political. It can’t be helped. His soul is part of a “confederation” over which he has no real control and whose connections are matters of the collective heart not the individual will. Even mere translation of long dead authors establishes such a bond that is politically dangerous.
The entire story is told in the form of a judicial deposition or police interrogation report as suggested by the title. It is a narrative prepared by an intermediary, ready perhaps for confirmation by the person who has been questioned. The central point of this narrative is stated early on: “Philosophy appears to concern itself only with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself only with fantasies, but perhaps it expresses the truth.” What’s wanting then is only a signature admitting this crime of recognition.
Giving unto Caesar is considered by most Christians to be a strict requirement of citizenship. From the payment of taxes to the offering of one’s life in patriotic war, one is expected to conform as a Christian duty. Established government appears to be divinely sanctioned by the biblical command. After all, Christianity stands for orderliness in the universe. Social chaos is by definition evil. And isn’t salvation a purely personal matter?
Martin Luther, for example, divided the world cleanly in two. In his interpretation the spiritual had nothing at all to do with the political. Modern Evangelicals still view existing law as God-given, unless of course they take offence at it. But mostly, middle-class Christians simply accept the inevitability of government and its policies and they adopt an attitude of impotent indifference to the resulting suffering - usually by the less well-off and non-Christians. Commonly they claim to do so in the name of Christianity itself.
So it was in Salazar’s Portugal during the 1930’s, as it was in most of contemporary Europe. Fear and hypocrisy combined to create political acceptance, even among those who found its oppressive fascism most distasteful. And so is it now in Trumpist America. Christianity seems to have a natural affinity with monarchs, dictators, and anyone else who can consolidate power in its, Christianity’s, interest. Occasionally however someone, usually a non-Christian, provokes the dormant conscience of the Christian psyche. Pereira Maintains is the story of such a provocation, and its consequences.
Christian conscience can be a strange thing. The eponymous Pereira feels uncomfortable with the political condition of his country and “... he wanted to repent but didn’t know what he had to repent of, he only felt a yearning for repentance as such, surely that’s what he meant, or perhaps (who knows?) he simply liked the idea of repentance.” Repentance, like salvation, is a personal thing without social implications. The resolution of Pereira’s discomfort, he thinks, is confession and counsel. Political involvement is unthinkable.
Pereira is drawn to memory, mainly the reminiscence of his deceased wife. But more generally he is motivated by the memory of how things used to be, the familiar orderliness of past life. Unable to live in the past, he ignores the reality of the present except within the limited sphere of his own ego - his digestion (poor), the weather (hot), his job as a journalist (satisfying), the maintenance of his social isolation from potential threats (mainly the government and its network of informers).
Pereira fervently believes in and desires the resurrection of his soul but not his body. The later, of course, is inherently social and dependent upon other human beings. This is hardly an orthodox opinion but it is necessary in order to maintain his detachment from the world. What he finds, however, is that the slightest human contact is political. It can’t be helped. His soul is part of a “confederation” over which he has no real control and whose connections are matters of the collective heart not the individual will. Even mere translation of long dead authors establishes such a bond that is politically dangerous.
The entire story is told in the form of a judicial deposition or police interrogation report as suggested by the title. It is a narrative prepared by an intermediary, ready perhaps for confirmation by the person who has been questioned. The central point of this narrative is stated early on: “Philosophy appears to concern itself only with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself only with fantasies, but perhaps it expresses the truth.” What’s wanting then is only a signature admitting this crime of recognition.