Anyone who has read Sostiene Pereira by Antonio Tabucchi knows that it is a novel destined to last beyond the time and space of the fragment of history it tells. I read it just a few weeks ago, while I was in Lisbon. I read it on the plane out, on the famous tram 28 that crosses the city and then sitting on a bench, in front of the sea. And yet, although my scenario was the same, Sostiene Pereira’s Lisbon is different: it is 1938, Portugal is suffocated by the Salazarist regime and the sultry heat of August merges with the cloak of oppression that weighs on the city. Pereira, to work on his articles, needs a fan that is always on, as if the air were already unbreathable.
A cultural journalist for the Catholic newspaper «Lisboa» and the absolute protagonist of the novel, Pereira is an awkward, apolitical, heart-diseased and overweight character, with an addiction to lemonade and French literature. His life proceeds in a routine way, punctuated by sandwiches with omelette and conversations with the portrait of his deceased wife, a silent interlocutor to whom Pereira confides his loneliness in search of comfort. A comfort that he cannot find. “Patience, we’ll see,” are the two words with which each dialogue ends, as if the protagonist were incapable of free will, as if time passed through him without him being truly part of it.
And yet, suddenly, something changes. During a torrid day like any other, Pereira reads an article on death written by a young man named Monteiro Rossi, and decides to meet him to offer him a job: writing obituaries of deceased authors. But Monteiro Rossi, in reality, has nothing to do with death, he betrays it every day in a passionate relationship with life. A young revolutionary, a militant socialist, he is used to living with the anarchist spirit of his twenties.
From this encounter Pereira himself cannot say what happens to him and the obsessive use of the verb “sustains” bears witness to this: the protagonist seems to continually justify his late stance. But attracted by Monteiro’s vitalism, Pereira finds himself in dangerously political situations and ideas. He who had given himself up for dead, who suffered from illness and the passing of days, decides to welcome Monteiro into his home and let his life be turned upside down.
Suitable for everyone but especially for the youngest, Sostiene Pereira is a twentieth-century classic with a capital C. Antonio Tabucchi, with a clear and enveloping prose, teaches us that culture is never a simple intellectual ornament: it is always politics, always a choice. A novel about the power of writing and the responsibility of words. A book about possible changes, about how even a cultural page can become an instrument of resistance, about how even a disillusioned intellectual can rediscover the strength and ideas of youth. I would have liked to read it years ago, maybe at school, to understand, to act. Because, as Tabucchi reminds us, silence, in front of history, is never the right solution.
Written by Maria De Gennaro
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Antonio Tabucchi, Sostiene Pereira, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1994