Antonio Tabucchi - Pereira Mantains (English) PDF

One of my favorite 100 novels ever.

In Portugal, the dictator Salazar is the greatest enemy of left wing intellectuals and he is always willing to torture and disappear anybody who opposes him. 

Pereira Maintains (Italian: Sostiene Pereira) is a 1994 novel by the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi. It is also known as Pereira Declares and Declares Pereira. Its story follows Pereira, a journalist for the culture column of a small Lisbon newspaper, as he struggles with his conscience and the restrictions of the dictatorial regime of Antonio Salazar. Antonio Tabucchi won the Premio Campiello, Viareggio Prize and Premio Scanno in 1994 for the novel. It was adapted into a film, also called Sostiene Pereira, in 1996. It was the basis for the French comic book Pereira prétend, made by Pierre-Henry Gomont and published in 2016.

The novel is set in Portugal in the summer of 1938, during Salazar's dictatorship. Pereira, an old journalist on a Portuguese newspaper - the Lisboa - who loves literature and practically gives his life to it. When he reads an essay written by a young man about death, he calls the young man, whose name is Monteiro Rossi, to ask him to write "advance obituaries" about great writers who could die at any moment. Not having ever been much concerned with politics, Pereira's world is turned upside down when he begins to get to know the distracted and leftist youth. The articles he receives from Monteiro Rossi (and pays him for) have a definite leftist slant and are completely unpublishable, but something continues to attract Pereira to him, perhaps the fact that his wife died before he could have children of his own.