Pereira Declares: A Testimony - Hardcover

Antonio Tabucchi has accomplished a rare feat: a socio-political novel with a decided left-wing slant that succeeds as a thriller. It is told through the voice of an aging editor at a Portuguese newspaper in 1938 during fascist rule. A murder inspires the editor out of acquiescence, and an underground movement ensues. The book rose to immediate success in Italy in 1994, a time when Italian fascism resurfaced, and Tabucchi's timely antidote to that movement was no doubt a factor in the novel's popularity. But widespread appeal of the book had as much to do with the page-turning nature of the work as its politics--a testament to Tabucchi's ability on both fronts.

Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa in 1943 and died in Lisbon, his adopted home, in 2012. Over the course of his career he won France’s MeŽdicis Prize for Indian Nocturne, the Italian PEN Prize for Requiem, and the Aristeion Prize for Pereira Maintains. A staunch critic of the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, he once said that “democracy isn’t a state of perfection, it has to be improved, and that means constant vigilance.”

PATRICK CREAGH (1930–2012) was a British poet and translator.