Review: Pereira Maintains

Brief, Exciting, Uplifting Tale for Today

Old Lisbon, 1930s-style trams, Wikimedia

What do you call a book that delves deeply into matters of life and death, psychological theories of personality, and right action in the face of tyranny in less than 150 pages?

I call it a perfect meditation

Great writers and thinkers have produced thousands, millions, of pages of profound musings on issues Antonio Tabucchi wraps up faster than Perry Mason outs a killer. 

Part of the book’s economy is its strict focus on Pereira, who does not ‘maintain,’ as the title suggests, but who is in fact slowly gradually almost imperceptibly changing. We are not given the perspective of an all-seeing third person viewer or of a presence inside the protagonist’s head. We are told the story by someone else who, presumably, Pereira told it to.

We are reminded of this viewpoint constantly, never letting us forget we are reading a version of the story from an old guy who was basically flipping out at the time. He was in it, so we are in it. That’s all there is, nothing else, no looking down on it ‘objectively.’

We don’t meet Lisbon. We meet his experience of Lisbon, the heat and the hills are hard on his heart. That’s all we hear about. We don’t take a restaurant tour. We go only to the Cafe Orquidea, which only serves omelet aux fines herbes and seafood salad.

I felt carried along on a slow-moving sidewalk, as Pereira feels himself and wonders why he is helping strangers and taking risks and then just keeps doing it without further reflection. Pereira is the non-Hamlet — he sees the question but doesn’t get engaged in it.

The brevity and scope of Pereira Maintains is why I see it as a meditation, a mindfulness meditation in which there is a comfortable focus to return to after every brief distraction. Pereira and the rest of us never stop monitoring the contents of his experience. We know what he senses and what he perceives. We know about the conditioned sequences that make up his life and we read about his own awareness of them.

Most of all, we know everything about the life of his body. It is hard to write about what happens to it without spoiling the surprise you were waiting for all along.

When we learn how much sugar he puts in all that lemonade, there’s a visceral response. That body takes a pounding in shocking ways we don’t associate with old men.

Old men, generally speaking, do not get hit in stories. Killed one way or another, sure. But not smashed in the mouth.

Old men, generally speaking, do not undertake complicated heroic actions unlike anything they have ever done in their life, without really thinking all that much about it. All part of the Meditation, getting caught up in thinking about it is just what you don’t want to do.

As a semi-old guy, I was thrilled by this book. I’d think anyone would be. It is equally realistic about the forces holding us back and the possibilities for dramatic personal change at any time. Even old age doesn’t have to be a story of winding down. If an old second-rate art critic with no friends and a bad heart can shed all that and start a new chapter, anybody can and probably should.