The ObserverFictionReviewAntonio Tabucchi's novel about a newspaper editor in 1930s Portugal is a passionate warning against political complacency

The Italian original of Antonio Tabucchi's novel, Sostiene Pereira (1994), has been widely translated and adapted to film, garnering major European awards. Its Portuguese protagonist – an overweight widower who edits the culture pages of a second-rate evening paper in 1938 Lisbon, under the dictatorship of Salazar – is therefore already beloved on the continent. Pereira begins by believing that self-censorship to avoid state censorship is common sense, that he need be "nobody's comrade" and that he can convey coded messages of dissent by publishing 19th-century French stories about repentance and resistance. His relationship to politics is like that to dieting – something he knows he ought to attend to, but which is easier to avoid, though doing so may ultimately kill him.

Pereira's awakening comes through a young man, Rossi, who is not only the son Pereira never had, but also, in the way of late 19th-century literature, his other self, his political conscience personified. Several other characters are similar stand-ins for Pereira's conscience: a savvy old priest, a lady on a train and his doctor, who talks about multiple selves. Rossi brings Pereira unprintable leftwing articles, slating the Italian futurist Filippo Marinetti or eulogising the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Pereira starts supporting Rossi and his revolutionary friends. Gradually, he understands that the times demand he be "for" one side and the novel ends with his commitment to a truly selfless political action.

Tabucchi writes with what Italo Calvino, who shared the same translator, called "quickness" – an agility of mind and economy of narrative that pulls the reader along, using conjunctions like lassos. Growing apprehension, however, is assisted by something oblique and disjointed in the prose – the slight lag behind words and phrases experienced even in excellent translations. The style is experimental – a third-person testimonial, with Pereira "maintaining" (in another translation "declaring") its narrative throughout. This suggests a statement made under pressure from opponents, yet what Pereira maintains can be the wiping of his brow, or simply, "In the afternoon the weather changed, Pereira maintains". This absurdity both endears and unsettles.

Italian opponents of Silvio Berlusconi have used this novel as a political allegory to support their cause, exactly as Pereira uses French literature, inadequately, in 1938. Throughout the novel, Tabucchi cites England and the BBC as bastions of free speech, but there is no country without need of this novel's passionate warning against complacency.

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