Mohsin Hamid recommends Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid’s fourth novel about migrants, refugees and teleporting through doorways, is up for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. In much the same vein as his earlier books The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, he continues to record what he calls “a divided man’s conversation with himself.” Hamid describes the book he’s chosen here, Pereira Maintains, by the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi — who in his lifetime was often tipped for the Nobel Prize — as “a masterpiece of compression. A political history of 1930s Portugal, a love story between a man and his dead wife, a gloriously successful formal experiment, and an irresistible thriller,” which “can be read on a single, lazy day, when it is raining and you have no wish to leave your house.” ©Alexi 2017
www.alexibooks.com
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 1st, 2017