Slender novel packs a punch

Pereira Maintains By Antonio Tabucchi Canongate Books Paperback, 210 pages, S$21.90 Rating: B+

PEREIRA Maintains is not a new book. It was written in Italian by Antonio Tabucchi in 1994 and received an English translation in 1995.

What drew this reviewer to pick up this relatively unknown novel at BooksActually was its new foreword by Mohsin Hamid, the wonderful British-Pakistani writer of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia.

Hamid declares the slender novel as one of his all-time favourites, its 195-page compressed storytelling approaching "perfection". He describes it as having "a heroin-like attrac…