Patrick Creagh
From AwardAnnals
Information about the author.
Works
- 2 works
- Show titles only
Marcello Fois, Patrick Creagh
The incident occurred in Nuoro, Sardinia, about a hundred years ago. A prosperous farmer was shot dead in his olive grove, and his hired hand, a young man called Zenobi, was found guilty In absentia—he had gone to ground already after being accused of theft and was now a bandit with a price on his head. An open-and-shut case. Only the lawyer was willing to see whether the evidence for either charge stood up against the facts. Neither the courts nor the police wanted to reopen the case; the boy had effectively admitted his guilt by absconding. The lawyer’s only recourse was to set up a trap of his own…
Pereira Declares: A Testimony
Antonio Tabucchi, Patrick Creagh
Salazar’s fascist Portugal in 1938 is part of the menacing cloud that hangs over Europe, and Dr. Pereira is an aging, overweight, lonely, mostly retired journalist who doesn’t want to think about it. He escapes facing the ominous times by translating nineteenth-century French stories for the weekly Culture Page he edits for a Lisbon newspaper. He dwells on the past and over-indulges in heavily-sugared glasses of lemonade and omelettes aux fines berbes.
“Are you living in another world, and you working for a newspaper?” his exasperated friend Father Antonio asks him. “Look here Pereira, for goodness sake go and find out what’s happening around you.”
Then Pereira meets a young man, Monteiro Rossi, and in a city where the very walls have ears and where those who know what’s good for them turn a blind eye to what goes on around them, he is forced to break out of the shell of his own inhibitions. In the process of facing reality and encountering the brutality of an authoritarian state, Pereira becomes a gentle hero the reader will long remember.
