Susana Moreira Marques’s masterpiece “Now and at the Hour of Our Death,” a piece of reportage about life and loss of life set in a village in northern Portugal, is an instance of one of the best modern Portuguese writing obtainable in translation. As for poetry, “Cape Verdean Blues,” by Shauna Barbosa, gives you a way of the multifaceted character of Cape Verdean tradition within the diaspora. “What’s in a Name,” by the good Ana Luísa Amaral, will incite you to look with marvel into the trivia of on a regular basis life.
What books can provide me a way of life underneath the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar?
The regime instituted by Salazar in 1933 lasted till 1974. “The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters,” by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Velho da Costa and Maria Teresa Horta, is an audacious and kooky collective work in opposition to fascism. Considered “pornographic and a threat to public morality” when it was printed, it led the federal government to put its authors on trial. “Empty Wardrobes,” a novel by Maria Judite de Carvalho, gives you a way of home life underneath the dictatorship: In exact, unsentimental prose, it tells the story of three generations of girls overshadowed by the loss of life of a patriarch.
What books can provide me a way of the town’s colonial previous?
The Portuguese empire, which included colonies within the Americas, Asia and Africa, was additionally probably the most enduring. Its legacy is vivid in Lisbon as we speak.
To witness it, you may go to Cova da Moura, the house of a big group of migrants from nations together with Cape Verde, Angola and Guinea-Bissau, amongst others, and pay a go to to Dentu Zona, a bookstore and silk-screen printing workshop the place you can find a rigorously curated choice of books concerning the metropolis’s colonial previous and works by main authors of African descent.
If you’re thinking about studying extra on this topic, there are a lot of books and authors to select from. “South of Nowhere,” considered one of António Lobo Antunes’s masterpieces, is a tense monologue instructed by an Angolan warfare veteran to a solitary girl he meets in a bar. A prose poem addressed to a silent interlocutor, and a memoir of the horrors of the warfare as witnessed by the creator himself, it’s a excellent ebook with which to begin.
Dulce Maria Cardoso’s “The Return” begins in Angola in 1975. The Salazar dictatorship has collapsed and the defeat of the Portuguese within the Angolan War of Independence is in sight. The narrator, Rui, is 15 years outdated. He is likely one of the 1000’s of settlers who’re returning to Portugal, a spot the place he has by no means been. The novel gives you a way of the contradictions and mythologies at play on the time of the Carnation Revolution, which led to the tip of the dictatorship in 1974.
