A Portuguese requiem

1995. 1st Edition.

We are faced with the first work by a Portuguese author whose name is undoubtedly worth remembering, due to the rare quality of her fictional discourse. Against a backdrop where several decades of this century's Portugal intersect, the author creates a true textual polyphony that encompasses multiple narrative voices, in a sequence that is utterly enchanting, moving between memory and dream, and at times bordering on madness, without however losing its grip on reality. 

The text thus presents itself to us as a labyrinthine web where the story is gradually deciphered, amid what emerges as an expression of something formless and purely instinctual, and the confrontation with the extreme violence of lived experience.

Mafalda Ivo Cruz is a Portuguese writer, translator, and essayist. Her work is distinguished by the pursuit of an emotional truth. In Pequena Europa, she confirms herself as one of the most elegant and intense voices in contemporary Portuguese literature. She is the author of Um Requiem Português (1995), A Casa do Diabo (2000), O Rapaz de Botticelli (2002, Pen Club Fiction Prize), Vermelho (2003, APE Grand Prize for Novels and Novellas 2004), Emma (2004), and Oz (2006).