The Punishment of Arles

A Punição de Arles (1975) is a deep and powerful dive into Emma Santos's inner turmoil after breaking up with the man who gave her her literary name. A Portuguese man aspiring to be a photographer, manipulative and abusive, with whom she lived for twelve years and who keeps her trapped in a cycle of waiting and abandonment.

Between delirium and lucidity, the book exposes the physical and psychological violence of this relationship and the hallucinatory vertigo triggered by the separation. Arles becomes the intimate setting of this inner punishment, the space where writing imposes itself as the only means of survival.

Obsessive and visceral, Emma's writing explores the limits of language and brings together the central themes of her work - literature, abortion, physical and mental illness, psychiatry and institutionalization - in a fusion of autobiography and fiction. The written word becomes a body in metamorphosis, a "second voice" that tries to repair the wounded body, the lost love and the interrupted motherhood.

Words unable to restore her existence in its entirety, but which bear witness to the birth of Emma Santos as a major writer.