The devil's house
2001. 1st Edition.
A man struggles, like all men, with the shadow of his father. From him, and from the father, we will never come to know everything, just as one never comes to know everything about or of anyone.
A woman sleeps, then wakes. She too is possessed by a deaf violence made of memories of which she does not fully become aware. Both live like the blind. Since we all live this way and it is our condition. Fiction tries to embrace this loneliness of the night that must be crossed.
It tries, in trying to give it a narrative structure, to think the narrative, to think the night. Although it knows that it can never go further than metaphor. And that only words, noise, sound, eventually music, can claim to be "created" reality. That is to say: before this, there was all this. After this, after this attempt to "narrate", there will continue to be the same thing, the night. A night whose essence forever eludes us. A night more vast, indifferent to everything.
These voices that emerge from the night may become "real", for an instant. Perhaps they may even remain, as a "particular reality". But they define nothing. Nor are there truly any value judgments. Because both the author and the characters know, each in their own subjectivity, that all this is vanity.
"I would take up the theme of the insidious mental conditioning of the Ancien Régime, reflected in family misunderstandings prolonged over generations, in A Casa do Diabo (2000), “the collective house where memories, dreams, frustrations, everything we inherit and everything we project dwell.” The book is dedicated to the pianist Ana Jacobetty, the author's childhood friend, and is precisely marked by a nostalgia for the early years of life, “the only time we live fully.”
Mafalda Ivo Cruz is a Portuguese writer, translator, and essayist. Her work is distinguished by the search for 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 Fiction and Novels of 2004), Emma (2004), and Oz (2006).
