Little Europe

Europe, with its endless religious and nationalist wars, its massacres, its fierce individualism and its struggle for freedom, cut through by every kind of violence and contradiction: the Inquisition, Empires, colonialism, racism, anti-Semitism—revolutionary Europe of the 18th and 19th centuries, of Robespierre, Freud, Wagner and Marx, of communism, anti-communism, fascism and secular republics, of democratic monarchies—is, even now, in the age of globalisation, our unconscious and our carnal relationship with the world.

(...) a space of exuberance, equivalent to any space or medium an artist defines (the diagram), in which to read oneself and the world. (Mafalda Ivo Cruz)

A subtle meditation on what remains of a continent that no longer knows who it is. The book traverses cities, memories and ruins, composing an intimate geography of Europe beyond treaties or borders. A geography of gestures, voices, silences, guilt, beauty and melancholy.

The text moves between narrative and essay. The voice that narrates is at once personal and collective

“Nothing is ever truly lost, it only changes its language.”

Mafalda Ivo Cruz is a Portuguese writer, translator and essayist. Her work is distinguished by its 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 in 2004), Emma (2004) and Oz (2006).