Boal’s most important work, Theatre of the Oppressed (“O Teatro do Oprimido“), explains the basic idea of this new form of politically and socially motivated acting techniques. Above all, Boal wanted to contribute to diminishing injustice and defend Human Rights. Together with the Forum Theatre system, the Theatre of the Opressed is trying to initiate a democratic process, “using the stage to empower the disempowered”. Acting groups and initiatives worldwide work on the basis of Boal’s methods.

Jogos Para Atores e Não-Atores is a collection of Boal’s most important exercises and games, in which the participants consciously recreate and confront problems such as sexual harrassment, homophobia or racism. After a short introduction to his theory, illustrated with stories and examples of his work with different groups in Europe, Boal describes the exercises he has found most useful, dividing them into body monologues, body dialogues, techniques from Image Theatre and rehearsal techniques. These “gamesercises” can be used by both professional and amateur actors, by teachers and therapists, in political, pedagogical or social areas. Their main aim is to convert the spectator into a spect“actor”, contributing ideas and converting roles. While dealing with problematic topics, it is of great importance to Boal that acting should always be fun, leaving out any negative notions like competition, envy or rivalry.

This classic has already been translated into numerous languages and updated several times, now including over 400 exercises. The latest edition comprises Boal’s experiences with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1997 for the creation of various characters from Hamlet.

O Arco-íris do Desejo is a handbook of exercises split into a theoretical part explaining the basics of Boal’s understanding of theatre, and a practical part presenting some of his newer acting techniques. Starting again from the principle that by acting we can free ourselves from external oppressions we have internalised, Boal’s aim is to reduce inner restraints and inhibitions and to alert a consciousness for the actor’s surroundings and his own person, which might ultimately lead him to change his life. In the exercise The Rainbow of Desire, for instance, a participant is asked to improvise a conflict from his daily life, represented by five different emotions and desires to be expressed with his body. Subsequently, the other participants assume his poses, while the improvisor steps back to see how others perceive him. He then has the chance to reflect on his behaviour and his reactions to others and possibly even change his demeanour. Other exercises are: The Cops in the Head and Their Anti-bodies, The Screen Image and The Image of the Future We Are Afraid Of. O Arco-íris do Desejo is one of the standard works of therapeutic theatre worldwide.

More information on Boal’s acting methods can be found on the homepage of the International Theatre of the Opressed Organisation:

> theatreoftheoppressed.org

> institutoaugustoboal.org

Membrane (“Membrana”) is a highly original novel that puts a spectacular twist on the tradition of speculative fiction from Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. LeGuin, Donna Haraway and Ted Chiang. Narrated by a complex artificial intelligence in the year 2100, it tells the secret history of the 21st century: how algorithms gradually took power and secretly built a monumental museum in the Amazon jungle to tell the story of how they became an empire. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”, said Walter Benjamin. The story we are reading, which takes the form of the catalogue of The 21st Century Museum, under which name the novel won the Barbastro Prize for Literature 2021, is no exception. To write it, Jorge Carrión – one of Spain’s most acclaimed and widely translated writers, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times – has invented a neo-language, somewhere between narrative, poetry and essay, which imagines how the artificial intelligences of the future will write. An experimental and philosophical novel that reads like a thriller. A great reflection on the tumultuous relationship between technology and humanity.

Winner of the prestigious Ciudad de Barbastro Prize, worth 15,000 euros.

Did the 21st century begin with the fall of the Twin Towers in New York or with the entry of a virus into a man’s body in Wuhan? Is SARS-CoV-2 the first cyborg pathogen? Are Netflix, Zoom and Amazon multinational pandemics? How can one represent the transformation of science fiction into everyday reality? The Viral (“Lo viral”) is, at the same time, a meticulous reconstruction of the first months of the coronavirus from personal experience, a fragmentary essay on digital virality, the memory of a quarantined library, an experiment in cultural criticism and a false but sincere diary that manages to keep the reader in permanent brain activity and throws up a series of essential questions about the future that awaits us.

Picking up where Bookshops: A Reader’s History left off, Against Amazon (“Contra Amazon”) explores the impact of new technologies on bookshops and libraries. Collecting Jorge Carrión’s essays on these vital cultural spaces, as well as interviews with the writers who love them. Jorge Carrión travels to the innovative libraries and bookstores of Seoul; in Naples and Capri he researches the history of the mythical house of Curzio Malaparte; he interviews booksellers and writers; he talks about books and cities with Alberto Manguel, Iain Sinclair, Luigi Amara and Han Kang; he interprets the libraries of Don Quixote and Captain Nemo, and pays homage to some of the world‘s most fascinating bookstores and libraries. Against Amazon is in equal parts a history of books and bookshops, a reader’s autobiography, a travelogue, a love letter – and, urgently, a manifesto against the corrosive pressures of modern-day capitalism.

In his new book Barcelona: Book of Passageways (“Barcelona. Libro de los pasajes”), Jorge Carrión invites us to stroll through the streets of Barcelona and especially its passageways, those elements of urban life that bring people together and contain hidden stories. The author wanders around the city, speaks with passers-by and the inhabitants of the passagaways. He rediscovers historical characters and stories that have contributed to the development of the city. Carrión tells us about Barcelona, but in reality he is talking about urban spaces all around the world, and the book is also in some ways a tribute to Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”.

In The Deceased (“Los difuntos”), Jorge Carrión tells the prequel to The Dead (“Los muertos”), set in a fictional 19th century New York City. In this society where technological progress reigns, “new ones” are enslaved in order to ensure the working of the steam machines. With time, they will climb the social ladder and become the “old ones”. In this scenario the philosophical ideals of Dionysos and Apollo materialize in the main character, who will battle against the decadence of progress and the oppression it generates. Jorge Carrión brilliantly narrates this tale about the search for identity and purpose set in a fictional world that is in many ways much like ours – from the alienation of the human being in a technological world, to the high price the “new ones” are willing to pay for the American dream.

Jorge Carrión’s book Bookshops (“Librerías”) is a survey of the history of bookstores all over the world, their relationships with writers and how they became the center pieces of culture and political resistance, making a trip through the history of the book trade from Ancient Rome to the 21st century. Nostalgic yet demystifying, this extraordinary book is the result of many readings, researches and visits to bookstores on the five continents, veering between cultural critique and travel chronicle. Librerías has come second in the prestigious Anagrama Award for Essays.

In his cleverly construed novel The Footprints (“Las huellas”), the author brings a number of essential topics like identity and human relationships together with moments in time and space, keeping the reader glued to the page. Reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Las huellas features a suggestive plot and vivid characters that make us question the future of our planet.

Julia dreams, dreams Ema (»Julia sueña, sueña Ema«) is a story about friendship, about the kind of light that friendship casts on life almost without us realising when the other is there, by our side, so much so that life is a dream, and dreams are full of wonderful coincidences. Two girls meet at school but shyness does not allow them to tell each other how much they like each other, yet what does not happen in class or at recess, happens on another plane… following the clues of these wonderful dreams.

In Dear Giant (“Querido Gigante”) Albertina is a giantess in love. In love with another giant named Vivaldo, who has one peculiarity: it’s hard for him to stay awake. He sleeps all the time. To communicate with him, Albertina writes letters, which she sends through her faithful handmaid, Lucrecia. Lucrecia goes and comes with the letters, from one castle to the other and she hands them over to Vivaldo’s faithful footman, Atilio. Albertina desperately hopes that her letters will capture the attention of her beloved as she shares with him information about the world outside. Until the kingdom falls into the peril of a foreign invasion. Albertina and Vivaldo are the only two giants, only they can defend the two gates to the kingdom and its inhabitants. But Vivaldo won’t wake up and Albertina has to handle the situation on her own. In the end she will manage to avoid a war without resorting to any form of violence, using only her creativity. She will also find, in an unexpected twist, a true love, wide awake! Set in medieval times, this children’s novel, through humor and a strong yet loveable female character, tells of unrequited love and the courage it takes to never give up. But, most of all, it tells of the importance of being awake and not missing out on the amazing opportunities that life has to offer us.

Do You Have a Book About Witches? And Other Stories (“¿Tiene un libro de brujas? Y otros cuentos”) includes three stories of the love between different creatures. Of the love that is possible between creatures who are different.

The first story, “Do You Have a Book About Witches?” (“¿Tiene un libro de brujas?”) tells the tale of a spoiled girl whose mother goes to the bookstore looking for a book about witches. When the shopkeeper can’t find the book, the mother returns home with a real witch. She hopes that this witch will be able to make her daughter happy. But the witch does not make things easy. She is very grumpy and doesn’t want to talk to the little girl. Little by little, love begins to grow between them as the girl and the witch start to understand each other… a little… through the help of books.

The second story is called “Where is Rye?” (“¿Dónde está Centeno?”) it tells of a mother’s desperate attempt to protect her family from the pain a divorce might cause them. She brings home a dog. Even though she has never liked dogs at all, she would do anything to give her son the thing he’s always wanted most to help him get through a difficult time for the family. But it turns out that Rye, which is the dog’s name, gets lost… more precisely Rye runs away with Zunilda, a female dog from the neighborhood who was mistreated by her owner. Rye is with Zunilda but he misses his family. Alba is with her family but she desperately misses Rye. The love that brought them together, from different and unexpected places, could be the solution to their problems. And in the end they find the solution together.

 “Ducky Rodríguez” (“Patito Rodríguez”) tells of a very uptight duck, who doesn’t like anything to be out of place, who follows the same routine every day, at the same time, with the same expression and the same hairdo. A very organized duck. Until one day a girl duck appears. Brave is her name, and she turns his life upside down as she proposes new things, different things, other worlds, broader horizons. But love becomes possible when they realize they can remain true to themselves even though the other one is different.

Vladimir is a dystopian novel set in contemporary Buenos Aires, in the midst of the chaos produced by a sudden power failure. The title and the attraction of an unevenly aged couple is inspired by Nabokov’s novel “Lolita”, but with reversed gender roles.
The protagonist, Guinea Haze, 45, is a literature professor with an obsession for young boys. After a falling-out with a student that ends in a major scandal, she leaves university in the United States and returns to her home country. This happens at the time of the Great Blackout, when a large part of the world is disconnected. Buenos Aires airport is in chaos, Guinea hitchhikes and is picked up by Rostov Peret. As her mobile phone doesn’t work and Guinea can’t even check the address of her destination, Rostov offers her a place to stay. He lives with his son Vladimir, a 13-year-old teenager. Guinea and the young boy are attracted to each other as soon as they meet.
Rostov also begins to like Guinea, but there is no room for this attraction. The three of them try to organise their lives under very precarious circumstances. There isn’t even enough food for the two dogs in the house. Disaster is compounded by outcasts attacking the house, looting and killing in the streets, and the dogs go from defending them to starving to death. In an attempt to rescue Rostov from an attack by his own animals, Vladimir shoots randomly and kills his father. Guinea is now left as the boy’s lawful guardian. At first she comforts him, looks after him, cares for him. But finally her instinct takes over and she has a sexual experience with him.
Vladimir equates the destruction of the world with the destruction of the human being. The story of a woman who cannot escape her impulses and who will never end up renouncing them. In a world of freedoms where nothing in relation to sex is forbidden, the story of Guinea and Vladimir shows us how limits can always go further, while at the same time raising a new question: does society exist if there are no limits?

Leticia Martin‘s A New Noise (“Un ruido nuevo”) tells the story of modern family life, infidelity and the breakdown of marriage, with a metaphysical twist. Maria Lobo is the mother of three children, a wife, an advertising professional and a writer. She lives a comfortable middle-class life with her family in Buenos Aires. Her daily routine of transporting her children and going to work has recently been expanded to include visits to a creative writing guru and a psychoanalyst. Maria struggles to balance her authorial ambitions and her bad conscience about neglecting her children and her husband, Román. Her attempts to revive some passion with him fail. Then a romantic encounter with a colleague brings the problems to the surface in an explosive way, and her life begins to change rapidly. New Noise is a powerful and witty meditation on the tribulations of modern life from the perspective of a woman and her different roles. The metafictional element, combined with the fragmentary nature of the novel that reflects the protagonist‘s state of mind, is what makes the novel more than just a domestic drama. There is a wise irony in the way that the very conscious Maria tells her story, enriched by an excellent sense of comic timing, evident from the very first pages.

Martín struggles at home with his partner Cecilia: she is stubborn and self-centred. He diverts her with sex, and she uses the opportunity to make him pregnant. Estrógenos („Oestrogens“) plays in the future, in which the women refuse to give birth and men can get pregnant. Although Martín, at Cecilia’s insistence, has been undergoing hormone therapy for weeks, he feels surprised, but lets it happen. After the act, while his girlfriend gives a little cheer and then, as usual, takes a shower and goes to work, Martín buys a pregnancy test: Positive. He finds himself keeping silent at his workplace, for fear of degradation. It does not take long before a colleague, who has watched his protective hand movement over his belly, starts a rumour. After a short time his boss dismisses Martín on the pretext of a team restructuring. While he is still thinking about how to give the news to Cecilia, she tells him that she still feels much too young for family planning, and, by the way, has she met someone. She grabs her backpack and Martín remains alone, pregnant and unemployed. He looks for consolation in alcohol, and has an affair. While he is carrying on in a car park with his new flame, Greta, he is arrested. The government has decreed that every pregnant man must go to the nearest hospital without delay. Martín lives there like in a prison, while on the streets violent protests start. After his son is born, he finds a possibility to escape.The novel is brilliantly written and invariably captivates the reader. It can be read as a dystopia, but is astonishingly up-to-date in its sharp observations concerning the coexistence of men and women, technological development, and social order. What is the difference between the sexes today? Is everything desirable in terms of progress? What should be regulated by the state, and what reserved for privacy? Martín paints a gloomy picture without giving up hope. In the end, the father tells his son what happened, the circle of human life and tradition enters a new phase.

His first novel Baía dos Tigres (“Bay of Tigers”) could also be described as a large-scale report and as travel literature in the tradition of Bruce Chatwin. This is an astonishing book about the author’s journey from Angola (Luanda) to Mozambique taking three and a half months. Mendes’ world presents itself to the reader like an old-fashioned junk shop, only that the journey is arduous and not quite as romantic. It takes the reader through a crisis-ridden and war-torn country. The journey resembles a trip to the heart of darkness, to the end of humanity, as one critic put it. And herein lies the true significance of Baía dos Tigres. Pedro Rosa Mendes has succeeded in writing an unusual text, which is very subtly composed, a text which, on the basis of countless individual fates, unfurls the everyday panorama of southern Africa, while at the same time painting a vigorous portrait of man.

In September 2000 Pedro Rosa Mendes was awarded the Prize for the Best Novel by the Portuguese PEN Club and the Literature Prize of Cascais.

In Peregrinação de Enmanuel Jhesus (“The Pilgrimage of Enmanuel Jhesus”), Pedro Rosa Mendes lends his voice to East Timor, its complex history and varied landscape, its colourful people and richly influenced culture. Interwoven with the protagonist Alor’s story – an architect travelling the island – historical events, political remembrances, theological debates, descriptions of martial arts and many other gems from this unique island’s treasure trove enrich the narrative and leave the reader fascinated with what he has learned in the process. True to his style and in beautiful language, Pedro Rosa Mendes renders the horrors East Timor has had to suffer in skilfully composed fragments.

In The Mountain (“A Montanha”), a writer travels across the world, attending literary events while working on a book inspired by the experiences of cancer patients, recounted directly by those who entrusted him with their most intimate truths. Haunted by the memories of his father, who also succumbed to the disease, and unsettled by his own doubts, he is suddenly confronted with an extraordinary twist: he is kidnapped by a mysterious Swedish academic who shadows his every step, who spies every moment of his creative process and seems to know all his thoughts.
Rooted in authentic testimonies from an oncology hospital and shaped by a profound autobiographical dimension, this novel pushes beyond the boundaries of realism, gradually descending into the realm of surrealism. What begins as an intimate reflection on memory, illness, and creativity evolves into a daring allegory of human existence itself.
Ambitious in scope and inventive in form, this work ventures into unexplored territories of contemporary fiction, where reality and imagination blur, and where literature becomes both a testimony to suffering and a meditation on the meaning of life.

Peixoto’s new novel Sunday Lunch (“Almoço de Domingo”) is a tribute to the Portuguese entrepreneur Rui Nabeiro, founder of the Delta Cafés, who celebrated his ninetieth birthday on 28 March 2021.
With great poetic power, the author traces the life of a man who wanted to become “a rich man of a different kind” and who today is a symbol of entrepreneurial commitment. Coming from the simplest of backgrounds and growing up in the small town of Campo Maior in the Alto Alentejo near the Spanish border, he succeeds in developing the small family business into an internationally operating corporate empire without sacrificing his humanity. Peixoto accompanies his protagonist through the two days before and on his birthday itself and lets individual episodes of his career emerge in short flashbacks. But “Sunday Lunch” is far more than just a biographical novel.
Written with genuine empathy, the book is a reflection on old age and death, on the uniqueness of every human being, but above all it is a celebration of a successful life whose richness is expressed less in the material than in the spiritual.

In Lisbon in the late 1990s, two writers meet: the young José in his early 30s, in the midst of a life crisis, and the established José Saramago at the height of his career. Following his debut, the young José is now expected to write a second novel, but he can‘t make any progress and is addicted to alcohol and gambling. He has enormous debts and agrees to write a Saramago biography, even if he finds his books rather long and difficult. Saramago himself is interested in the author of his biography and is ready for interviews. From this relationship, a story is born that mixes reality and fiction. While the main plot is heading towards the announcement of Saramago being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on 8 October 1998, the young José, true to a statement by the Portuguese intellectual that all writing is autobiographical, is increasingly merging with his subject. Peixoto leads the reader into a cabinet of mirrors from which there is no escape.

Between Bangkok and Las Vegas, José Luís Peixoto returns to non-fiction with an astonishing, layered book of unforeseen relationships, moving from the most intimate account to the most remote and exuberant of descriptions. The Imperfect Path (“O Caminho Imperfeito”) is itself the long journey to a Thailand beyond the normal tourist haunts, exploring lesser known aspects of its culture, society, history and religion, among many others. The sinister discovery of several parcels containing parts of a human body at a post office in Bangkok cause, with unpredictable consequences, his wanderings to become an ordeal. Every episode of this eccentric investigation forms “The Imperfect Path” and, at the same time, constitutes a search for the meaning of travel, writing, and life itself.

In his new novel In Your Belly (“Em Teu Ventre”), José Luís Peixoto addresses one of the defining religious events of the 20th century: the appearance of the Virgin Mary before the eyes of three children in the Portuguese village of Fátima in 1917. After lengthy interviews, the Catholic Church recognized this miracle, turning Fátima into a place of worldwide pilgrimage. But what is behind the phenomenon? Peixoto is interested in people, and so he chooses the ten-year-old Lúcia as the protagonist of his novel. She is the youngest of five children and therefore especially dear to her mother Maria’s heart. Although piously educated, Lúcia is a very headstrong and dreamy girl. For her, the arrival of the Madonna means a sudden end of her childhood and separation from her birth mother. Situated between Christian mysticism and historical research, Em Teu Ventre is a piece of fictional biography of the figure of Sister Lúcia, now revered as a saint in Portugal. Without deciding between reason and superstition, the novel is an ode to both the freedom of faith and the love between mother and child.

The sleepy village of Galveias is home to both long-established families with their rivalries and feuds, like the brothers José and Justino who fell out over their inheritance and haven’t spoken for over fifty years, and newcomers like Isabella, the beautiful Brazilian who runs the bakery that, at night, also functions as a brothel. After the village is struck by some sort of mysterious meteor, the bread starts tasting of sulphur, relationships are reshaped and a series of events is set in motion: it stops raining for nine months; the two brothers are finally reconciled with each other and with their past; Isabella is mistaken for a cork thief and accidentally shot. Then finally a baby girl who doesn’t smell of sulphur is born, and the spell is broken. This beautifully written novel is brimming with astute observations and depictions of human behaviour, of life itself and how it is shaped and changed. The characters that inhabit the captivating microcosm of Galveias inevitably draw the reader in with their intertwining stories that come together as one.

Book (“Livro”) confirms José Luís Peixoto as one of the leading contemporary Portuguese novelists, and also as an author of increasing importance on the international literary scene. This book chooses as its backdrop the extraordinary saga of Portuguese emigration to France, told through a gallery of unforgettable characters and the luminous writing of José Luís Peixoto. From a village in Portugal to Paris, and from popular culture to the most erudite of literary references, are revealed to us the traces of a past that took thousands of Portuguese in search of better conditions and a future of dual nationality. Overwhelming and striking, Book exposes the magnitude of the dream and the rawness, ironic, tender or grotesque, of reality. Through stories of lives, meetings and farewells, the reader is led to a disconcerting ending beyond the frontiers of literature.

What is this permanent itch on the head of every writer in the world? No anti-lice shampoo can soothe it. This widespread affliction makes the headlines of every newspaper and intrigues readers of this and every other book in existence. It is only when the protagonists of children´s books undertake the journey to enter the heads and creative minds of the itching authors that they make a great discovery: there are no lice! The itch that the authors have been feeling are new ideas, stories and characters. The itch won´t be relieved by shampoos or shaving, but it can be treated by expressing the authors´ creativity!
All the Writers of the World Have Their Heads Full of Lice (“Todos os Escritores do Mundo Têm a Cabeça Cheia de Piolhos“) is a beautifully written and illustrated book that focusses on the joy of writing and reading. It sparks young readers´ interest in creativity and upholds imagination as a great gift and important element of human life.

The protagonist of José Luís Peixoto’s first children’s book is a child of the rain. With such a unique mother, so necessary to everyone, he has to learn to share with the world the thing that is most important to him: maternal love. With exceptional tenderness, poetry and disarming simplicity, The Mother That Rained (“A Mãe Que Chovia”) honours and exalts one of nature’s most powerful forces: the unconditional love of mothers.

Against a backdrop of rural Portuguese poverty, a handful of magical characters are living out their destiny: José, a shepherd, who is visited by a devil whispering violent words in his ear; Moises and Elias, Siamese twins joined at the tip of their little fingers; Gabriel, a wise man, who is over one hundred years old; and an unnamed character who sits writing alone in a windowless room.
The characters in Blank Gaze / The Implacable Order of Things (“Nenhum Olhar”) are universal, and they are all at the mercy of fate – their lives are pulled in different directions and sometimes even suffocated and snuffed out… A dark and compelling story with elements of magic realism and Greek tragedy.

More than sixty years ago, at the table of a bar that no longer exists, some of Montevideo’s cultural and political personalities met to debate, in the midst of a society threatened by fear.
From the symbolic space of this bar table, and with the Olivetti typewriter commanding the actions, Rosencof conjures up memories and key figures from Uruguayan recent history. Memory guides the journey, and through the pages appear the approaching dictatorship, the revolutionary movements that seek to change history, the politicians of the time, the chronicles of captivity together with the tenderness of a father who wants to tell his daughter a story, and in this way to ward off the horror. And, above all, the freedom that finds every opening from which light can spring.
For the Little Ones to Come (“Por los chiquitos que vienen”) unties the knots of memory, searching the past to think about the future.

On the verge of turning 90, Mauricio Rosencof decides to rummage through the drawers of his memory to weave the tale of his own history, the one that led him to undertake a feat that marked his life and that of many others. With the Root on the Shoulder (“Con la raíz al hombro”) is a brave, sincere and emotional book; indispensable. This book represents a highly personal and engaged look at the process that gave rise to the revolutionary movement which erupted in Uruguay during the 1960s. Rosencof writes about events he lived through; his gaze does not aspire to universality or objective truths. From the origins of the MLN-Tupamaros through the milestones of revolutionary action, prison, and torture, to the return of democracy, these pages represent a personal, unique, and reflective point of view. Mauricio Rosencof was a witness and a protagonist, he helped to change the destiny of his country. He is a man who fought tirelessly for freedom and democracy.

An unexpected find in Mauricio Rosencof’s library was the creative impulse for his novel The Silences of the Old Man (“Los silencios del viejo”), whose roots go back to the origins of the story of a Jewish family who landed in Uruguay fleeing the Holocaust. A book whose process of writing revealed to the author himself surprising aspects of his own family’s history.
Don Isaac’s journey by train, to go and talk to Mauricio, his imprisoned son, symbolises another journey, deeper and more complex, which unites the destinies of different generations in their struggle against injustice and dislocation.

“The old photos contain little green. There are no trees in colour. Everything is grey, white, black. They are photos from before. I am from before. I’m part of the shoebox universe. And I try to fit in as best I can.”
To ignore the hood that imprisons him in a present of pain and injustice, the narrator escapes with his imagination to the shoebox where the photos are kept. This is the refuge where memories are a living present. The idealised childhood and youth in 1950’s Montevideo, the neighbourhood, first love, political persecution, family secrets, the aftermath of the Holocaust; all this comes together in a text that is suggestive, moving and full of poetry.

Mauricio Rosencof’s most personal book.

In The Private Life of Tota (“La vida privada de la Tota”), the neighborhood’s in turmoil. The police arrived to raid the house of la Tota, apparently looking for her nephew, Antonio. The neighbors are crowded into the sidewalk, waiting for what might happen as they exchange ideas, suppositions, myths, gossip. Nobody knows much. But there is a denunciation, two shots were heard. They are looking for a body. This is the starting point for revealing the story of Tota, amiable character who is part of the neighborhood stage, someone who fights bravely to overcome loneliness. Other creatures parade along with her, born of the imagination and memory of Mauricio Rosencof, who puts them on stage with compassionate gaze and deep understanding of the human essence. The nostalgia, the tenderness and the small joys of people so heroic as well as inconsequential are part of the charm of this book, which is inscribed within the Rosencofian saga of a neighborhood that contains in itself the metaphor of our society. The volume is completed with an essay by Professor Leticia Collazo on this fictional space and its characters, and illuminates from a different perspective the creation of one of the most relevant writers of the last decades in Uruguay.

Since Rosencof was freed in 1985 during a general amnesty he has been invited to numerous conferences and congresses at the most important universities in Europe and America. His dramatic works have been performed internationally. His prose texts The Bataraz (“El Bataraz”) and The Letters That Never Came (“Las cartas que no llegaron”) are yet to be discovered.

In Las cartas que no llegaron young Moishe talks about his oppressive childhood and youth, which were marked by war, loss, flight and indomitable courage. As an adult Moishe will report again later from La Paz. His letters are evidence of deep humanity that has survived death, letters full of music, macabre humour and sadness which never arrived. And those in El Bataraz were never written, for the first-person narrator had neither paper nor pen at his disposal to satisfy his urgent need to communicate during his years of solitary confinement. He does so with a cock, the bataraz. With fascination the reader enters into the narrator’s physical and mental world and asks himself, whether the bataraz actually existed: having shared the narrator’s fate of imprisonment and torture and having assumed the role of conversation partner, in the end, this cell companion mutates into his betrayer and executor.

In his novel The Fire Messenger (“El enviado del fuego”), Rosencof passes the word on to the inhabitants of a mental home in a long monologue, which argues for unconditional love, tenderness, human dignity and humour being the only weapons against discontentment in every day life.

The sonnets entitled The Daisy (“La Margarita”), which were written in prison and smuggled out in the seams of clothes, tell in simple words the story of a first love, of an imaginary Margarita, a girl from the neighbourhood. In 1994 the popular Uruguayan rock musician Jaime Roos put 15 of the 25 sonnets to music. The poems and CD have now been reissued in an attractive new edition, together with interviews with those involved.

Like the sonnets, Rosencof’s work A Gondola Anchored in the Corner (“Una góndola ancló en la esquina”) evokes the atmosphere of the southern quarter of Montevideo at the beginning of the 1960s. The wonderfully woven story tells of a confetti salesman who, on his search for love, makes a pact with the devil, and henceforth meanders through the area on a gondola until he finally finds happiness. The events – which include other small romantic dramas – are observed and commented on by four card players in the local café. It may not appear so at first, but they take on the very essentials of life.

In Half World (“Medio Mundo”) the author reflects on humanity and on the urgent need for man to take control of his destiny, a destiny that only depends on his strength and conviction, because God, this apparently omnipotent and eternal figure, created man as an intelligent and free being, even though the reality, both actual and historic, reveals that he left a lot of unfinished business, with many unpleasant events to follow.

In this novel the omnipotent God figure has lost his strength and in a last attempt to exercise his absolute control he cannot think of anything else to do but call a meeting, 2,000 years later, in a very non biblical setting, a suburb of Montevideo, with the protagonists of that biblical story: Jesus of Nazareth, Mary, Judas, Mary Magdalene and the fishermen. All these characters are called together for this particular meeting without knowing why or who it is that has brought them together. Only at the end, at the last supper, which on this occasion is a more human affair, with exquisite delicacies, do they realise that the God who called them together has no more cards to play. This punishing God who tried to correct a civilisation by drowning it in a flood and who refrained from acting during Hiroshima and Auschwitz, has nothing left to offer. Now everything is in our hands alone.

In this latest novel, Rosencof calls on the strength of humanity, on the strength of everything and every one of us to build a better future, one that is freer and less dark. In the rewriting of certain Biblical passages, man is given that unique opportunity, beyond Biblical maxims: to love each other.

In The End of the United States of America. An Epic (“O Fim dos Estados Unidos da América. Epopeia”), in the middle of an American football game, a terrible plague enters the United States of America. In the midst of this is Bloom, the hero of the epic, who, like Oedipus, will meet a terrible fate but will try to save America from falling apart. Bloom gets into his car to travel across the United States in search of a solution, but also looking for his love, the Mexican La Rosa.

The two political leaders, Ted Trash, right-wing extremist and Left Wing, communist and left-wing extremist, instead of pacifying the country, fight for its separation. At a certain point, it becomes clear that the Plague only affects the poor. In some states, they are placed in ghettos. Different states adopt opposing laws. There is a division between Marxist-extremists and fascists. Tensions escalate until they lead to the Second Civil War. The country is divided in two, Homo Pobrus and Homo Ricus, genetically separated, becoming two distinct species incapable of reproducing with each other. The poor die at an average age of forty-two, while the rich live to one hundred and thirty. Bloom is rich, La Rosa is poor.

Bloom, who thought he was a natural-born American, was actually adopted by an American couple living in New York. When he receives an oracle saying that he will save America but also kill his father and mother, Bloom decides to distance himself from the parents he believes to be his real ones. What happens is that, on his journey across America to try to find the plague, he accidentally kills his real father in a car accident and sleeps with his real mother, without knowing it, at a hippie camp. Bloom finally finds La Rosa, the woman he met at the beginning of the epic. The two stay together. And La Rosa becomes pregnant. This means that the two have once again made the genes of the poor and the rich compatible.

Ted Trash and Left Wing each lead their own army, dividing the country in two. But Bloom, without realising it, saves America not from the plague but from the genetic division. It is as if Bloom and La Rosa were the new Adam and Eve, recreating a single human species.

A prose sonorously thought out and designed to be read in a hushed voice, as Gonçalo M. Tavares defines it, this is the book Mussolini’s Boots (“As Botas de Mussolini”). It is the beginning of a Fragmented History of the World (“História Fragmentada do Mundo”), which starts by analysing news from the 21st century and the memory of historical characters and facts. Its pages include Robespierre, one of the exponents of the French Revolution; Turing, a genius of detail and numbers; the hand of Hitler as a young painter and the biography of his niece, Geli Raubal, with whom the dictator is said to have fallen in love; the great fire in Tokyo in 1923 and the voice of Emperor Hirohito of Japan when, over the radio, he decreed his country’s surrender; the tragedy of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the follies of the juggler Joseph L. Greenstein, who wandered around the world. Greenstein, who wandered the American fairs of the 20th century; the turbulent life of Malcolm X; Enrico Fermi’s atomic reactor, linked to the atomic bomb; the high-speed tragedy of Marilyn Monroe; and the imposing finger of Tito, president of Yugoslavia; the day the Berlin Wall was erected and Nietzsche’s sanatorium; the trial of a Nazi in 2020, already 93 years old; and the high boots of Mussolini, the Italian dictator. These are flashes, small fragments, notes.

Bashô tells a short story of his many journeys. He is leaving for the city of Maruoka and his great friend, Hokushi, who is from Kanazawa, thought he would only accompany him for a short distance – “but ended up travelling all the way to Maruoka, unable to say goodbye”. So we have a friend who endlessly says goodbye to the other, travelling all the way on a journey that is not his own. And then I imagine the continuation of this story. Now it would be Bashô’s friend Hokushi who would have to leave for his home, and Bashô would go with him, just a few metres, just to say goodbye, but he wouldn’t be able to let go of him and would go with him all the way back to Kanazawa. Imagine a farewell like this, uninterrupted, between two humans. Two humans who could spend a lifetime saying goodbye to each other like this, with such ceremony and delicacy.

This Dictionary of Artists (“Dicionário de Artistas”), this Museum, starts from a detail, a tiny fragment, or the very central core of an artist’s work, and from there the text moves somewhere else. In the way that an animal that is hungry leaves its nest to go to a place where it senses food, thus the text starts its journey. But there is nothing didactic or explanatory about it, the texts in this Dictionary are autonomous beings that go out into the streets free and completely alone after midnight.

The Middle Bone (“O Osso do Meio”) forms part of the universe of The Kingdom (“O Reino”), next in the series following Klaus Klump: A Man (“Um homem: Klaus Klump“), Joseph Walser’s Machine (“A Máquina de Joseph Walser”), Jerusalem, and Learning to Pray in the Age of Technology (“Aprender a rezar na Era da Técnica”). Perhaps a tone, books with tones (colours, aggression, speed) rather than literary genres. A tone such as this: how does evil, excitement, passivity and violence flow through the many soils of the earth? Taking place in a post-war period, in a movement of collective hangover. It is a book where the middle is there, right at the beginning, and there it remains until the end. Three men and a woman caught up in a point of their violent, (almost) happy lives. Happiness has many variations and some are not at all benign. Kahnnak, Albert Mulder, Maria Llurbai, Vassliss Rania: three men and a woman. A harsh and sad book.

Tavares has been writing a daily column for the renowned Portuguese newspaper Expresso tracking the COVID-19 pandemic, entitled Plague Diary (“Diário da Peste”). The first entry in Englishtranslation by Daniel Hahn went online at Words Without Borders. Several texts have been published at: Granta, Bookanista, PEN Transmissions, Asymptote, Politics/Letters, Onomatomania, The Massachusetts Reviews, Scroll, The White Review, and TLS. A chronological survey and access to the English translations can be found here: > danielhahn.co.uk. Plague Diary is also available in Argentina, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Greece, India, Italy, The Netherlands, Peru, and Venezuela.

First book rights have been sold in Greece, Spain and for Romanian language.

In America, Said Jonathan (“Na América, Disse Jonathan”) is a book that relates a trip through the United States of America. During this trip, the protagonist writes a diary that follows his real and imaginary adventures. It is a ­ ctional diary. The author brings a portrait of Kafka to the United States of America and puts it in various places throughout the country, including the supermarket shelves of 7-Eleven convenience stores. Kafka’s portrait seems to disturb a country the size of the United States of America. As if Kafka‘s face were asking uncomfortable questions of this great country.

Mythologies (“Mitologias”), is one of the most important literary universes of Gonçalo M. Tavares. This world – which is now beginning to be published – blends men, machines, animals, and objects in a 21st Century mythology that can be read in any order of entry. It is a return to the traditional Once Upon a Time format set in a mythical time, which mixes dates and exchanges narrative orders in a space without geographic location. There is a suspension of normal physical laws, a different logic, other narrative conventions, in a zone of freedom that deals with evil, human temptations and their disorders and fears. Five children go through this world and just want what everyone wants: to survive as they grow.

The Devil (“O Diabo”) is the story of the Devil who sits wellbehaved at the table but who is quickly led astray by children. Mythologies is a universe of fiction by Gonçalo M. Tavares, the result of a five-year creative process, a unique work of great literary richness and brilliance, using the narrative tradition of orality and fantasy, in which the author places humankind and history in a mythological dimension that he distorts, to show and explore more fully what is human nature. It is a return to ‘Once Upon a Time’ set in a mythical time, mixing dates and swapping narrative orders, in a space without geographical location.

In the middle of the forest, five children lost. Or four. Because the youngest of the sisters got lost from those who were already lost. The children find a man-with-the-evil-eye, but he‘s good. They also encounter Speed, which is a dangerous element that makes men mad. There is a Train that does not like humans and a man who cannot stop gawping at the world. There is a tiny church where a body can barely fit, but this body has room to pray. And there are those who come out cured of very small spaces. In Five Children, Five Rats (“Cinco Meninos, Cinco Ratos”) we are in a mythological narrative, and machines and animals have since long ceased to be mere helpers or friends. There are very hungry machines.

In The Woman-Without-a-Head and the Man-With-the-Evil-Eye (“A Mulher Sem-Cabeça e o Homem-do-Mau-Olhado”), Gonçalo M. Tavares repositions mankind and history within a mythological dimension, which he distorts in order to clarify, and through which, using the narrative universe of orality and fantasy, he brilliantly explores the essence of human nature. A woman’s head is beaten off, but she can still walk upright. A man with an evil eye cannot look at his bride. Five children of the king are devoured by a machine. A famous neurologist wants to give a poor madman a smile. And a group of downtrodden wretches builds a flying machine to flee before the revolution. If Kafka had rewritten Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, this book would have been the result.

The effort to distinguish various forms of knowledge production has been a constant occupation of Tavares; in particular distinguishing independent science from literature, the main theme of the last part of Encyclopaedia (“Encyclopédia”), entitled Short Notes on Literature-Bloom (“Breves Notas sobre a Literatura-Bloom”). Science, according to Tavares, is focussed on all that can be repeated; literature, on everything that is unrepeatable. Science was created to resolve paradoxes and contradictions; literature, on the contrary, requires “specialists in mystery”. But not mysteries for detectives, Tavares points out, not those mysteries that end with the discovery of the murderer: to study mystery means increasing, not decreasing it, so that at the end of Literature-Bloom the reader knows less facts than he did before. This paradoxical logic, this wild arithmetic, is one of the central issues of Tavares poetic and literary language: to domestication, it counters with estrangement; to the desire to control, the ethics of dispossession.

(Borja Bagunyà)

His Excellency, The Circumlucologist (“O Torcicologologista, Excelência”) is a work of fiction: ironic and capable of making one burst out in laughter, but also a painful book, composed of two very different parts. The first, wherein disenchantment intersects with corrosive humor, is composed of fictional dialogues between two characters, the Excellencies, created and developed over a few years by Gonçalo M. Tavares in the pages of a newspaper. Your Excellency speaks to Your Excellency, and–in the middle of the absurdity that is existence and the attempt to understand it–the two discourse on good and evil, revolutions, boredom, dance and laziness, big questions and minor mishaps, leaps forward and major downfalls. Continuous irony, humor, and sabotage of thought and language progress in the dialogue between these two curious Excellencies, characters of impeccable manners and a quick, comical wit.

The second part of O Torcicologologista, Excelência takes the reader to commotion of the city, to the small gestures and great tragedies that there reside. An accelerated tragedy in which an abrupt zoom into and quick glance at humanity brings a collective character to the foreground: the city, the modern city, with its illnesses, its obsessions, and, sometimes, its hopes.

A Girl is Lost in Her Century, Looking for Her Father (“Uma Menina Está Perdida no seu Século à Procura do Pai”) tells the story of Hanna, a 12-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome. Together with Marius, a man who seems to be hiding from something, she embarks on a journey through cities haunted by traces of World War II. Once more, Tavares takes his readers to a dismal world that poses existential questions.

The Greek myth of the tragedy Alceste, by the playwright Euripides, is revived in Old People Want to Live Too (“Os Velhos Também Querem Viver”). In this novel-poem, Gonçalo M. Tavares stages the drama in contemporary Sarajevo and discusses issues such as death, love, sacrifice, the value of thousands of lives, and the value of just one.

Atlas of the Body and the Imagination (“Atlas do corpo e da imaginação”) is a multilayered essay that revolves around literature and art, addressing topics like fiction, identity, technology and desire. With a firm hand and lucid spirit, Tavares guides us around the labyrinthine world we live in, revisiting the work of some of the most important contemporary thinkers, among them Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt and Nietzsche.

Please find here the trailer of the Portuguese edition: > Atlas do corpo e da imaginação Booktrailer

Gonçalo M. Tavares’ novel A Voyage to India (“Uma Viagem à Índia”) is a mental journey as well as a physical one. Written in easily accessible language, which stands in stark contrast to its epic form inspired by The Lusiads, A Voyage to India relates the experiences Bloom has on his way to India and back.

The Neighbourhood (“O Bairro”) describes a utopian neighbourhood whose characters share the names of great artists and writers, almost a literary version of Asterix’s village.

From an impressive list of works published in swift succession which surprise readers by their philosophical mind quizzes, diffidently and ironically told events and broad stylistic variations, choice is made here of a number in which the main protagonist is a “Senhor”: Mr Valéry and Logic (”O Senhor Valéry e a Lógica“) embraces 25 short, playfully-philosophical stories about Mr. Valéry, who is short but tries hard to adapt to his surroundings, more or less successfully. With apparent childlike naivety he upsets the rules of logic and reason. For example, he jumps up and down in order to be as tall as his fellow men, declaring: I am as tall as tall people, only for a shorter while.

Mr Henri and the Encyclopaedia (”O Senhor Henri e a Enciclopédia“), a close relative of Mr. Valéry’s, is a bit more egocentric and conceited and likes to dabble in paradoxical matters and linguistic games, besides being very partial to absinthe. Mister Henri says … it’s true that if a man mixes absinthe with reality it makes for a better reality … yet it’s also the case that if a man mixes absinthe with reality it makes for a worse reality …

Mr Swedenborg and the Geometrical Investigations (”O Senhor Swedenborg e as Investigações Geométricas“), the latest resident in the writer’s quarter, is based on a Swedish scientist, theologian and mystic who, in the eighteenth century, wrote a large amount of fiction in Latin. Tavares’ Swedenborg uses the lectures that his colleagues and the people living in his neighbourhood give, to help him think through and carry out his geometric research. His reflections on memory, the mirror, seduction, desire, death and dozens of other things, are acute observations on life, always from a geometric and logical perspective and written in the familiar and jocular tone of the Senhores.

And other gentlemen, neighbours in a fictional writers´quarter, are introduced in book form such as Mr. Brecht, Mr. Juarroz, Mr. Calvino, Mr. Walser, Mr. Kraus and Mr. Eliot.

In a series which the author calls The Kingdom (“O Reino”), Tavares has published four novels which – this time in a less playful manner – address the topic of the essence of human existence.

Just like Walser’s dark notebooks, Gonçalo M. Tavares’ Black Books continue to give their version of the world we live in, […] of individual conscience, and the fragility of a human being in the play of existential forces, and the indifference or alienation of the individual. Joseph Walser’s Machine (“A Máquina de Joseph Walser”), following Klaus Klump: A Man (“Um Homem: Klaus Klump”), is constructed as an attempt at apprehending the essence of humanity, drawing on material with the soul of a frighteningly rational world.

In Jerusalém Ernst Spengler finds himself alone in the night of the 29th of May. He is about to throw himself out of the window. Suddenly the phone rings. Change of scene: The thirty-year-old Mylia is in her apartment and suffering great pain. She is terminally ill. She leaves the flat to go to a church. Ever since the war ended, Hinnerek Obst can not go out into the street without fear. For his eerie guise he is taken to be a murderer. He too is roaming the streets this night. Theodor Busbeck, doctor, historian and ex-husband of Mylia likewise leaves his apartment at 3 am in the morning in search of a prostitute. Mylia had one day turned up at his surgery and said I am schizophrenically mad. Would you like to cure me? The two had married. Later, however, Theodor left his wife in a psychiatric clinic. For years he had worked on developing a mathematical formula to foresee future crimes in the history of mankind.

In a clear and objective language, this book tells a strange and disconcerting story. It seems as though a secret force is leading the individual characters to their encounter in this particular night. A world coined by violence, fear, pain and insanity is evoked. The author succeeds in combining an exceedingly attention-grabbing story full of surprising contemplations on human nature with the diverse mechanisms of the exertion of power.

Jerusalém has been selected for the Portuguese edition of “1001 books to read before dying – a chronological guide to the most important novels of all times”. The novel appears alongside works by Philip Roth and John Banville.

In his novel Matteo Lost His Job (“Matteo Perdeu o Emprego”), Tavares explores the course of his protagonist’s destiny. Matteo answers an advertisement for a job and the woman who interviews him has a peculiar characteristic: she has no arms. His duty will be to accompany her and do everything that she cannot do. He takes the job because it is the first offer he’s received in several months, but he doesn’t like it and leaves it. He spends a few more months unemployed until he responds to a new ad. The man he meets has no arms.

In The Shoes. Stories by Mister Valéry (“Os Sapatos. Histórias do Senhor Valéry”) Mr. Valéry walks in the street with a white shoe on his left foot and a black shoe on his right foot. Sometimes it’s the other way around. But he is never wrong. He gets irritated when people tell him that he has mixed up his shoes. He then switches his shoes, but receives the same reaction. He gets even more irritated. According to his logic, one of these two situations has to be right for the other to be wrong, since they are inverse. He decides he is indifferent to the subject, because if they say both situations are wrong, it is because they are both right. In this unusual work for children, Gonçalo M. Tavares explores the limits of logic and philosophical principles in a creative and entertaining way.

For Mr. Valéry, holidays are the times when no one can require you to make decisions. The difficult thing is to find the ideal house where he can rest. In an attempt to discover the best place, in The Holiday House. Stories by Mister Valéry (“A Casa de Férias. Histórias do Senhor Valéry”) Mr. Valéry imagines different houses, which by their specific but always unusual structure can offer him the rest he deserves. However, his imagination does not stop working and surprises us with ever more incredible propositions, revealing his extraordinary power.

In The Friends. Stories by Mister Valéry (“Os Amigos. Histórias do Senhor Valéry”), Mr. Valéry is small but jumps a lot, so he explains that he is “like tall people but only for a short time.” But “if tall people jumped, he would never reach them vertically” and, persistent in his learning, he abandons the exercise and begins new experiments: first a bench, then a bench with wheels, even thinking about how to “freeze a jump”. “When concentrating, Mr Valéry could actually see the tops of the heads of people who were much taller than him,” but with the vision from above “he had difficulty remembering the faces of the people he met. “With height, Mr. Valéry lost friends.”So finally he decides to be tall only in his head.

In The Two Sides. Stories by Mister Valéry (“Os Dois Lados. Histórias do Senhor Valéry”), Mr Valéry has a problem to solve: how to always be on the right side of the world? Mr Valéry’s dilemma calls for rules, and his steps in seeking this knowledge show us the absurdity of a mental system, touching us in our awareness of the absurdities that we all, at some point, raise.

Developing the theory that the world has two sides, “the right and the left,” Mr Valéry implements a disciplined and rigorous methodology: he divides his house into two parts and “only touches the things that were on his left with the left hand and the things on his right hand with his right hand”. Furthermore, in order never to deceive himself in rigorously always using the “right” hand, even when lying on his back, he painted “the whole left side of the house, including every object, in blue” and the other side in red. But so as to make no mistake, Mr. Valéry had another great trick: his left hand was also painted blue and his right hand red.

Despite his obligations as a writer, he never abandoned his profession as a doctor and always felt closest to the simple people from the region where he was born. He encouraged resistance to dictatorship and fascism not just in theory; he even suffered imprisonment for his convictions. Only seldom did Torga interrupt his secluded life in the university city of Coimbra to make public appearances. He was awarded numerous national and international prizes for his multifaceted and comprehensive oeuvre. He published a total of 40 volumes: novels, short-stories, plays, poetry and diaries. Miguel Torga’s oeuvre exudes the scent of earth, reveals a dominant love for concrete things, and portrays the simple people of northern Portugal, whose mysteries and myth gain entry intothe author’s lyrical and narrative work. Torga’s deliberately archaic style possesses the vividness and originality of the language of the farmers of northern Portugal. In its conciseness, his prose mirrors the ruggedness of their rural homeland.

Represented for Dom Quixote, Portugal.