Your face will be the last one (loose translation)

I decided to loosely translate this book’s title by myself because it’s an interesting novel from the Portuguese author João Ricardo Pedro and it hadn’t already been translated into English. It definitely should be though.

Much of our Portuguese literature is marked by the oppressive government, so-called “New State” and this is one more of such books. The difference is that it isn’t about that time period, rather about the following decades and how the political police and the lack of development the dictatorship gave to Portuguese people influenced the next generations to come.

The book is about a family, telling us stories of 3 different generations, all of them somehow marked by the dictatorship and the colonial war. The ones who lived it as an adult, those who lived it as a child and the ones who just heard stories about it. All of them had their lives shaped by this reality.

So, we have Chronicles about a typical Portuguese family, a first generation living in the countryside, a second that decided to try something new coming to the capital, a life in the suburbs of the big city, a gift thrown away, an incurable disease. A borderline ‘real’ story, so real that it can scare you. A story of a family that tries to move on but the scars and fears run so deep that it’s almost impossible to do so.

The author writes all this in a very interesting way. When you start reading the book, it looks like a bunch of random unrelated stories, but the longer you read it, you can start connecting all of them and draw in your head the path this family might’ve taken.

I honestly hope that the publisher makes the decision to translate the book because it’s an interesting piece of literature.

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