I decided to loosely translate this book’s title myself because it’s an interesting novel by the Portuguese author João Ricardo Pedro and hasn’t been translated into English. It definitely should be, though.
The Context
Much of Portuguese literature is marked by the oppressive government, the so-called “New State,” and this is one more such book.
The difference is that it isn’t about that time period, but rather about the following decades and how the political police and the lack of development the dictatorship gave the Portuguese people influenced the next generations.
3 Generations
The book is about a family, telling us stories from 3 different generations, all of whom are somehow marked by the dictatorship and the colonial war.
The ones who lived it as adults, the ones who lived it as children, and the ones who just heard stories about it. All of them had their lives shaped by this reality.
An Average Portuguese Family
We have Chronicles about a typical Portuguese family, a first generation living in the countryside, a second generation 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.
A Worth Reading Author
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, the more you can start connecting all of them and draw in your head the path this family might’ve taken.
I honestly hope the publisher decides to translate the book because it’s an interesting piece of literature.
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