Novel
Creole
Nação crioula
José Eduardo Agualusa · 1997
Synopsis
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Fradique Mendes, a cosmopolitan dandy borrowed from a Portuguese novel, writes to his godmother, Madame de Jouarre, to the novelist who invented him and to Ana Olímpia. Arrived in Luanda, he describes with irony a colonial society that still lives off slavery, up to the governor's ball. He falls in love with Ana Olímpia, daughter of a prince of the Congo, a former slave who became, through her marriage, a mistress of slaves, and his letters follow him from Luanda to Paris and Brazil, as he turns to the abolitionist cause.
Context
The novel appeared in 1997 in Lisbon, with the secret correspondence of its hero as a subtitle; it is its author's third. He takes up the character from an epistolary book by Eça de Queiroz in order to look at Europe and Brazil from the Angolan colony. Translated into English in 2002, then into German and Dutch, it has been reissued in Brazil. Readings of it diverge: some see an abolitionist novel, others judge that it softens the violence of slavery.
Who it is for
A novel made up of letters and an epilogue, in Portuguese; translated into English under the title Creole, never into French.
Prizes and reception
Grand Prize for Literature of the Portuguese public radio and television; at first received with very favourable criticism.
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