Novel
Ilhéu de Contenda
Not translated into English
Henrique Teixeira de Sousa · 1978
Synopsis
Ilhéu de Contenda (The Islet of Contenda): on the island of Fogo, in Cape Verde, in the sixties, the death of Nha Caela, widow of an old landowning family, opens the division of her estate. Her younger son Eusébio, the only one of the siblings to have stayed on the island, wants to keep the family house and rebuild the broken-up estate, including the islet that gives the book its title; he must reckon with his brother Alberto and his cousin Felisberto. Around them, the white aristocracy comes apart, while a class of mestizos enriched by trade and emigration gains ground.
Context
Sketched as early as the forties and finished in April 1974, on the eve of the Carnation Revolution, the novel appeared in Lisbon in 1978 from O Século; it opens a trilogy devoted to Fogo, continued by Xaguate in 1987 and Na Ribeira de Deus in 1992. In it the author extends his essays on the island, its great houses, its shops and its huts. Reissued in Brazil in 1984, it was translated into French in 2002 by Françoise Massa for Actes Sud, and Leão Lopes brought it to the screen in 1995.
Who it is for
For discovering Fogo and the end of a world of great landowners, in the first novel of a doctor-writer.
Prizes and reception
On the release of the French translation, Afrik.com read in it the end of the last whites of the estate facing a rising class.
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