Novel
A Floresta em Bremerhaven
Not translated into English
Olga Gonçalves · 1975
Synopsis
July 1975. A narrator from Lisbon stays in Porto Covo, on the Alentejo coast, with Manuel and his wife, a couple in their forties who returned from Germany a year earlier. She listens to them, and with them a woman met on the beach, a fisherman, a Frenchwoman, a couple occupying a house, an architect on holiday, the tobacconist; then, in the Algarve, another couple of emigrants. Each tells of their life, what they found over there and what they find again here, and the book lets them speak without choosing between them.
Context
This is its author's first novel, published a year after the revolution. The narrator becomes an investigator and falls silent to let voices be heard, transcribed as close as possible to their speech, following a method borrowed from sociology. The subject is Portuguese emigration to Western Europe and the place women hold in it; Germany is the over there, under the name Bremerhaven, facing the here of Porto Covo. The book was reissued by Bertrand in 1980.
Who it is for
A polyphonic novel, with no French translation. The text is made of reported speech, with no narrator to arbitrate, and one must be willing to follow several voices at once.
Prizes and reception
Ricardo Malheiros Prize of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences; a sharp portrait of the Portugal of 1975, through voices that had until then been silent.
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