A festive evening E-Book

Mário Bentes

• Herausgeber: Lendari
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 36

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The first Christmas lights bring out bad memories to Martinez and Olga, worsening a father-daughter relationship that was already hard enough. Between them, the young and innocent Nina does the little she can within her reach to unite the family, ruined by grievances of the past, sorrows of the present and obscure perspectives of the future. But uncanny things happen on the few days that antecede the 25th of December. Father, daughter and granddaughter will welcome the visit of unknown and strangely familiar figures. Each one, on their own way, will learn the tough lessons of those who are already gone. On this reinterpretation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Mário Bentes exploits the melancholic terror from ""Minhas conversas com o diabo"" to create a fable in which Christmas times from the past, present and future coexist.

Leseprobe

Copyright © Mário Bentes, 2018

All rights reserved to Lendari Group.

A Festive Evening

All characters and events on this piece, except from those which are clearly on public domain, are fictitious, and any similarity to real people, alive or not, is a mere coincidence. No part of this work can be reproduced or conveyed in any way – by electronic or mechanical means, moreover photocopies, recordings or devices of storage and recovery of information – without the editor’s express permission in writing.

Editor-in-chief

Mário Bentes

Digital diagramation

Bookwire Brasil

Cover (photo included)

Mário Bentes

Translation and proofreading

Heloísa Ribeiro

B475n

Bentes, Mário

A festive evening / Mário Bentes; Tradução de Heloísa Ribeiro. – Manaus: Lendari, 2018.

50p.

ISBN 978-85-69243-31-1

1. Ficção Brasileira – Contos – Terror. 2. Literatura – Fantasia. I. Título.

CDD: B869.3  CDU: 82.3(81)

Ficha Catalográfica elaborada pela Bibliotecária

Beatriz do Carmo Alves CRB 11/801

Lendari Group

[email protected]

www.lendari.com.br

www.grupolendari.com.br

www.lendaristore.com.br

To my mother and to all the little Christmas lights we’re yet to turn on.

A brief presentation

I have decided to write this story, basically because I love Christmas. Although I don’t have any religious connections to the period, but only a nostalgic motivation. The end of the year always brings me childhood memories, the grandparents’ house, the cousins, our playing and running through the courtyard before supper. And yes, all the food. The best food is Christmas parties’ food, including the sweets.

I also appreciate Christmas because it represents the end of some cycles and the beginning of others. Again, there is no religious connection or, most importantly, no esoteric drive towards the subject; it is simply about organising the mind to new personal and professional phases. Such attachment to the date, to the lights and the decoration, to the snowy movies and fables, aroused in me the restlessness I needed to write something more specific.

The wish increased itself when I revisited my picture library of nearly a decade ago and found a “Christmas photo-essay” that I made in my living room. They are high exposure close up photos of details of my Christmas tree ornaments, highlighting its Christmas balls, its star and other props that may make more sense in cold countries.

The pictures reminded me of something else: the fact that Christmas has always generated in me some sort of internal melancholy. The colourful and the white lights, the wreaths, the crowns, the nativity scene sets… All of which produced in me an inexplicable sensation of sadness. A good kind of sadness, though, if that’s even a thing. A bittersweet flavour, which no other time of the year could reconstitute.

I’ve used one of the photos as the cover of this book, A Festive Evening, since it depicts so well such particular feeling. I also felt that I needed to drink from some melancholic Christmassy source in order to write what I had in mind. Then I remembered Charles Dickens’ Victorian classic A Christmas Carol.

The tale is about a miser old man who loathes Christmas and is visited by three spirits on Christmas Eve. Each one of them shows him different points in time, since his youth and his love for Christmas, going through his current days and reaching a future of solitude and sorrow. Besides, the 19th of December of 2018 marks the 175th anniversary of the first releasing of this classic.

The moment couldn’t be more appropriate. Some may call it luck or destiny. I’d rather call it a Christmas gift.

Mário Bentes

A Festive Evening

“Old git”, murmured Olga, startled, as soon as she woke up with her father’s screaming. She should’ve been used to it by then, but she wasn’t. The old man woke up early, every day, coming into her bedroom, shutting her fan off and opening her only window altogether. “Let the fucking sunlight come in”