MÁRIO DE SÁ-CARNEIRO E-Book

Giuseppe Cafiero

• Herausgeber: Clink Street Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The apparent suicide in 1916 of the writer Mário de Sá-Carneiro causes his friend, the poet Fernando Pessoa, great distress. Pessoa feels compelled to trace Sá-Carneiro's final movements, to understand what could have caused him to lose all hope. Exploring byways of the imagination and ambiguity with the investigator David Mondine and Dr. Abílio Fernandes Quaresma, solver of enigmas, the three men decide to uncover the conclusive certainties which led Mário to poison himself. These suicide investigators travel to Lisbon - Mário's birthplace - and to Paris, talking to strangers and friends who might shed light on the poet's mysterious and sudden decline. As the city wrestles with the grief and tumult of war, the men hold court at the cafes and bistros Mário would have frequented. Their witty, enigmatic and sometimes obscure conversations illuminate the friendship between Mário and Fernando Pessoa, their poetry and their literary ambitions, revealing the tragic end of one of the founders of Portuguese modernism.

Leseprobe

MÁRIO DE SÁ-CARNEIRO:The Ambiguity of a Suicide

Giuseppe Cafiero Translated by Peter Christie

Dedication

Contents

Title PageDedication  IIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXXI  Copyright

HENDERSON & CRASTON Detective Agency 21 Osnaburgh St., Regent’s Park London, England

to Mr David Mondine Piazza della Borsa, 8 Trieste (Austria) 30 June 1916

Dear Mr Mondine,

I had thought that you were lost in a boundless sea. They reported to me that perhaps you had rashly embarked on a very poor looking and rather treacherous ship. Thus difficult in keeping a rough and hostile sea at bay. A true ship, or your improvident propensity to embark? It seemed to many, including those fortunate enough to know you, that you wandered with your mind in horizons that seemed to open up to bizarre and ambiguous investigative adventures.

Were you dreaming perhaps of enterprising journeys without precluding any destination? Perhaps the determination to flee was the most evident sign of a fantasy that foretold satisfying paradigms. Undoubtedly mental doodles, which must be relied upon in the ambiguity of human will.

I was not intending to rummage among dirty clothes. Mine was only the mute aspiration of a miscreant drunkard. And the imagination will certainly have had some regrettable responsibility. I never believed that you had rashly yielded to improbable fantasies of opportunity and necessity. Perhaps urges of melancholy financial needs?

I thought it plausible, for example, that you might have been carried away by stories in taverns amidst chronic drunkenness there in Istria. One glass leads to another. Slivovitz or something else? Mellow flavour and white transparency. Also the fragrance. Wild plums, and alcohol up to 70%. An old and rash habit of the peoples of the Balkans. For us it is malt: the sacred malt, also whisky sometimes with endless toasts in honour of King George V. In exclusive clubs, certainly not in harbour taverns. At the Caledonian, or the Colonial Club, or also the Thatched House, or even the Wellington. Right in the heart of London while you had the faculty to go wandering as an unaware drunk regurgitating bile of past slaveries and fantasising about your next assignment.