For anyone who is used to avant garde writing such as Mário Cláudio’s, or to his fictionalised biographies of the complex figures of our modernism, where the concept "informative" comes as a challenge to the creation of a style of fiction, which emerges from an initial note of praise, documentary dryness or an urge for hagiography or for some exemplary personality, for any such this novel will come as a surprise. For its most obvious moods, themes and linguistic aspects takes us back to the post Romantic novels of Camilo, Júlio Dinis or even Arnaldo Gama. The suggestion of history writing which a certain very recent post modernism has brought back into fashion comes healthily into vision. Above all, what seems magnificent to us in this experience of a framework of a roman-fleuve taken back into the 19^th century is the exhaustive use of what we could call the descriptive style of chronicle – not merely the presentation of the very being of things, but this restful story telling of a lengthy chronicle, so unsuited to the past tense, giving attention at each time zone of the picture to a visual perspective, the re-composition of a precise historical locality, and which for this very reason derives from an undetermined moment in time, as if one were walking along a gallery of portraits and landscapes. Taken overall, the result is a baroque panel, of multiple perspectives, given brush strokes from the age of cubism, where, within the framework of eighteenth and nineteenth century Oporto, emphasising one family and its home, with all its genealogical meanderings, a chronicle is told of mental states, daily activities, beliefs and wisdom and living people.

D.S. Bruno, Diário de Notícias 6/1/91

TOCCATA FOR ANOTHER AGE

Mário Cláudio’s new novel is a fictional journey into the period when Salazar’s New State was in process of consolidation, together with the mentality which it stood for. It is far from being a political pamphlet or any kind of thesis upon this period of Portuguese life, which corresponded to the beginning of the collapse of the empire. It is rather a very well constructed narrative, in which two central characters – António and Maria – fall in love and marry and travel to Lisbon to see the famed Exhibition of the Portuguese World, an emblematic event in that period of national history.

Novelist, poet and dramatist, Mário Cláudio is a top civil servant in the Secretariat of State for Culture in Oporto, and chaired the Commission for the Commemoration of the Centenary of the Death of Camilo Castelo Branco. He was awarded the Portuguese Writers’ Association Grand Prize for the Novel for his book "Amadeo", a type of fictionalised biography of the Portuguese painter Amadeo de Sousa Cardoso, an essential name of reference in Portuguese artistic modernism at the start of the century. Mário Cláudio then published "Rosa" and "Guilhermina", dealing respectively with the ceramic artist Rosa Ramalho and the cellist Guilhermina Suggia. This trilogy confirmed the originality of his project as a novelist, and also his ability and pleasure in taking a look at Portugal and our collective way of being in the North of the country.

His following books emphasised the main lines of this project, although at present Mário Cláudio admits that he would like to move the axis of this examination to other places.

The writer states: "Of all the books which I have written, this was the one which I lived least in advance, by which I do not mean that it was the one which I felt the less deeply. Maybe I should say that it was not dreamed like the others. It finally appeared as a book almost completed by a miracle. I lived it without being aware of any passion."

The emblematic characters. Although the figures of Maria and António, clearly drawn from his own parents, are the fulcrum of the whole narrative process, the true central figure is the period of five years which corresponds to the consolidation of the mentality of the New State. The central and less central figures are treated in the book without any excess of emotion. Mário Cláudio does not hesitate to explain this fact: "I think that totalitarianism provoked exactly that: a fear of emotions and feelings. I myself grew up in a family where tears were almost prohibited."

A common feature in the most recent works of fiction of Mário Cláudio is the use of documentary research and investigation, which is especially evident in the trilogy and in "The House of the Virtues."

"In this book also," he explains, "there was some work of documentary study. But here the documents were already in the family library, or in the library of memory. As a result, I tried to draw more of a sketch than a full portrait."

José Jorge Letria, Tempo Livre 11, January 1993

THE CAIA AND NATIONAL TRAGEDIES

In 1872 Eça de Queirós wrote in "Farpas" that "It is only just that we should think a little of our Country. Because, at the end of the day, we do have a Country. At least we have a place. What we really have is indeed a place: namely a tongue of land where we have built hour houses and planted our grain. Our place is Portugal." This was an obvious sign of the lack of belief in the capacity of Portugal to exist as an autonomous country amongst the other nations.

It was something that a generation (those of the eighteen seventies) had adopted as evident proof of Portugal’s failure as a "Country." The short story "The Catastrophe" (which is included in the book "The Count of Abranhos", published by Livros do Brasil), and which was the basic scheme for a book which Eça de Queirós planned to write under the title "The Battle of the River Caia", was much more an enterprise involving the deep decadentist obsession in Portugal, which had dreamed of new worlds and forgotten its own territory.

One of the most important novels of Portuguese literature, "Os Maias" ("The Maia Family") would offer all these themes for question: Does Portugal really exist, or is it nothing more than a mere sensation of existing? Is it at the edge of the abyss or has it not yet discovered that it is there?

This trauma which figures in all Queirós’ work as well as that of other writers of the period, is shown to perfection in "The Catastophe" (curiously the title of a chapter in Oliveira Martins’ History of Portugal, dedicated to the central trauma which that generation of the eighteen seventies would only worsen: with the disappearance of King Sebastian and Camões, the Country went into permanent mourning, because they were the Soul of Portugal’s resurrection.)

The novel which never came to be written, "The Battle of the River Caia", would inevitably (at least judging from "The Catastrophe") have been a book about national tragedy, the nation which had been drained of its blood at Alcácer Quibir and which had found no liquid to enable its rebirth from the world of dreams and myths. "The Battle of the River Caia" was to have been the scene of a Spanish invasion (which would destroy once and for all our anguished and hollow political, social and economic system) and which after totally humiliating the Country would lead to a regeneration. This would not occur through principles increasingly less Portuguese, but through the recuperation of an "authentic" Portugal. The catastrophe would therefore be like an earthquake which devastates everything but which enables everything to be rebuilt from nothing. Just as dreams took place of the French Revolution…

In "The Battles of the River Caia" Mário Cláudio uses Eça de Queirós’ text as a starting point for development, and mixes into it the last years of Eça himself, his slow death and his own redemption. In this symbolism (the death of the Fatherland or of the writer are the passport to regeneration) one finds the greatest virtue of this novel. It seems clear that had Eça written "The Battle of the River Caia" he would have been overwhelming and highly polemical, and he might well have written a book to equal "As Maias": a book about a country slowly dying of fatigue, undermined by illness, voyaging forward only with the successive lifts offered to it by the outside world. Surviving but not genuinely living (…)

Fernando Sobral, Diário Ecónomico, 9/1/96

Commemorating 150 years after the birth and 95 after the death of Eça de Queirós, Mário Cláudio has published in 1995 his novel The Battles of the River Caia. The author starts out from the text The Catastrophe, included in the work The Count of Abranhos, where Eça poses the hypothesis of Portugal being invaded by the neighbouring country, and also from a letter from Eça to Ramalho Ortigão where he talks of his plan of writing a novel on the subject.

Eça’s text, in its final pages, causes a patriotic tear to fall from the more unwary reader. Mário Cláudio’s novel leads us finally to a complacent smile for the dishevelled country which has been ours since birth.

But let us consider Mário Cláudio’s book which is in part the book which Eça did not write. This is in itself a cause of apprehension. How can anyone other than the original author, and without discovering any manuscript or giving news of it, even if falsified, write a book which that other original had in his head? Has Mário Cláudio taken on this act of daring? I do not think that this was his intention, and indeed he gives us to understand the same from his closing pages. Mário Cláudio has resurrected the last moments in the writer’s life, when he was eaten up with intestinal disease. The Castillian invasion and the reaction to it therefore become a kind of nightmare in the mind of the dying man.

The reflections of Policarpo, the figure who recounts the events of the invasion, refer not only to other works of Eça de Queirós where the collapse of Portuguese society is in large measure described and commented, but especially to the present day destruction of cultural identity. Portugal as an unusual country can only survive with difficulty the attacks on its cultural structures produced by the creation of the global village.

Apart from an account of the hypothetical Spanish invasion, the book is also a biography of the great writer, and a graphical distinction is drawn by a move into italics when the narration of episodes connected with the invasion is set out.

The story of the invasion accompanies the clinical case story of the writer. He dies in Paris and Portugal, with the presumed flight of the Spaniards, returns to sleepy insipidity as a southern, poor country. While the politicians tear it apart in the capital, people in the provinces die of typhus and yellow fever, and its citizens grow up in the eternal ignorance as to who they really are.

A severe book, aggressive in the mouth of Policarpo, destructive of myths, a dying ex libris being the small crow hovering over the Master’s grave. The last story which Eça told was published 95 years after his death and reminds us that the monocle is still fixed there in his eye to look yet again at the country with no king or rook, as long as there is someone to read the author of The Catastrophe.