Histórias de amor, the censored book by José Cardoso Pires

Abstract

The alienation and violence so often manifested in José Cardoso Pires’ narrative appear associated with an environment of suffocation, motivated by a social structure that constantly threatens freedom, dignity and, in many cases, the lives of human beings. It is true that the Portuguese are beings full of history. There have always been those who lived in the shadow of Power, among various inquisitions, whose eyes – a thousand – always included bureaucrats on duty, putting at risk the freedom and rights of men, in a state of exception, this “point of imbalance between public law and private fact”, according to Giorgio Agamben (State of exception, 2004, p. 11), tending “increasingly to present itself as a dominant government paradigm in contemporary politics.” Two books of short narratives come to the public when neorealism is in full force, at a time when the Salazarist Estado Novo exercises its power of repression and censorship – Os Caminheiros (1949) and Histórias de Amor (1952) – the latter taken out of circulation by censorship on August 26 of the same year of its publication. With the publication of the volume Jogos de Azar, in 1963, stories from the two books were made public. In 2008, ten years after the death of its author, the second edition of Histórias de amor would be released, including the previously censored excerpts. It is with this book that I intend to pay homage to the author of O Delfim, twenty-five years after his death.