Dulce Maria Cardoso

Dulce Maria Cardoso, was born in Trás-os-Montes in 1964, she is one of the most important literary voices in Portugal. She spent her childhood in Angola and returned to Portugal in 1975, shortly after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution and Angola’s independence. She studied law, worked as a lawyer and wrote scripts for the cinema. The author has received numerous prizes for her literary work and her latest novel, was awarded the Special Prize of the Critics 2011 inPortugal, and was selected as Book of the Year 2011. Dulce Maria Cardoso is Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters.

EUPL Year:
2009
EUPL Country:
Portugal

Winning Book

Os Meus Sentimentos (Les Anges, Violeta)

The night of the accident. There is a drop of water hanging from a piece of glass that refuses to fall. There is an instant that lasts an eternity. Reflected in the drop, Violeta plunges into that eternity and thinks about what the last day of her life could have been like. She examines her life, and what that life consists of: the parents, the daughter, the child, the bastard. She feels the urgency of life that carries on indifferent like the road that she veered off during the accident. In her unstable position, upside down, trapped by her seat belt, it appears that everything is coming undone. Losing the obscurity that daily life presents, Violeta sinks into her past, a hallucinating spiral of transparencies and echoes. Violeta turns a corner (or is it a page?) and the revolution of April interrupts, brandishing its anger. She opens a door (perhaps a paragraph) of an empty house and her mother calls for her when her father descends into madness out in the yard. A man chokes the desire from her body (comma, for sure) and the girl with the roller skates glides in front of the daughter who loses her life. The maid, as always, is silent (full stop).