At school, I was forced to read book because my country has a literature plan (named PNL 2027) that consists of forcing students to read, and here are the summaries I made of these books:
*Farsa de Inês Pereira* by Gil Vicente (1523): Very complex and tedious story about a girl who wants to marry the “perfect man”, basically a netflix teenager romance but on the XVI century, I wasnt even able to understand what kind of social issue the history criticizes, but the book is so old that it doesnt represent our society anymore.
*Sermão de Santo António aos peixes* by Padre António Vieira (1654): The story of a man that speaks to fish, yes, a man that speaks to fish to teach them things, the funniest part is that the writer assembled the people from the amazon forest to tell them this story in front of them, I wonder if the natives thought “Is this man crazy?” or at least understand what he said.
*Frei Luís de Sousa* by Almeida Garret (1843): Despite the original release year, the history happens in medieval ages, and its about a crazy woman who takes advantage of her husband’s dissapearance to cheat on him, no criticism of society or anything, I’v always asked why this book is part of the PNL (the program that forced me to read this books).
*Amor de Perdição* by Camilo Castelo Branco (1862): This a long and complicated book but if I am not wrong is about a teenager named Simão who is in love with a girl named Teresa but the families do not agree, they dont care and they start dating, Teresa’s family finds out and Teresa goes to a convent in another city, then Simão goes to that city and while sleeping at a friend’s house he falls in love again with another girl… This book is really complicated but the only things I’ve learned are “do not cheat” and “do not kill” (related with another part of the story), ironically the author had an affair with a married woman…
*Os Maias* by Eça de Queirós (1888): The king of portuguese literature and also Portugal’s number 1 fan of incest and unnecessarily long descriptions (the twenty first pages are the description of a house!), if you thought *Amor de Perdição* was long, then wait for this one: more than 600 pages describing the lives of people and their personal problems, if you want to be portuguese-style bored, Queirós is the best option. Before reading this book I had to read a text written by the author’s great-great-grandson convincing me to read the whole book (spoiler: It didnt work)
*Memorial do convento* by José Saramago (1982): Despite being the newest book on this list, the story happens around 1717, the story is tedious but what made José a famous author in our country was the fact he disliked punctuation, and its like, I have to follow all kinds of writing rules but when this man doesnt follow the rules is not considered a “bad writer”.
Students only read their books because they are forced and because they need to read them to go to university
The writers mentioned are considered “heroes” in our country, more important than Kings, politicians and scientists, for example, José has a museum in Lisbon, there is a square in Porto dedicated to *Amor de Perdição* (in front of the *Cadeia de Relação*), Almeida has a painting in Portugal’s parliament, Gil has a football club named after him and Eça has a square with a statue of him at his hometown (Póvoa de Varzim), this is less than 1% of the homages done to writers in my country…
by Quicheisthebest
9 Comments
Very interesting.
What, if any, texts from other countries were you required to read (in translation)?
Don’t you read Pessoa? Im not from Portugal, but he is the only portuguese author I know, and i thought he was very famous in Portugal.
I swear I read almost this exact post a month ago. At the very least PNL 2027 is getting teens to post well-written critiques in English on Reddit.
I am close to 45 years old and I have read a lot of books. I do not think that there is a single one that I regret reading, even if some were more tedious than others. I do not think that you will look back in 20 or 30 years from now and feel regret for having read these books.
At most, you invested some time. If you are honest, how would you have invested the time spent reading these books if the decision was yours? Do you feel that whatever you would have done instead would be more important for you ten, or fifty years down the line?
I am not from Portugal and accidentally stumbled upon Memorial do Convento by Saramago while traveling. I had virtually no knowledge of him or his works. I read the book and absolutely loved it, although yes, it can be a bit tedious sometimes. I spent years looking for another copy of it and finally reread it a year ago and it’s still up there among my favourite books.
I just read Blindness by Saramago and the lack of punctuation drove me bonkers.
I’m not Portuguese, but I recently read *The Lusiads* and absolutely loved it. Primarily because i’m from South Africa and the fact that my homeland could feature in a Western epic of its stature was so cool (that’s very rare for us down here in the Southern Hemisphere). Do you guys also read Camoes at school?
I’ve actually been meaning to get into more Portuguese literature, so naturally Saramago is on my TBR but this list is awesome. I’ll see if there are any English translations of these works, cheers!
Muito fixe este post.
Gostas muito do nosso país…
I had a portuguese education (not in Portugal) and those were mostly the books we had to read from 8th-12th grade + Pessoa.
The exams were mostly about those books as well.