Teolinda gersao biography samples
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Review
"The quiet echoes of moments from The Odyssey, as when Paulo casts Cecília in the role of Nausicaa, are just right … Gersão deserves a wider audience in English.” — Kirkus Reviews
"This story is, of course, a love story but one that cleverly intertwines with that love affair the idea of art and what it is, and the idea of a city, a city unknown to all too many people and a city, that like most cities, has parts which are unknown to many of its inhabitants. Unlike most cities this is the City of Ulysses, not, as he stresses, Joyce’s Ulysses but Homer’s." — The Modern Novel
About the Author
Annie McDermott translates fiction and poetry from Spanish and Portuguese, and her work has appeared in publications such as Granta, World Literature Today, Asymptote, The Missing Slate, and Two Lines. She has previously lived in Mexico City and São Paulo, Brazil, and is now based in London.
Teolinda Gersão was born in Coimbra (Portugal) and has lived in Germany, São Paulo, and Moz
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I go to Lisbon on business fairly regularly. I get on a plane to go there, if not every month, then at least every six weeks or so. I understand the language well enough not to need an interpreter, having spent a good deal of my childhood and adolescence in Brazil, where my parents lived for some years, again for professional reasons.
I know the city reasonably well too. Places we travel to frequently eventually do början to feel familiar, at least superficially, even when, at a deeper level, almost everything about them makes us feel foreign.
It’s only natural, then, that many of the unusual things that happen in Lisbon no longer surprise me, as if inom were, in a way, prepared for them. inom was not, therefore, particularly annoyed (or at least I didn’t show it) when inom realized that my (five-star) hotel had been overbooked, and the room already paid for by my agency was occupied bygd someone else, who had arrived before me.
The manager, moreover, was profuse in his ap
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My rating: 3 stars
Lisbon has served as inspiration for numerous books. In A Cidade de Ulisses (City of Ulysses in the English translation), the Portuguese author Teolinda Gersão mixed the history of the city with a story about love and the visual arts. At first, this is an enthralling read, thanks to a rhythmic prose and various stimulating considerations. However, the fact that it tries to juggle various elements means that the events that are explored at each given time are not always the most interesting.
The narrator, Paulo Vaz, was invited to take part in an art exhibition about the city of Lisbon. Years before he had thought about doing something similar, but it never came to fruition. It was a project he had with a woman he loved, Cecília, whom part of the text is addressed to. He recalls their relationship, conversations, sexual attraction and experiences. He was a graduate teaching assistant at the university she was studying in. They shared a love for art and disc