José Luís Peixoto (Portugal)

The event focuses on several books written by the author. Cemitério de Pianos:At the heart of the novel are several generations of a Lisbon family whose lives are closely connected to a carpenter’s workshop and a mysterious “piano cemetery.” Peixoto writes about love, loss, family ties and the inescapable return of the past, interweaving different periods and voices. The novel thus becomes a poetic meditation on family, memory and death. Autobiografia: The novel brings the young Portuguese writer José Luís Peixoto together with the renowned José Saramago, deliberately blurring the boundaries between autobiographical reality and fiction. The relationship between the young author and his literary role model develops into a reflection on writing, identity, love and the question of how literature emerges from one’s own life. At the same time, the book is a playful homage to Saramago and to the power of literature. Morreste-me: A deeply personal, autobiographically inspired book about the death of Peixoto’s father and the experience of grief. The narrator addresses his deceased father directly, bringing back memories of childhood, family and places they shared. Out of pain and absence emerges a poetic meditation on memory, love and the need to carry on after a loss. Galveias: One night, a mysterious celestial object strikes the small Portuguese village of Galveias, enveloping it in a pervasive smell of sulphur. Against this extraordinary backdrop, Peixoto tells the stories of the villagers, their families, conflicts, love affairs, secrets and tragedies, creating a portrait of an entire community. The novel connects the local with the universal, while offering a multilayered portrait of rural Portugal and its identity. Morreste-me is the literary debut of the Prémio José Saramago laureate José Luís Peixoto from Lisbon and at the same time one of his most personal works. It is less a conventional novel than a poetic prose text that deals with the death of the father. In fragmented, almost lyrical passages, the narrator circles around memory, loss, and the inability to find words. The book was widely noticed in Portugal and established the author as a new literary voice. To this day, it is considered a key work in his oeuvre, as many of his later themes—family, origin, death, and identity—are already present here. Even without receiving its own award, Morreste-me is often regarded as one of the most important literary debuts in recent Portuguese literature—above all for its radically personal, poetic language. The author received the prestigious Prémio José Saramago for his novel Nenhum Olhar.

Moderator:
Victor Cobuz (Romania)

Actor:
Ilinca Munteanu

Language:
English