This summer Dulce Maria Cardoso won the European Union Prize for Literature. This honour was bestowed upon her because of her second novel Os Meus Sentimentos. Recently this book was translated into Dutch and released under the title: “Violeta en de Engelen.” Portugal received the book gratefully, and now Holland can finally indulge itself.

The book tells the story of an extremely fat woman called Violeta, who is, as she says herself, unfamiliar with love. As the story begins with Violeta’s last moments, when she is looking back on her life. During her life she has fulfilled her desire for contact with other human beings with brutal sex in the parking lots by the side of the road. Her struggle with contemporary ideas about beauty is a story of feeling guilty for the shame her family endured because of her appearance. In the book the loneliness, desire and betrayal, all part of human life, do not make for a lot of romance, but it soon becomes clear that life is so much more complicated than just one person’s love or happiness.

Cardoso says about Violeta’s struggle: ‘As I was writing about Violeta, I was talking about racism. There are lots of forms, and we talk about colour but not about the way we look – like if we are ugly. She is fat and we treat her different because of it. I read in the newspaper once that it is worse to be fat than it is to be handicapped; in school kids are very cruel to overweight children. Why are we always talking about tolerance, but can’t we deal with this? There is no better or worse, we exist the way we exist and we have to accept that.’

But the story of Violeta isn’t the only theme in this book. The significance of the Portuguese history might be overlooked by the Dutch reader at first; only later on does it become more apparent. Bit by bit, as Violeta remembers her father, another face of the revolution is brought to light. However much subliminal, it is vital to Cardoso: ‘I wanted to pay special attention to the Revolution in 1974, but in a different way than normal. We had a dictator for almost fifty years, and the Portuguese mostly talk about the revolution like it was the greatest event in our national history. Of course it was a very good thing, but I thought there is another story to be told as well, that of those who were not that happy with the revolution. It is not my work to say which side of the story is right or wrong. I don’t believe in  literature as being part of any battle, it is just a story. I wanted to talk about that and about the changes that took place in our country since those days. When I was little there were a lot of those typical small businesses, like the beauty parlour in the story of Violeta; nowadays more often than not they are part of international chains or they were simply just replaced by restaurants and Chinese shops. Everything has changed.’

It is a very unusual book in more than just one way, as Cardoso clearly intended: ‘When I started to write this book I was interested in death and memory.’ Because of the latter theme she chose a rather remarkable writing style: ‘I wanted to try a formal exercise with the style. With that the book begins and ends with the same word, which represents the idea of the eternal. For the same reason there are no periods throughout the story, I wrote in consecutive parts of sentences, because I think memory comes to us like this, in little pieces. What I mean is that when we remember something we don’t remember the whole thing, we remember pieces. It can come to us by a smell, a sound, a face or whatever.’ She continues, ‘I also wanted to write without the conditional or future tense, I was working in a stream of consciousness, or a series, so I thought those tenses would be redundant. It was important for me not to have any future tense there. It was like trying to work with past and present, because the future is almost the opposite of memory.’ The translation has retained a lot this style, quite a achievement, which will in part be due to Cardoso’s attitude towards the process: ‘I look at translations as a teamwork, I don’t control anything. The translators write in that language, and my book was the beginning, but the translation is their book. It would be impossible to make it completely the same. They are different and I don’t mind. Even if you know a language, and its not your native language, you will never be able to say what you mean. And for a writer this can be very complicated because we are obsessed with words. It teaches you to be humble. The translation is my book according to the translator. I hope people can enjoy the translation, despite the differences, because I am talking about the human condition, about death and in that we are pretty much the same anywhere. All my books are about the human condition.’

Cardoso definitely gets her ideas and style across and it is laudable that a writer is capable of such a performance, but Cardoso downplays her achievement: ‘When I’m working I’m always trying new things. None of my books are the same, they are completely different. Probably there are other books that are like this book, but I haven’t read them, because they are in a different language or just because I did not get around to them yet. Everything has already been done, it is not a new thing, nobody’s inventing anything.’ However modest she may be, it’s no surprise that her first book, Campo de Sangue (not translated to Dutch yet) was also awarded a prize. Currently she is already working on her finishing a next book. ‘It will be about power. Another completely different book.’ Maybe it will be a prize winner too.

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