CLÁSSICOS BRASILEIROS BRAZILIAN CLASSICS - Imprensa Oficial

Brazilian Classics
A selection of authors with works in public domain
20
ALUÍSIO AZEVEDO
(1857 – 1913)
Very few writers managed to achieve such a strong
vivification of sensations in relation to the social
group and the environment described as Aluísio
Azevedo, especially in O cortiço (The flophouse),
where he shows his immense capacity to approach
the collective in its most effervescent, passionate,
and disconcerting facet. Dealing with the urban
social problem including its economical, ethnic,
and ethical contradictions, he is most interested
in snapshooting the conflicting gear between the
settlers and the mestizo people.
Review
Main works
Excerpt
The flophouse
It was five in the morning and the flophouse was
just waking up, opening not its eyes, but its many
doors and aligned windows.
That was the cheerful and bountiful wake-up
of one who had slept like a log for seven hours
all at once. One could still somehow feel in the
indolence of the dew the final notes of the last
guitar of the night, fading away in the yellowish
and soft dawning light, like a longing sigh lost in
a foreign land.
The free-thinking assault
"Aluísio Azevedo, influenced above all by Zola and Eça de Queirós, represents, in Brazil, the anticlericalism and fiery
atheism, the 'free-thinking' assault – an intellectual attitude peculiar to the 'materialism generation', the generation marked
by social, political and economical reforms (religious issue, military issue, abolition, republic)."
(Dirce Côrtes Riedel)
One of the greatest novelists
"Brazil was then endowed with one of its greatest novelists of all times. Precisely in this O Mulato (Mulatto)'s story, the
novelist reached one of the most beautiful, touching and sublime moments of his career as a writer."
(Fernando Góes, Aluísio Azevedo e O mulato)
Os doidos (1879); Uma lágrima de mulher (1879); O mulato (1881); Casa de pensão (1884); O caboclo (1886); Memórias
de um condenado (1886); O homem (1887); O cortiço (1890) Um caso de adultério (1891); Em flagrante (1891); Livro de
uma sogra (1895); Pegados (1897); Obras completas (1961).