The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy (Anthology) Edited by Dr Eugenio Lisboa Original language: Portuguese Country: Portugal   Published by Dedalus Pub. Date: 1994 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 291 pages ISBN: 1873982666 List Price: $16.95, £9.99 Not available for ordering

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The Portuguese are notorious as a people somehow immersed in dreams, or at least prone to feeling the famous saudade (not wholly translatable by the word ‘nostalgia’) and so perhaps ‘fantasy’ has been a happy genre for their writers. The independent publisher Dedalus has a series of short story collections that explore the riches of 19th and 20th century fantasy, surrealism etc. in various European literatures. The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy is a collection that has been lovingly researched and effectively translated; the result is satisfying and enjoyable even for someone not necessarily invited by the word ‘fantasy’ in the title.

For one thing this is because some of the greatest Portuguese writers, such as Eça de Queirós and Mário de Sá-Carneiro are here in ‘fantastic’ mode alongside other accomplished authors including Ferreira de Castro and Manuel Texeira Gomes. Another factor is that this is quite a big book, allowing the reader to skip one or two pieces that may be too gothic or mysterious and still find plenty of good stuff. Highlights are Our Lord of All Seafarers by Ferreira de Castro which is a romantically-set ironic dialogue with the Creator on his creation — a clever and radical story; Sá-Carneiro’s Myself the Other is an avant-gardist interrogation of madness and the struggle to be oneself, with a magnificent line that berates those that ‘don’t even have enough genius to want to be a genius’; Texeira Gomes’s Blood Lust is as enjoyably decadent and archly funny as an Almodovar film with its strange-sex angle and finally of especial note is António Patrício’s The Fountain Man, a touching celebration of Italy and her cities. Patrício has really ‘seen’ the grandeur of Rome in its soft but magnificently glowing light and this is also the fascinating story of a bizarre and beautiful young man, a story that takes the possibilities of the fantastic as a genre and uses it to express some realities of aesthetic and sexual existence. Which could also be said for many of the other stories in this marvellous book.

‘Then I returned to Rome where I had first seen Harry months before.

I often thought about him with a persistent, complicit sympathy, for I too love fountains. At the time, I used to go to the Piazza del Popolo at night in order to savour the rough, tragic wine of its solitude. I would stretch out on the broad alabaster rim of the fountain, opposite the Pincio; and allow myself to be impregnated by that memoryless soul, by that august chronicle of silence: the magical atmosphere of Rome’s squares when they are empty of people and filled only by liquid voices. I would stay there for hours at a time filled by an almost sensual sadness, a kind of delirium of grandeur that allowed me to converse with Rome, to calm my doubts about my failures in the supernatural beauty of that great dead city and fuse my destiny with hers, like that of a hero in an old poem.

To experience that ecstasy of the psyche you must either have lived a great deal or else be touched by the premature old age of the artist who, even in the full flush of youth and strength, seizes happiness by her hair and grows sad when he kisses her eyes. During my time in Rome that was my most silent hour.

In the middle of the square the four lions spouted water, guarding the Egyptian obelisk like sphinxes keeping perpetual watch. At night, in Rome, time takes on an almost monastic quality. It is the perfect city in which to live out a dream or an idea, watched over by millenary figures poised to receive your confession.’ The Fountain Man António Patrício