The Farce

Amazon Book Description - The Farce by Raul Brandão In The Farce, Raul Brandão transforms a provincial Portuguese town into a stage of grief, hypocrisy, poverty, religious fear, social cruelty, and spiritual anguish. Around a deathbed, a coffin shop, old women wrapped in ritual piety, and ruined lives consumed by resentment, Brandão builds one of the most haunting psychological landscapes in Portuguese literature. At the center of the novel stands Candidinha, a woman shaped by humiliation, hunger, envy, and a lifelong thirst for revenge. Around her move Sofia, Anacleto, Joana, Antoninho, and a gallery of grotesque yet profoundly human figures, each trapped between misery and illusion. Brandão's prose is intense, atmospheric, and visionary: fog, granite, rain, death, silence, and despair become living presences. First published in the early twentieth century, The Farce is not merely a social novel. It is a dark meditation on the masks people wear, the violence hidden beneath respectability, and the tragic comedy of human existence. This English translation brings to modern readers a powerful work of Portuguese literary modernism, preserving the author's dense imagery, moral intensity, and unforgettable voice. For readers of Dostoevsky, Eça de Queirós, Camilo Castelo Branco, José Saramago, and European psychological fiction, The Farce offers a disturbing, poetic, and deeply original encounter with the human soul.

Pagina's: 162, Paperback, Independently published