Five Minutes
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in Brazilian or Portuguese-language literature
- Students seeking an introduction to Romantic narrative through a short work
- Language learners with basic Portuguese reading ability
- General readers who enjoy emotionally nuanced, compact fiction
Not a good fit for
- Readers with no Portuguese and no access to a translation
- Genre-fiction readers expecting complex plots or grand narrative
- Researchers requiring detailed annotation and scholarly introduction
Reading tips
- Read through once for narrative rhythm, then revisit key emotional turning points.
- Compare the Portuguese original with a reliable translation and note stylistic differences.
- Use background material on Brazilian Romanticism to understand the work's historical context.
- The text is short; read it in two or three sittings and take brief notes.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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About the author
José Martiniano de Alencar (1829–1877) was a Brazilian Romantic novelist, lawyer and politician. Born in Fortaleza in 1829, he served as Minister of Justice from 1868 to 1870 and died of tuberculosis in Rio de Janeiro in 1877. A proponent of "Indianism," he drew on Brazil's native landscapes and Indigenous traditions in order to free local writing from dependence on European literary taste and to shape a distinct national literature. His works combine Romantic sensibility with careful description of regional scenery and social customs, and his language is notable for its evocative power. His major works include O Guarani, Iracema and Ubirajara, as well as the titles held here: Ubirajara: Lenda Tupi, Cinco minutos and Como e porque sou romancista. Ranging from Indigenous legend to urban sketches and reflections on his own craft, these works reflect his sustained effort to make Brazilian literature national in character, and they have deeply influenced later Brazilian writers.
