Novelas do Minho

Castelo Branco, Camilo, 1825-1890Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.8

Word count: 279K words
Chapters: 28

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Novelas do Minho by Camilo Castelo BrancoAuthor: Castelo Branco, Camilo, 1825-1890,Language: Portuguese, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: May 9, 2007

Editor's review

Novelas do Minho is a collection of novellas and short stories by the Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco, set in the Minho region and written in Portuguese. Its value lies in its strong local color and its gallery of characters: the entanglements of rural society, conflicts of love and family, and the interweaving of religion and local custom, narrated with Romantic passion and sentimentality yet also with a cool-eyed observation of his characters' fates. Castelo Branco excels at advancing his stories through colloquial dialogue and dramatic scenes; the pieces are of moderate length and make a good introduction to nineteenth-century Portuguese regional narrative. For learners of Portuguese it offers literary, context-rich reading material, though dialect and period vocabulary increase the difficulty, so an annotated edition or introduction is advisable. As you read, note how local space shapes his characters' choices, and how the narrator oscillates between sympathy and irony; the book also rewards comparison with the tradition of the Portuguese Romantic novel.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Language learners with some reading proficiency in Portuguese
Specialist readers studying Portuguese Romantic literature
Readers interested in regional tales of the Iberian Peninsula
Teachers and students in need of Portuguese literary reading material

Not a good fit for

Complete beginners with no Portuguese
Readers who prefer fast-paced plots and spare, modern narrative
Readers seeking a systematic history or social study of Portugal
Readers impatient with the long sentences and dialect of nineteenth-century literature

Reading tips

Begin with a shorter story to get used to the language and narrative rhythm, then work gradually through the whole book.
Keep pen and paper at hand to note recurring local words and forms of address, and organize them once you have finished.
After each story, write a two- or three-sentence summary of plot and characters to help keep the structure of the collection in view.
Use a Portuguese dictionary alongside a brief introduction to the Minho region to reduce the obstacles posed by dialect and local reference.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

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.

FAQ

Can I read this book without any Portuguese?

Reading it from scratch is not advisable. The original is nineteenth-century Portuguese with local expressions and period usage, and requires some grounding in grammar and vocabulary. If you know no Portuguese at all, look first for an annotated selection or introductory material, then decide whether to tackle the original.

Is this a novel or a collection of short stories?

It is a collection of stories set in the Minho region, made up of several novellas and short narratives rather than a single long novel. The characters and plots are relatively independent, so it can be read in sections and lends itself to choosing one piece for a class or reading group.

What background should I pay most attention to while reading?

Note the social structure, religious customs, and family ethics of nineteenth-century rural Portugal, the soil from which the characters' conflicts grow. Also watch the shifts in the narrator's tone: there is Romantic sentimentality but also irony at human weakness, and grasping that tension helps capture the work's register.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Castelo Branco, Camilo, 1825-1890 Author

Camilo Castelo Branco (1825–1890) was a Portuguese novelist whose works number 47 in this collection, showing how prolific he was. His representative works include Amor de Perdição: Memorias d'uma familia, Amor de Salvação, A espada de Alexandre, Salve, Rei!, and A Morgadinha de Val-D'Amores.Entre a Flauta e a Viola. Judging from these titles, his writing centers on themes such as love, religious salvation, history and kingship, and social manners, spanning novels, miscellaneous reflections, and narrative prose. His tone is sentimental and dramatic, and he excels at portraying emotional conflict and the twists of fate. Because public information is limited, details of his life, nationality, and common classification cannot be confirmed, and no existing introduction is available; even so, the scale and thematic range of the works in this collection indicate his standing in Portuguese literature and merit readers' attention to the works themselves.