Novel
Serafim Ponte Grande
Not translated into English
Oswald de Andrade · 1933
Synopsis
Serafim Ponte Grande, a clerk in a federal office in São Paulo that he nicknames the spittoon, has had to marry Lalá under the pressure of convention. During the revolution of 1924, he seizes the money his son was keeping for the insurgents and sets off to roam the world, Europe and then the Orient, from affair to affair, accompanied by his sycophantic friend Pinto Calçudo, whom he eventually drives out of the book. The narrative, without chapters, is made up of two hundred fragments divided into eleven parts: diary, theatre, poems, parodies of every genre.
Context
The book, completed in 1928 at the time of the anthropophagic manifesto, appeared in São Paulo in 1933 with a preface written in Rio in February of that year; its author, who had joined the Communist Party, disowned most of his works in it. Haroldo de Campos reports that Oswald struck out the word “novel” on the copy he gave him and wrote “invention” instead, and spoke of a great “non-book”. The journal Travessia notes in it fragments that each imitate a form, from the recitative to the will.
Who it is for
A short novel, with a fragmented construction and a parodic tone; the cannibal manifesto of 1928 sheds light on the project.
Prizes and reception
The “non-book” of Brazilian modernism according to Haroldo de Campos, reread as an invention rather than as a novel.
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