The Great Shadow: And Other Stories (Empire of the Senses Series)

Rating:
Summary: Genuinely CRAZY
Review: Having read my share of basically insane authors, I would venture to say that Mario Carneiro is the closest thing to an authentically deranged author that I have ever come across, along with Antonin Artaud. At times the pitch of intensity reached in his tales is actually frightening. The stories themselves, yes, lack focus and often degenerate into subjective meanderings, but this only bespeaks of the artist's state of mind. His obsession with "the other" or "the shadow" seems to have been his overwhelming desire to enter the realm of the imaginary, the aesthetic, entirely. His narrators are, like Bernhard's (but more so) seriously messed up people voicing their misanthropy in sometimes unintelligible, sometimes intelligible ways. Most end up killing themselves or someone else. All are extremely anti-social and despise the contented, even revering murderers and drug addicts over 'normal' people. One will be left with a paradoxically tasty distate in one's mouth after reading these stories, and will gain a clear understanding of why this disturbed man ended up dead at 26 years old.

Rating:
Summary: The Great Shadow - A Fiction Lived, a Life Ficcioned
Review: The Great Shadow is one of the novels of the only Sa-Carneiro's book dedication to Fiction. But is is central in the identification of the key-structure that allows that his works talk about his life, and vice-versa. No one, has constructed as Sá-Carneiro did, a romantical project that would make his life the total fulfillment of his poetical project. And The Great Shadow brings us the fantasmagorical story of a man pursuited by his shadow, appealing, stressing and killing his own reflection of himself; his shadow is himself, because the Other is the only condition he has to live and see himself. This obsession with the Other will lead him to death by suicide. As in the book: in a profound despair, the protagonist kills himself and his shadow, as a way to finish his life of agony and self-division. A book that situates us in the drama of the Portuguese First Modernism, by the hand of our most desgraceful and auto-biographical poet.

Rating:
Summary: it's dark in here
Review: What a great collection of stories. They gave me vivid flashbacks of my youth as the protag would get involved in things I have done as a child. I didn't care for some aspects of it, though. I'm not a literary genius, but this book seemed all over the place, and without a central plot. I loved it, bu tI'll never read it again, or buy anything else this author penned.

Rating:
Summary: it's dark in here
Review: What a great collection of stories. They gave me vivid flashbacks of my youth as the protag would get involved in things I have done as a child. I didn't care for some aspects of it, though. I'm not a literary genius, but this book seemed all over the place, and without a central plot. I loved it, bu tI'll never read it again, or buy anything else this author penned.