It is fiction based on the legend of Joseph of Risso and beautifully written by Jose Riço Direitinho.
The quality of a book should never be judged by the thickness of its cover. There are some readers who believe that good fiction requires at least 250 pages. It is utterly false. The book occupies the space that writer understand it needs, according to their latent need to strip the words that plague him and compulsively are immortalized on paper. Everything depends on how the story is told. This is the case of the "Breviary of evil inclinations," which out of curiosity has only 162 pages that delight us without the need of any further a comma or an exclamation point. It is a romance novel that recounts the life and death of Joseph Risso, a virtuous man, a healer, marked by fate in the back by a signal in the form of an oak leaf. It is a book full of flavors and aromas from teas that cure all kinds of ailments, from home remedies that heal the woes of love and plasters for wounds that insist on not healing, in the meantime, the author delights us with this story about the life of a man whom the people attribute a supernatural ability to heal and purge all evil from the village overlooking the neighboring Spain wrapped in a civil war. But life goes on at the whim of the seasons, in a land of legends and superstitions of which we are enthusiastic witnesses in a rich and fragrant narrative that transports us into a suspended world, in a Portugal lost in the mists of a collective memory averse to change but filled with fantastic, phantasmagorical and mythical characters rubbing the legendary, that never defraud us. It has been a while since I read something so beautifully written. Good reading.
