It is a tour thru the country and the memories of a love interrupted.
This book is a hybrid novel, on one hand, is the story of a real train trip initiated by the writer Almeida Garrett between Lisbon and Santarem, on the other, is the novelistic narrative of love with a troubled and tragic end, much to the taste of the time and the Portuguese’s, between Charles and Joanna. Interestingly, my attention was raised not towards the burning passion between the two characters, but the analysis that the author makes of our country, which unfortunately is still as present as in the year of 1846. Just change the names. The barons and liberals become... well, I leave it to your discretion. Not to mention the role of the Holy Mother Church in the national goal that is embodied by the character of Friar Denis! To support my thesis, I leave a beautiful passage that will surely make you smile at least, "a great nation can still go on living and expect the best of time, despite the paralysis that boggles the life of the soul for the most part of your body. But a small nation, it is impossible it must die. Ten more years of barons and regimen of matter, and inevitably runs away from the body the dying of Portugal the last breath. “The book of Joao Leitao da Silva, whose pen name is Garrett, can also be considered a contemporary novel, for this mixture of various types of texts, languages and genres in a single publication and that broke definitively with the trend of its time. It is therefore one of the greatest literary works at the national level, because it is the best example of modern Portuguese prose. What remains as a reflection, in my view, is how a text written in the nineteenth century featuring a Portugal on the brink of destruction, which the author believes is due to the lack of political vision of the time before the impotence of his people, is so contemporary? Well, if we look at the fierce criticism of the writer optimistically we can already say that there is no crisis that apparently kills Portugal! Over eight hundred years of our history, we have recounted so many catastrophic episodes that seem to me that if we did not cease to exist as a nation, it's not now that we are going to die as a country. For all these reasons and some I urge you to read or reread as it was in my case, this "Trips thru my land." Happy reading!
