Crônica da casa assassinada

Crônica da casa assassinada [Chronicle of the Murdered House] (1959) is a famous epistolary novel by Brazilian writer Lúcio Cardoso (1913-1968), considered a masterpiece in Brazilian literature.

Synopsis

Crônica da casa assassinada is the greatest work of the novelist, poet and playwright Lúcio Cardoso. The story is told through letters, a dense story full of jealousy, grudges and perversion. It takes place in an old farm in the interior of Minas Gerais, which is visited by a woman. In the story of the decay of the Meneses family, kinship, extramarital affairs, violent acts, forbidden love, incestuous relationships are discovered.

According to researcher Mario Carelli (1951-1994), Cardoso's “human and artistic path” comes together in this novel. It is the culmination of the trajectory that began in 1934, with Maleita, in tune with the dominant regionalist trend at the time. The novel leads to the last consequences the psychological-existential path of Luz no Underground (1936), characterized by Carelli as a “passionate sketch”. This can also be seen in texts like the novel Mãos Vazias [Empty Hands] (1938) and the trilogy composed by Inácio (1944), O Enfeitiçado [Bewitched] (1954) and the unpublished Baltazar, which serve as a laboratory for the creation of this novel.

In fact, as critic Alfredo Bosi (1936) points out, the novel's theme is linked to religious and spiritualist issues, immersed in the formal freedom conquered by the vanguards in a “descent into the hell of anguish and guilt.” However, the difficulty persists in framing it in one of the currents of the national novel. The complex crossing of literary characteristics does not allow reducing its uniqueness to the idea of ​​an “introspective novel” or to the trends developed by the mentioned interlocutors.

The reader is faced with the narrative unfolded between psychological turbulence and the portrait of the degrading social order. Or, between the production of “spectral portraits of being”, as suggested by the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) in a tribute poem to Cardoso, and the exhibition of the “moral metastasis of the Meneses farm”, in the words of the critic Eduardo Portella (1932).

Plot

At the core of the action is the decadent farm, located in a provincial town in Minas Gerais, and the scene of a plot punctuated by sin, death and illness, the result of the coexistence between three brothers (Demétrio, Valdo and Timóteo) and the wives (Ana and Nina). Nina, a woman of rare beauty, comes from Rio de Janeiro and is unable to adapt to the rural peasant. She marries Valdo believing in his wealth, but soon discovers the decay of the Meneses. Protagonist of the work, she is a destructive element of the family order, causing envy and disaffection. Among the servants who witness the events, gardener Alberto has an adulterous relationship with Nina. From the relationship, it seems, André is born, a character who opens the book in a cyclic key and retells Nina's death, the end of the chronological plot. Incest between mother and child is the taboo around which plot and form are organized. It is up to the reader to unlock the fictional truth.

References

Literature | Modernism