It is the oral account of a rural life that is losing described by Bento da Cruz.
The author is a physician by profession but has always been a lover of tales of oral tradition of his homeland, Barroso, in Tras-os-Montes. Bento da Cruz has an extensive literary work that addresses this issue of the deep rurality. The language he uses in this collection is literally the way the people had tale this stories, not taking away even a comma. Do not expect a masterpiece of literature, because it is not, or it aspires to be. It is a writing that may shock some readers with it shameless descriptions and the many funny situations of everyday life in the villages, it is a decal of the language that retrieves and safeguards its rich ethnography, which never fells in the error of been mere folklore. It is a journey through the rural village field with priests, wolves and voluptuous women that are the delight of the reader without any linguistic prejudices, let's just call like that. It is above all an honest and very funny account of how they lived somewhere in these villages lost in the depths of Portugal. With these stories, Bento da Cruz tries to immortalize a way of life that it has been disappearing gradually, due to desertification of the countryside population and the increasing disappearance of older people who kept this strong oral tradition of profane storytelling that rejoiced everyone during the harsh winter nights and fed the gossip of the village. You will enjoy it, if only because it is so slight and assuming that will make you smile. Who is the red? Ahh, that you will have to disclose it yourself. Good reading.
