CHRONICLE OF THE MURDERED HOUSE, BY LÚCIO CARDOSO, TRANSLATED BY MARGARET JULL COSTA AND ROBIN PATTERSON
Open the cover of Chronicle of the Murdered House and you’ll find a map of the Chácara, the estate of the proud, yet fading Meneses family. Beside the kitchen is Uncle Timóteo’s bedroom, where he dresses up in sequin gowns and drinks himself into a stupor. Down the hall is André’s room, where he awaits his mother in the dark, consumed by longing. Outside are the sprawling gardens; the Pavilion lined with violets planted by Alberto, the love-struck gardener.
Lúcio Cardoso confines his readers almost exclusively to the rooms of the Chácara, and guides them carefully through its most shadowy corridors, revealing the inner lives of its tormented inhabitants along the way. Their confessions, which appear in the form of letters, diary entries and doctor’s reports (to name a few), are all fixated on the same subject: her.
“That woman can make one doubt everything, even reality,” Valdo Meneses says of his wife Nina, the vivacious young woman who arrives from Rio de Janeiro, suitcases of extravagant dresses in hand. Her mere presence invades every corner of the house and her sensuality soon threatens to destroy the patriarchal tradition that the Meneses, for generations, have so desperately clung to.
In moments as unconventional as it must have been to the Brazilian literati of the late 1950s, Cardoso’s daring novel— now translated into English thanks to Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson—is filled with characters who, through their moral transgressions, are forced to encounter their darker (and perhaps truer) selves.
