Lima Barreto

Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto (May 13, 1881 – November 1, 1922) was a Brazilian author who is considered one of the best satirical writers in Brazilian literature.

Barreto in 1917

Sourced

Recordações do Escrivão Isaias Caminha (1909)

Memories of Scrivener Isaias Caminha

• Ah! I would be a Doctor! (...) Ah! Doctor! Doctor! Walking through the roads, through the streets, though the squares, through the rooms, receiving all the honors: "Doctor, what have you done today? How are you, doctor?" This feeling was simply divine!

• It was a rude, brutal and purposely ugly book. However, it was an honest book.

Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma (1915)

Tragic Death of Policarpo Quaresma

• Nobody precisely knew where he born, but it's known it wasn't in São Paulo, nor in Rio de Janeiro, nor in Pará. It was wrong trying to find in this man any kind of regionalism. Before anything, Quaresma was a Brazilian.

• He was going to die, and who knows that it could be in that same night? What crime had he committed in his entire life? None. He has carried all his life with the mirage of studying his nation, loving it, intending to contribute to its happiness and prosperity. He has spent all his adolescence in this project, and all his virility too. And now, in his elder ages, how did life return him this favor? Killing him!

Os Bruzundangas (1923)

The Bruzundangas

• Bruzundanga's literature is ruled by cute, rhyming and tasteless sonnets.

• In the Samoiedas literary school, the students get satisfied only with shallow literary appearances and a ordinary simulation of notoriety, sometimes because of their intellectual incapacity and some other times by a vicious and careless instruction.

• The great question is: from which country shall we copy the Constitution?

Clara dos Anjos (1948)

• We are nothing in this life.

• At the following morning, when the first citizens started walking around, he was found dead. So died the poor and brave Antônio da Silva Marramaque who, at the age of 18, dreamed with the glories of poetry and was now murdered due his great soul and brave moral! He didn't compose any sonnet and, if he did, he composed bad ones. But, by his way, he was a hero and a poet... that God bless him!

• Inside this complex labyrinth of roads lives a great part of the city's population, whose existence is ignored by the government, despite it still demands abusive taxes from it. Taxes which are used in magnificent and useless buildings elsewhere in Rio de Janeiro.

• The true love is a state of half-madness, of some kind of soft obsession, ruling a so delicate kind of feeling that can lead a person from the greatest happiness to the most dreadful pain.

External links

• Lima Barreto's works (in the Portuguese Wikisource):
  • Recordações do Escrivão Isaías Caminha;
  • Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma;
  • Os Bruzundangas;
  • Clara dos Anjos;
  • O Cemitério dos Vivos.