INTO MACAU

Plot

One leaves reading this book - a novel of a biography, one could call it - with the feeling that we have lived, in its brief pages, every year of this century and, moreover, that we have traveled through time and space. A space that has something fabulous - from tsarist Russia to Paris at the end of the belle époque, from France to the Far East, until everything ends in Macau.

A time that passes through two world wars, the communist revolution of 1917, the transformation of China, the emergence of anti-European guerrillas and a Macau that fades into nostalgia. Irina Ostrikoff is the character who crosses this time and space. And in it are reflected the ostentation and misery, madness and anguish, exhilarating joy and hallucinating pain, honesty and corruption, cruelty and kindness that are, in short, common to all Humanity, but which have creased, unforgettably, in the long decades that Irina lived and on this side of the East, coming from a false colonialist peace to the ideological struggles for liberation.

A sweet and tragic figure, Irina is told by Rodrigo Leal de Carvalho with a soft and tender irony that never escapes deep human respect, even, at times, the passion and communion of the author with the biographed. It is a book that fits into the genre of certain English literature from the imperial period (Kipling, Conrad, Bloomfielf and Somerset Maugham) but in which we can feel an accordingly Portuguese texture of a Camillian plot.