The Great Shadow (and other stories)

Author: Mario de Sa-Carneiro

Translator: Margaret Jull Costa   Cover illustration: Lise Weisgerber  

Reviews

Sa-Carneiro was only 26 when he committed suicide in Paris in 1916. His short stories depict madness, death, erotic jealousy and fin de siecle decadence in fragmented and luminously synaesthetic prose. Almost anticipating Kafka, he describes a scientist killed by the machinery of an invisible parallel world, and a poet, whose verses fly to the stars leaving blank pages in their wake.

Scotland on Sunday