Paradise School

In this work, the author of Léah and Páscoa Feliz begins to trace the evolution of a Lisbon family, part of that obscure population that the capital attracts to itself to form, absorb, disaggregate, and finally dissolve into its original anonymity: perhaps preserving from it a trace of tenderness, revolt, and hope – that of those who respond to Life with acts of life, seeking salvation in toil, in dreams, and eventually in ideals. Through the attentive and astonished eyes of a child, we are presented with an environment and an era – the years immediately preceding and following the establishment of the Republic. In the landscape thus described, legend and truth, fantasy and common sense, street dramas and folklore, joys and disappointments, goodness and sordidness are juxtaposed – all that constitutes the shocking and seductive learning process through which Gabriel, the young protagonist, will integrate his limited personal sphere as a child into the vast adult world around him, a bizarre and often incomprehensible universe that, at the same time, fascinates and frightens him. A prodigious inventory of an era, a passionate exploration of a city and its inhabitants, A Escola do Paraíso, with which the author intends to help fill a gap in Lisbon's novelistic tradition, between naturalism and neo-realism – shows us, sublimated to the highest degree, the qualities that made José Rodrigues Miguéis one of the greatest Portuguese writers of our time.