The sad river

(...) The Sad River, we know, is not just the Tagus River, but the flow of life, a temporal metaphor already present in other works by the author; (...) What is most impressive and surprising in this 'passionate' work, however, is the process of dissolution of the writing and the narrative itself, which takes place imperceptibly but relentlessly throughout the book. The Sad River is not only the novel of Portuguese life in a certain historical period, or the existential novel of an artist reaching maturity, nor, equally, merely the novel of 'how a novel is made' - it is, also and at the same time, a pathetic process whose unfolding we witness: the act of the novel destroying itself (...).