Tolik lidí, Mariano / Nevyřčená slova – de Carvalho Maria Judite (2025)

This collection of short stories and novellas by Maria Judite de Carvalho (1921–1998) is the first part of a four-volume collected edition of her complete works. Her 1959 debut novella was highly praised by critics. Carvalho, a prose writer and journalist, began writing during Portugal’s authoritarian Estado Novo regime under António de Oliveira Salazar and remains an exceptional voice in Portuguese prose. Until the Carnation Revolution in 1974, women’s cultural expression in the country was sporadic. As the wife of influential dissident and prominent writer Urbano Tavares Rodrigues, she was often under secret-police pressure, and the couple spent several years in exile in France and Belgium. Her prose is marked by a dense, suffocating silence resulting from misunderstandings between men and women and between generations. Her protagonists are mainly women radiating unease, depression, negativity and self-denial. The desire to change an uncomfortable world is especially evident in the first novella, while the second, written in highly concise language and published in 1961, won that year’s Grande Prémio do Conto Camilo Castelo Branco. The contents are in Czech.