The Woman Who Stole the Rain and Other Stories/ A mulher que prendeu a chuva e outras histórias
The Woman Who Trapped the Rain brings together 14 short stories that begin in everyday life but imperceptibly open onto other worlds – dreamlike, fantastic, terrifying or absurd – which nonetheless still belong to us and remain the place where we live.
“I was running forward, into the night, on the back of a maddened horse that was dragging me nowhere. There were no points of reference in the landscape, we galloped flat out, fast, ever faster and yet without moving through space. I didn’t know where I was and could only vaguely remember my own name. But I hadn’t forgotten yours. Nor the fact that you were dead.”
(from the story “Night Horses”)
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“The guiding thread is this dark vertigo of time as it is lived, which leads us to discover a new facet of Teolinda Gersão’s writing. […] This rupture forces us to reread her, to understand her in another way, new and deeply unsettling.”
Helena Barbas, Expresso
In these stories, judgement finds in narrative the form it needs in order to take shape – whether it is merely the summary judgement one neighbour passes on another (…), or the difficult verdict a child ends up reaching about her mother’s cruelty (…), from which an even harder decision will follow: to fall silent, that is, not to tell the story.
Within the narrative drive or compulsion that seems to move even the most silent, inward-turned characters, nothing is neutral, and what these stories reveal – the darkest ones as much as the lightest – is a kind of analysis of the necessity to judge.
In the fine mesh woven by this necessity, not even God escapes having a story told to him – that is, being forced to listen to a story so that he may know that not even God remains the same between the beginning and the end of the words he hears, if he exists to hear them: “For one cannot at the same time listen and not listen.”
GUSTAVO RUBIM, PÚBLICO, ÍPSILON
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Morocco
A Mulher que Prendeu a Chuva e Outras Histórias, transl. Said Benabdelouahed, Rabat, Saad Warzazi Éd., 2010
Colombia
“La Mujer que Atrapó la Lluvia”,De la Otra Orilla del Atlántico: Portugal en la FILBO 2013, transl. Sergio Corella, Lisboa, Direcção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas, 2013
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Prémio Máxima de Literatura, 2008
Prémio Literário Fundação Inês de Castro, 2008
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A mulher que prendeu a chuva e outras histórias
A mulher que prendeu a chuva reúne 14 contos que partem da vida quotidiana mas se abrem, insensivelmente, a outros mundos – oníricos, fantásticos, terríveis ou absurdos –, que nem por isso deixam de nos pertencer e de ser o lugar onde habitamos.
«Corria para a frente, na noite, no dorso de um cavalo enlouquecido, que me arrastava, para nenhum lugar. Não havia pontos de referência na paisagem, cavalgávamos à desfilada, depressa, cada vez mais depressa, e no entanto sem avançar no espaço. Não sabia onde estava e recordava-me só vagamente do meu nome. Mas não esquecera o teu. Nem o facto de que estavas morto.» (do conto «Cavalos nocturnos»)