Language: English. Portuguese original here. Dutch translation here.

One morning late in May, between three and six, a group of lonely men and women wait to be brought together, like the elements in an equation. Ernst Spengler is about to throw himself out his window. Mylia, terminally ill and in enormous pain, goes out to visit a church. Hinnerk Obst, who’s always been told by the neighborhood children that he looks like a killer, walks the streets with a loaded gun. As these characters are brought together, a world of violence, fear, pain, and uncertainty is revealed, where human nature itself, an the mechanisms determining our actions, our fictions, and the impulses of our imagination, are laid bare.

Tavares (1970) one of Portugal's most talented writers, praised with a great number of literary prizes. His novels Learning to Pray in the Age of Technology (translation published in August 2011), Klaus Klump: A Man, and Joseph Walser’s Machine (translation published in November 2011) form, along with Jerusalem (José Saramago Award 2005), a series Tavares calls The Kingdom.

Tavares' clear and objective languageis adeptable for anyone. The following two quotes are Mylia's, whose pain is driving her close to madness.

I am schizophrenically mad. Would you like to cure me?

She understood that there, right there, next to the church, her two pains were trying to outdo each other: the pain that would kill her, the bad pain, as she called it, the sickness pain, and, on the other hand, the good pain, the hunger pain, the pain of wanting to eat, a pain that signified life, the pain of existence, as she would say; as though her stomach, even in the dead of night, was the one obvious sign of her humanity…and likewise of humanity’s ambiguous relationship with the things in the world it still couldn’t understand. Yes, she was alive, and this proof of being alive hurt even more, at this moment, in an objective and physical way, than the pain she knew was going to kill her.

(…)

The hunger made her feel strangely safe: the pain of hunger was a guarantee, a promise, at least for the time being. The other pain can’t sneak up and kill me when this pain is so strong! And now that she felt safe, she tried to take her mind off eating. If I’ll eat something, the hunger pain will pass, and then I’ll feel the other pain again… and that one can kill me.