Bidspirit auction | REDOL (Alves). CICLO PORT-WINE. Lisboa.

REDOL (Alves). CICLO PORT-WINE. Lisboa. 1949. - REDOL (Alves) CICLO PORT-WINE . Lisboa: Publicações Europa América, 1949. 3 v.; 195 mm. A trilogy composed of the novels Horizonte Cerrado (1949), Os Homens e as Sombras (1951) and Vindima de Sangue (1953), published by Publicações Europa-América. António Alves Redol (Vila Franca de Xira, 1911 - Lisbon, 1969) is the founder of Portuguese neorealism with Gaibéus (1939), a work that he himself modestly defined as a ”human documentary” rather than a work of art. Before the Port-Wine Cycle , he had already outlined the contours of Ribatejo society in Marés (1941), Avieiros (1942) and Fanga (1943). A communist militant and opponent of the Estado Novo regime, his books were subject to prior censorship between 1944 and 1958. The Port-Wine Cycle constitutes the most ambitious novelistic project of all of Redol's work. The trilogy covers the first fifteen years of the 20th century – from the final years of the monarchy to the middle of the Republic, between 1907 and 1915 – and centers on the ”Teimas” family, small winegrowers in the Douro region who, despite all adversity, refuse to abandon their land. At the heart of the action is an intense story of love and adultery between Francisco, the family's son, and his sister-in-law Gracinda. The setting is the Douro region in all its social and landscape harshness: the terraced vineyards, the exploitation of agricultural workers, the dependence of the Port wine trade on foreign capital – a dimension denounced by Alexandre Pinheiro Torres as the underlying economic deciphering of the cycle. * Vindima de Sangue* ( Blood Harvest) concludes the trilogy with the true story of the massacre of the winegrowing population in Lamego. The cover of the first volume was illustrated by Júlio Pomar; the third one by Lima de Freitas. Horizonte Cerrado earned Redol the Ricardo Malheiros Prize from the Lisbon Academy of Sciences in 1950. According to specialized critics, the trilogy combines literary quality with anthropological and ethnographic rigor, representing the most ambitious line of Portuguese neorealism – and, according to the Museum of Neo-Realism, ”there is no work of fiction in all of Portuguese literature that compares to it in terms of the ambition of its purposes.” Complete set. Rare and highly valued. ⚑ Auto-translated via Google Translate