Alves Redol
António Alves Redol ( born December 29, 1911 in Vila Franca de Xira, † November 29, 1969 in Lisbon ) was a Portuguese writer and journalist. He is considered one of the greatest exponents of neo-realism in Portugal. With the social documentary debut Gaibéus Redol achieved in 1939 his literary breakthrough. His main work applies the 1962 novel published Barranco de Cegos.
Life
António Alves Redol was on December 29, 1911in Vila Franca de Xira, an industrial town near the Portuguese capital Lisbon, the son of a simple businessman António Redol da Cruz and his wife Inocência Alves. In 1927 he finished his training at a trade school, worked a few months for his father and left the following year in the former Portuguese colony, Angola, where he remained until 1931. His experience in Angola were in a sense less successful, as he was there a long time unemployed and ill also from malaria, but this should give him a different perspective on the world, what would later put it in his literary works. Back in Portugal, he joined the Movimento de Unidades Democrática (MUD ) that the regime of Estado Novo opposed to. Later, he joined the Communist Party.
His literary activity began in 1936 when Redol a writer for the magazine O Diabo was where he wrote chronicles and tales of his home region of Ribatejo. But Redol should not be known as a journalist, but as a novelist.
In 1939 he published his first work: Gaibéus, the first neo-realist novel of Portuguese literature. As Gaibéus one called in Portugal in the 1920s, the rice farmers of Beiro do Ribatejo. Redol even considered Gaibéus not as part of the literature, but documentation of the lives of the inhabitants of the Ribatejo. This condition, both writers to be as a reporter of the real environment can be considered as the main characteristic of his literary work. So it was quite appropriate for Redol to approach his viewport, by conversing with the rural population of the rice fields near the Tagus, to learn their stories and experiences. Finally, his grandparents came from also of the rural population.
His work revealed a strong interest in the social question, but what he could not say openly as censorship and political persecution of the opposition by the regime António de Oliveira Salazar and towards the followers of the Partido Comunista Português cultural climate of Portugal impaired. As a result, he was also a political prisoner and was tortured.
His last novel, Barranco de Cegos, 1962, is considered his major work. In this new phase, in which the political and social developments are pushed into the background, giving way to the Focus on the social question a concentration on the acting characters and their psychological development. In his last years he wrote some children's books that were intended by him for primary schools, and probably also on his experience in Africa went where he had stray children taught the Portuguese language. However, the former teachers had pedagogical concerns about his political orientation.
1936 married Redol Maria dos Santos Mota. From the marriage of the son born in 1943 António Mota Redol showed the engineer was later.
António Alves Redol died on 29 November 1969 in Lisbon without the social changes to experience, for which he had worked all his life.