The Neighborhood

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This English-language version of The Neighborhood is a welcome introduction to the United States of an essential body of work by Gonçalo M. Tavares. One of Portugal’s greatest living authors, Tavares, though just turned forty, has already carved out a place for himself in that country’s literary history. Still relatively unknown in North America (Dalkey Archive published his novel Jerusalem in 2009), Tavares’s works have won enough awards to fill a town crier’s long list and have been translated and praised in over forty-five countries, including England, Spain, Italy, India, Poland, France, South Korea, Greece, Germany, and Argentina. In Portugal his works are regularly adapted as plays, oratorios, and operas.

I first became aware of Tavares’s work when I attended the Ninth International Short Story Conference, which was held in Lisbon in June 2006. There was quite a buzz about him; he had won the José Saramago Prize the previous year, for his third novel, Jerusalem, and the Nobel Prize — wining Saramago himself wasn’t shy about doling out praise: “Jerusalem is a great book, and truly deserves a place among the great works of Western literature. Gonçalo M. Tavares has no right to be writing so well at the age of 35. One feels like punching him!”

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