more photos (1)

Lúcio Cardoso’s Followers (39)

Lúcio Cardoso

Born

in Curvelo, Minas Gerais, Brazil

August 14, 1912

Died

September 22, 1968

Genre

Fiction, Poetry, Drama

edit data

Joaquim Lúcio Cardoso Filho, known as Lúcio Cardoso (Curvelo, Minas Gerais, Brazil, August 14, 1912 – Rio de Janeiro, September 22, 1968), was a Brazilian novelist, playwright, and poet.

The son of an impoverished but prominent family in Minas Gerais, Lúcio Cardoso was the brother of Adauto Lúcio Cardoso, a congressman for the center-right União Democrática Nacional and later justice of the Supreme Federal Court; and of Maria Helena Cardoso, who became a respected writer herself as a memorialist, including the editing of the posthumous memoirs of her brother Lúcio (Por onde andou meu coração, 1967; Vida-vida, 1973; and Sonata perdida: Anotações de uma velha dama digna, 1979).

At an early age, after attending school in Belo Horizonte, Cardoso Joaquim Lúcio Cardoso Filho, known as Lúcio Cardoso (Curvelo, Minas Gerais, Brazil, August 14, 1912 – Rio de Janeiro, September 22, 1968), was a Brazilian novelist, playwright, and poet.

The son of an impoverished but prominent family in Minas Gerais, Lúcio Cardoso was the brother of Adauto Lúcio Cardoso, a congressman for the center-right União Democrática Nacional and later justice of the Supreme Federal Court; and of Maria Helena Cardoso, who became a respected writer herself as a memorialist, including the editing of the posthumous memoirs of her brother Lúcio (Por onde andou meu coração, 1967; Vida-vida, 1973; and Sonata perdida: Anotações de uma velha dama digna, 1979).

At an early age, after attending school in Belo Horizonte, Cardoso moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he got a job in the Equitativa insurance company. He soon came to the notice of the group of writers around the wealthy industrialist (and a poet himself) Augusto Frederico Schmidt, who published his first works. Many of these writers, including Otávio de Faria and Cornélio Penna, were, like Cardoso, Catholic - and, in the twin case of Cardoso and Otávio de Faria, both Catholic and homosexual. In a time when Brazilian literature was dominated by leftist, regionalist themes, these writers were less interested in the then-dominant political concerns of Brazilian writing than in inner experience and themes of human redemption and personal tragedy. This paramount value placed upon the subjective character of writing was a characteristic Cardoso shared also with his younger contemporary Clarice Lispector, who fell in love with Cardoso when she was a young woman, and who remained a close friend until his death.

Cardoso's first novel, Maleita (Malaria) - the story of an engineer stranded in a backwater in Minas Gerais - did not stray far from the dominant regionalist themes, which, however, he forsook after 1936, with his third novel Luz no Subsolo, in favour of psychological introspection.

Cardoso was enormously prolific in several genres, including the theater, where, together with the Afro-Brazilian activist Abdias do Nascimento, he started the Teatro Experimental do Negro, Brazil's first black theater company. With Paulo César Saraceni, he was responsible for the first feature-length film of the nascent Cinema Novo, Porto das caixas - based on a true story about a crime in the municipality of Itaboraí, then a backwater rural community in the State of Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps his most famous novel is Crônica da casa assassinada (Chronicle of the Murdered House), 1959, a Faulknerian saga of a decaying patriarchal family in Minas Gerais. In this novel, one of the chief characters, Timóteo, is the family's gay scion, who lives secluded in the ancestral mansion, always dressed in his mother's old clothes, and who stands for the unravelling of the traditional order embodied in the mansion.

A famous figure in the bohemian milieu of Rio de Janeiro—"Ipanema should be called Lúcio Cardoso," according to one friend—his health deteriorated because of his alcoholism and dependence on prescription drugs. On December 7, 1962, at the height of his creativity, he suffered a debilitating stroke that left him partially paralyzed. He struggled unsuccessfully to recover his ability to speak and write, and when that failed he turned to painting.

On September 22, 1968, following another stroke, he died in Rio de Janeiro. ...more

Combine Editions
Lúcio Cardoso’s books

Average rating: 4.25 · 1,542 ratings · 230 reviews · 36 distinct works • Similar authors

	Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, Robin Patterson (Translator), Margaret Jull Costa (Translator) 4.28 avg rating — 984 ratings — published 1959 — 22 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A luz no subsolo 4.24 avg rating — 21 ratings — published 1936	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Maleita 3.71 avg rating — 21 ratings — published 1934 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Dias Perdidos 4.36 avg rating — 11 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Contos da Ilha e do Continente 4.56 avg rating — 9 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Salgueiro 3.90 avg rating — 10 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	O Desconhecido e Mãos Vazias 4.67 avg rating — 6 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Diários 4.67 avg rating — 6 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Poesia Completa by Lúcio Cardoso, Esio Macedo Ribeiro (Organizer) 4.50 avg rating — 2 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Todos os diários - Volume I liked it 3.00 avg rating — 2 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by Lúcio Cardoso…

Quotes by Lúcio Cardoso (?)

“Truth cannot be invented, it cannot be distorted or replaced--it is simply that, the truth. However grotesque, absurd, or fatal, it is the truth.”
― Lúcio Cardoso

3 likes

“I went over to the bed and knelt down beside it. I saw that she was still breathing, not in the hoarse, distressing way she had been breathing over the last few days, but almost serenely, as if the sacrament really had brought her relief. Then I took her pulse and felt it beating, rather irregularly, but beating nonetheless, and that was enough to assure me that she was still there. Finally, I carefully tried to prize open her eyelids, so that she could, if possible, see me, or so that I could at least see her, even if she could not see me. If my image could no longer penetrate the place where she now found herself, and I was, for her, merely a dull, meaningless thing, I wanted at least to be able to see my own image in those opaque pupils and feel myself floating on the surface of that world that had once been mine and which, now that it was lost, would bear me up as indifferently as a wave washing over a dead body. And I was thinking this even as I was trying to open her eyelids, which insisted on closing, while, meanwhile, everything inside me rebelled against being made an outcast, an exile, and I wanted her to see me, for my presence once more to illumine her inner world, which was, at that moment, heading into endless night, the desert where she would know nothing about me.”
― Lúcio Cardoso, Crônica da Casa Assassinada

tags: death

2 likes

“Resta-nos, como essas ervas desesperadas que se agarram às paredes em ruínas, a nostalgia do que poderia ter sido. Não, Nina, não pense que a estou acusando, que ainda a culpo como de um crime, por tudo o que aconteceu. Há muito que desapareceu este meu rigor de antigamente.
acredito hoje que somos culpados em comum por tudo o que não soubemos levar avante - e se construímos a culpa, também fomos as vítimas.”
― Lúcio Cardoso, Crônica da Casa Assassinada

0 likes

See all Lúcio Cardoso's quotes »