The Religious Mantle

""The work of Nuno Jâudice is like a spell," Millicent Borges Accardi once wrote in the Portuguese-American Journal. "A reverie. A dark dream with quiet overtones and hidden meanings." She was speaking of his poetry, but the same could be said for The Religious Mantle, Jâudice's novella, which came out in 1982 as A Manta Religiosa, and is published here for the first time in an English translation by David Swartz.As if playing Virgil to his own Dante, the narrator of The Religious Mantle spins a labyrinthine inner dialogue, which at times approaches an ars poetica, a meditation on the poetic novel. In fact, the entire novella is written in the form of a dialogue between two male characters who are projections of the "I." Together, they are "somewhat like the heteronyms of Pessoa," as Jâudice explains.Philosophical and discursive novels are a style that have-sadly, in my humble opinion-gone out of style. While The Religious Mantle is as much a book of philosophy as it is a book of fiction, with its search for meaning from within a labyrinth of feelings and ideas, one never feels one is reading an artifact, and translator David Swartz deftly manages to make the novella sound contemporary and fresh"--