Álamo Oliveira - Marta de Jesus (A Verdadeira)

Marta de Jesus (The True One) is a novel based on the biblical narrative of the New Testament. The epigraph, taken from the Gospel of Luke, highlights the antithetical behavior and profile of Lazarus' sisters, Mary and Martha. By transposing the core group of followers of the biblical Emmanuel (his mother Mary of Nazareth, Mary Magdalene, the group of disciples) into the universe of this Martha, recontextualizing them temporally from the mid-20th century (but extending to the 1990s) and situating them in the westernmost part of Europe, the island of Flores, Álamo Oliveira constructs a novel whose reading requires a recurring back-and-forth between the explicit, contemporary foreground and the implicit, remote background (that is, the evangelical subtext), challenging the reader and playing with the expectations arising from their greater or lesser biblical knowledge.

The reader will therefore have the opportunity to attest to the summoning of biblical episodes within this novel, to verify to what extent it is realized as repetition and difference (as is typical of narrative and textual procedures of the genre), and how these differences may ultimately constitute a factor in frustrating the reader's expectations. In reality, by transposing some biblical episodes to the second half of the 20th century in the Azores and Portugal, including the messianic project of political salvation for the country, the author immediately condemns them to failure: because this is not a narrative touched by the vision and perspective of miracles, and because historical truth opposes a liberation situated in that period of time.