BOOK "O Cadáver"

A medical student finds himself sorounded by a cloud of mental confusion when he finds himself in love with a corpse which he dissected on the table in a morgue. His mental struggle comes very close to the tenuous barrier that separates passion and madness. His head is flooded with reminiscences of his past life that leads him to inquire about philosophical aspects as madmen and poets sometimes do. The protagonist narrates his memories and small psychological aberrations himself, as if the reader heard him, first hand, explains aspects of your soul's intimacy.

Relationships from the past come back to haunt him, like demons that need to be exorcised. A simple story of someone who gets lost in the midst of so many memories. The story of an ordinary person who is innocently carried by the innate mechanisms of human psychology to a world that is so subjective it seems like a free fall towards a Dantesque hell.

The work in question has a very common element in Alvares de Azevedo's ultra-romantic literature, which is the idealized figure of the woman represented by the corpse who, despite being able to be touched and even torn apart, remains distant due to the impossibility of possessing it. The woman in the view of the romantic was an angelic being, unattainable. A figure that was so idealized that lost concreteness once and for all, becoming an ethereal being and placed on an almost divine level. It was this impossibility of having the woman he loved that generated great literary works in the heyday of romanticism. For it is in the sadness caused by “not having”, that man discovers that life is not rational.

"How hard it is to face death ... like that, raw, on top of that table. Naked, hardened and icy, but still beautiful. A beautiful woman, a young woman who obviously had not lived long enough to see herself mature. She was 23 or 24 years old, no more. Black hair, very clean and beautiful, she was certainly an exquisite woman. White skin already darkened by the time of death. I had not yet looked at hes face. It was unconscious, I was afraid of feeling something human in that corpse. It would certainly hamper my work.