Book, Tales of Love from the 19th century[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. After the revolutions and wars that, from 1789 onwards, gave rise to the bourgeois, urban and individualist world, the 19th century found itself grappling with the invention of new forms of organizing politics, ideas and, of course, also the love. It is the vibrant century of unbridled romanticism, Victorian morality, melodramatic passion, intimate dramas in the recesses of the home or the unconscious - disparate paths of loving feeling that, however, never stop intersecting in surprising ways. This is the territory that Alberto Manguel maps in this remarkable anthology Love Stories from the 19th Century. The starting point is Kleist and Sade, who announce this era of ambiguities. From there, Manguel travels through two large veins. On the one hand, romantic passion in its sentimental, perverse, conjugal or fantastic modalities - the universe of Balzac, Nerval and Bécquer. On the other, Victorian decorum, made up of reservations, meanderings and casuistry, so often comical - and here we are in the preferred terrain of lesser-known authors in Brazil, such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Ronald Firbank, but also of masters such as Henry James, Kipling and Jacobsen . With his vast and heterodox reading, Manguel further expands the scope of the anthology. Canadian writer Tekahionwake presents us with love in a non-Western context, while RL Stevenson narrates the fate of a native of the South Pacific under the empire (literally) of European morality. Finally, in a brief masterpiece from 1903, "After the Ball," Tolstoy shatters the last sentimental illusions of the 19th century and takes us to the eve of the turmoil of the 20th century.