ABSTRACT
In the early 2010s, most Portuguese had to manage to keep their heads above the waters of a serious financial crisis, aggravated by the austerity measures imposed by the Troika in 2011. The Troika representatives left Portugal in 2014 after the bailout agreement had formally finished. There was a new horizon of economic prosperity, with prospects of improvement in the standards of living of the Portuguese. In the meantime, Portugal celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution. O verdadeiro ator (2011) and O Coro dos Defuntos (2015) are two novels whose narratives use fantasy to represent the persistence of the late years of the New State and the Carnation Revolution as phantasmagoria in the collective memory. These narratives confirm that the legacy of the post-revolutionary discourse (Cardoso Pires and Lídia Jorge, among others) can shed light on the political, social and cultural tensions experienced in the 2010s, re-defining the Portuguese as the metaphor of the collectively-driven subject to overcome conflict. Ultimately, the memory of the Revolution in the 21st century shows that these are melancholic times, burdened by the lack of utopia, aggravated by the tensions between depoliticized collective memory policies and efforts to ignite hope to reverse melancholia.
