ABSTRACT
The crónica (literally “chronicle,” from the Greek khronos) is a Portuguese-language journalistic piece published as a column. It offers a particularly unique record of the present time from an eminently personal perspective, allowing us to learn some aspects of daily life that shaped a given space and time. As an opinion and eclectic text, these columns also take on a pragmatic dimension, seeking to generate some sort of impact on the reader.Mário de Carvalho is a writer who reflects on the Portuguese national identity in a lucid, ironic, and sometimes caustic way. From novels and short stories to dramatic texts and essays, his work represents and thinks about contemporary Portugal and its fragilities and challenges. The crónicas Mário de Carvalho has written for the press are no different in this regard, as he explores several aspects of Portugal’s social, cultural, and political identity.This chapter aims to analyze Mário de Carvalho’s O que eu ouvi na barrica das maçãs (2019), which compiles several of the columns he wrote for the newspapers Público and Jornal de Letras, and which won the 2020 Grand Prize for Crónicas and Dispersed Literary Texts awarded by the Portuguese Writers’ Association (APE). We aim to discuss the aspects of identity Mário de Carvalho highlights and comments on, covering areas such as the society, media, politics, and writing world of a given space (Portugal) and time (1980s and 90s).
