José Cardoso Pires and the multiple voices of a dissonant ballad of silences

Abstract

Balada da Praia dos Dogs (1982), by José Cardoso Pires, stands out for being the author's first post-Revolution novel, in which dialogism is the high point of the narrative strategy adopted, recounting the trajectory of a police investigation resulting from the murder of Major Luis Dantas, found, initially unidentified, on Mastro beach, on April 3, 1960. This is a "true" case, in the novel focused on multiple voices, multiple discourses, intertexts and extratexts. Fundamentally, it is the interrelationships between History and fiction that mainly become the object of questioning in the work or, as its subtitle indicates, in this "Dissertation on a crime".